How the Green New Deal Can Save Our Future
Written by Abby Garrett, graphic by Sarah Nash
Five million Americans huddled in their houses with no water or power for days in February 2021 as a record-breaking winter storm ravaged the country. As the temperature outside was dropping below zero the wholesale price of electricity shot up 10,000%. Amid our capitalist society tragedy for some means economic gain for others.
In recent years we have experienced multiple “once in a lifetime” climatic events ranging from blazing summers to arctic polar vortexes. According to the National Fire Protection Association, in California alone, the 2020 wildfire season had killed more than 30 people, destroyed some 8,500 structures, and torched a record-breaking 4 million acres of land. All of that destruction came with a price tag of between $130-150 billion dollars, along with the $450 billion estimated cost of long-term health issues due to exposure from wildfires.
According to the National Resources Defense Council, if present trends continue, the total cost of global warming will be as high as 3.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Four global warming impacts alone—hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs—will come with a price tag of almost $1.9 trillion annually by 2100.
What’s the solution for a problem of this magnitude? The Green New Deal. It’s an environmental policy proposal inspired by Franklin D.Roosevelt's New Deal economic approach of the 1930s. It combines his ideas with modern ones such as renewable energy and resource efficiency. The Green New Deal isn’t a law, it’s a set of goals. The main goal aims to move the United States to renewable energy for electricity and to make transportation, housing, agriculture and manufacturing more energy-efficient all in 10 years. It would also create millions of new jobs in clean energy and get us to net-zero emissions by 2050, not only in the United States, but around the world. Through The Green New Deal we can prevent climate disaster, as opposed to living through it and paying for the damage it causes.
Many times the answers to today’s problems can be shown in our past. On March 3rd, 1933 President Roosevelt signed the New Deal. The goal was to stabilize the economy by providing jobs, social programs and financial relief in order to restore prosperity to Americans during the Great Depression. Fast forward 90 years and today Americans need relief once again.
Along with the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crisis, we are facing an issue that knows no borders:–climate change. According to NASA, this includes global temperature rise, a warming ocean, shrinking ice sheets, glacial retreat, decreased snow cover, declining arctic sea ice,, acidification of the ocean, and as we’ve seen more recently, an increase in extreme weather events.
Fiscal conservatives often criticize the Green New Deal for its ambitious economic approach, but FDR, like his predecessor Hoover, was a fiscal conservative himself. He believed in balanced budgets as a key to restoring economic stability. However, Roosevelt was afraid. He understood the dangers that a struggling class of unemployed people posed to capitalist, political, and economic recovery.
Beginning in 1930-31, communists, socialists, and supporters of A. J. Muste’s American Workers Party (AWP) began to organize the unemployed. The unemployed organizations led militant, direct actions in defense of evicted tenants, sit-ins at relief offices, and mass demonstrations for unemployment insurance. Roosevelt was scared that the socialists and communists parties would destroy the capitalist system in America, so he threw them a bone in the form of new jobs and social programs. This was the last period of major pro-working-class social reforms and of a mass socialist presence among working people in the United States.
It is possible for us to follow in the footsteps of the socialist activists during the Great Depression Era to combat climate change and the current economic crisis in the 21st century. The first step is to make sure we are voting to elect leaders that support the Green New Deal. Support organizations such as the Sunrise Movement which is actively protesting, organizing, and demanding the Green New Deal. Join tenant and workers unions. Join and/or support current socialist parties such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) or the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which both support the Green New Deal.
When we look at the triumphs and mistakes of the past, we have the power to determine our future. We have the power to create millions of new clean energy jobs and save ourselves from environmental and economic disasters caused by climate change. A future with clean and renewable energy for everyone is possible.
(non-web sources)
Theda Skocpol, “Political Response to Capitalist Crisis: Neo-Marxist Theories of the State and the Case of the New Deal,” Politics and Society 10, no. 2 (1980)
“Worker Insurgency, Radical Organization, and New Deal Labor Legislation,” American Political Science Review 83, no. 4 (1989), 1267.