'Future Hope' Column
By Ted Glick
“The scope of the challenges ahead of us shares similarities with the
crisis faced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s.
Battling a world war on two fronts – both in the East and the West – the
United States came together, and within three short years restructured
the entire economy in order to win the war and defeat fascism. As
President, Bernie will generate the political will necessary for a
wholesale transformation of our society, with support for frontline and
vulnerable communities and massive investments in sustainable energy,
energy efficiency, and a transformation of our transportation system.” -from the Sanders campaign’s “The Green New Deal.”
The release a few days ago of Bernie’s Green New Deal proposal, all
67 pages of it, was a big deal that is only going to get bigger as more
and more people read it and come to appreciate how important it is.
This is a visionary proposal. There is a lot of detail, and that is
important, but most important is that this is a proposal which
articulates the urgency of our situation regarding the climate crisis
and then puts forward a comprehensive and understandable set of actions
which could actually get us out of it. This set of proposals is at the
scale of the problem.
Not surprisingly for someone who is about a grassroots-based
political revolution, some of the proposals are clearly outside the
mainstream of Democrat and Republican politics and policy. At first
reading it’s hard not to think, wow, does he really think we can make
this happen?
But on second thought it’s kind-of like Medicare for All, or
tuition-free public colleges, or a $15/hour minimum wage. When those
ideas were first brought forward, who would have thought that a few
years later they would have become the focal point of political debate
not just on the political left but in the country as a whole, and in the
case of the $15/hour minimum wage actually starting to happen? And
let’s not forget that with catastrophic climate change staring down the
gun barrel at human society, there will undoubtedly be a willingness to
consider proposals that in another time there would not be.
What are some of Bernie’s major ideas?
-Publicly-owned “Federal Power Marketing Administrations,” PMAs,
which were first created by FDR to bring inexpensive electricity to the
country. Between four existing PMA’s, the Tennessee Valley Authority and
a new PMA to be created, they will “build more than enough wind, solar,
energy storage and geothermal power plants,” through investment of
$2.34 trillion. “Together with an EPA federal renewable energy standard,
this will fully drive out non-sustainable generation.”
-Build a “truly inclusive movement that prioritizes young people,
workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color and other historically
marginalized groups to take on the fossil fuel industry and other
polluters to push this over the finish line and lead the globe in
solving the climate crisis.”
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