Over the past year, #GreenNewDeal rhetoric has become ubiquitous. When New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey, both Democrats, released their Green New Deal resolution in February 2019, thought leaders and environmental organizations alike hailed it as the proverbial “Moses” that would deliver us from climate change and its associated social catastrophes.
Cooper Eaton
Yet even as the resolution has provided visionary moonshots and catalyzed a rigorous discussion, it also serves as a cautionary tale for progressives as we map out a truly transformative and inclusive approach to climate change.
It can no longer be debated, denied, or doubted that the climate crisis is happening or that it is especially iniquitous for black, brown, indigenous, and poor white people who live near toxic fossil fuel operations—those we in the climate justice sphere call frontline communities. To dismantle the climate crisis, good policy—and any resulting legislation—must center frontline communities and their liberation. As such, it’s necessary to remain vigilant from the onset of policy creation through its implementation.
Any Green New Deal, and all climate policy in general, must not be utilized solely, or primarily, as a fundraising tactic or talking point to win a few elections. It must be, first and foremost, a tool that builds, establishes, and maintains long-term grassroots power that fosters translocal organizing models which are inclusive, equitable, and accessible to all people.
Shortly before the official release of the Green New Deal resolution, a coalition of frontline groups known as the Climate Justice Alliance admonished legislators to avoid a top-down process, calling instead for “the strengthening of community-based and tribal leadership, and Indigenous, place-based strategies.” The Indigenous Environmental Network, an alliance member, added, “The government-to-government relationship of tribes and the United States means that the U.S. government [cannot] treat tribes as mere ‘stakeholders’ or simply as part of the general public. Tribes, their tribal members, and indigenous communities are rights-holders.”
An important takeaway here is that policy development must be a bottom-up process—especially when it involves allocating much-needed funding to frontline communities and grassroots organizations with minimal bureaucratic delay. As Dawn Phillips, executive director of the Right to the City Alliance, tells me, “The only way any [Green New Deal] policy will work is if resources distributed from the feds are controlled by local groups that represent local people.”
As such, before even getting into the necessary ingredients for good climate policy, we must first determine how it is being developed and who is developing it in the first place.
Historically, and all too often, governments and white-led environmental groups have treated frontline communities as tertiary. Unfortunately, the development of the Green New Deal resolution was no exception. Indeed, as The New Yorker reported, Ocasio-Cortez’s staff and three groups that do not represent frontline communities siloed themselves off to write the resolution over a single weekend in December 2018.
“The way that the plan was developed and shared is one of its greatest weaknesses,” Climate Justice Alliance Executive Director Angela Adrar told environmental news outlet Grist following the release of the draft resolution.
The old saying “you’re either at the table or on the menu” applies here. Even well-intentioned folks on the left, by disregarding the frontlines, put these communities in the untenable position of having to struggle against the system, as well as the system that’s supposed to be fighting the system.
In an effort to address this head on, the Climate Justice Alliance and its member group, the Labor Network for Sustainability, developed what they call The People’s Solutions Lens for a Green New Deal. This tool contains a series of questions that aim at pushing policy makers, allied organizations, and local communities to center the concerns of frontline communities. These questions—including “Who tells the story?” and “How will this build or shift power?”—ensure increased transparency, inclusivity, and equity from the drafting through the implementation of any policy.
The People’s Solutions Lens also serves another purpose: to clarify what we mean by a “Green New Deal.” As we enter the season of 2020 endorsements and scorecards, there’s been minimal discussion of what candidates are actually advocating for when it comes to the climate crisis.
Right now, candidates can say they support an amorphous “Green New Deal” while also pushing neoliberal, corporate-friendly “solutions” like carbon markets, industrialized carbon capture, nuclear energy, and geoengineering.
Right now, candidates can say they support an amorphous “Green New Deal” while also pushing neoliberal, corporate-friendly “solutions” like carbon markets, industrialized carbon capture, nuclear energy, and geoengineering. Before the Green New Deal is further co-opted, it requires an immediate baseline of standard requirements and nonnegotiables.
And here’s the thing: We actually do have longstanding sets of principles to guide what qualifies as good climate policy. However, because of who designed and developed these principles, they are rarely put into action.
The seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice were offered to the world in 1991 following the first National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. They insist that any grassroots movement for environmental justice be rooted in, among other things, “the sacredness of our Mother Earth,” “mutual respect and justice for all peoples,” and “political, economic, cultural, and environmental self-determination of all peoples.”
There are hopeful examples of this work in action. We’re witnessing frontline leadership across the nation, like in New York State, where Climate Justice Alliance members UPROSE and PUSH Buffalo led a coalition that recently helped pass the landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act—heralded by some as the most aggressive climate policy in the nation.
At the local level, alliance members including New York City Environmental Justice Alliance and Got Green have recently advanced Green New Deal legislation in New York City and Seattle, respectively. And the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, a frontline group in Louisiana, recently released the first regional Green New Deal effort in the country.
What these groups and their initiatives have in common is recognition that a Green New Deal must dismantle the root causes of climate change, not just the symptoms. It must explicitly call for the end of fossil fuel usage, and false market-based solutions. But it also must be driven by the wisdom, leadership, and grassroots power of frontline communities.
This is because any good climate policy requires massive accountability for historic and systemic extraction—from the Earth and from marginalized people. This means reparations and atonement for brutal land theft, broken treaties, and genocide, and real steps toward the ultimate goals of decolonization, anti-patriarchy, and total emancipation.
The message needs to be clear that while these proclamations may or may not make it into a “Green New Deal,” they will always be the requirements for climate justice as the destination, with a just transition as the vehicle. As frontline communities tell us, “transition is inevitable, justice is not.”