Girls, we run this mutha.
—Beyoncé, “Run the World (Girls)”
When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke at the Women’s March in Washington on January 19, 2019, she chose to define justice.
Justice is not a concept that we [just] read about in a book. Justice is about the water we drink. Justice is about the air we breathe. Justice is about how easy it is to vote. Justice is about how much ladies get paid. Justice is about whether we can stay with our children for a just amount of time after we have them—mothers, fathers, and all parents. Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.
Last year we took power to the polls, and this year we’re taking power to the policy. Let us remember that a fight means no person left behind. So when people want to stop talking about the issues that Black women face, when people want to stop talking about the issues that trans women or immigrant women face, we gotta ask them why does that make you so uncomfortable? Because now this is the time when we’re going to address poverty. This is the time we’re going to address Flint. This is the time we’re going to talk about Baltimore and the Bronx and the wildfires and Puerto Rico. Because this is not just about identity, this is about justice. And this is about the America that we are going to bring into this world.
ONE OF THE principles of justice that Ocasio-Cortez went into Congress raising the alarm about was human existence, period. What grander scale is there than the future of Earth itself? That’s why one of her central initiatives has been the Green New Deal.
In 2019, 12.5 billion tons of ice was reportedly melted. It was a sad time for ski bums. Sea levels are rising, producing some severe storms and deadly winds, increasing wildfires, droughts, and other extreme weather. There was a deadly mudslide in California; more than a half inch of rain fell in five minutes. The mud flattened homes and covered freeways. Streets in Maryland became raging rivers in a drastic storm where more than eight inches of rain fell in a few hours. The same with North and South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia, where Hurricane Michael was the worst storm since 1969. One hundred and fifty thousand acres and more than thirteen thousand homes were lost in the Golden State due to the devastating Camp Fire disaster.
This is all the result of climate change. The world is too hot and getting hotter. Scientists predict that there will be at least twice as many wildfires by 2050 as there were in 2019. Warming beyond 2 degrees Celsius will expose 350,000,000 people globally to deadly heat stress by 2050. It will cost money: $500,000,000,000 in lost annual output, damage to those beautiful waterside oases we love, with $1,000,000,000,000 of damage to public infrastructure and coastal real estate, and more. And it will take us to the grave quicker. Human life expectancy will decline due to the scarcity of basic needs of clean water and air, and healthy foods.
It’s not only the wildlife suffering; people are being killed. In 2018 there were 315 natural disasters and 11,804 deaths, but more than 68 million people were affected. The economic loss was in the millions, taxpayers. According to AOC, the government must invest in dealing with these issues and make human existence a priority, rather than siding with big oil companies and climate deniers. Her Green New Deal is an aggressive and economically focused policy to jump-start greater investments in clean-energy jobs and infrastructure. The benefits of AOC’s proposal are twofold: (1) it will move the country to 100 percent clean energy in ten years (2) it will stimulate the creation of green jobs and introduce a new kind of economy, independent from reliance on fossil fuels.
The Green New Deal may be some straight-fire policy, no pun intended, but what most Americans want to know is, what the hell is it? Here are some of the Green New Deal’s goals unplugged and decoded in layman’s terms:
(A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers;
Unplugged translation: You can drive, and we can also still breathe easy.
(B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States;
Unplugged translation: Will allow another opportunity for your cousin to get off his parents’ couch and get a good job saving the planet.
(C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;
Unplugged translation: To keep the country from falling apart (literally!) and not pollute the planet.
(D) to secure for all people of the United States for generations to come—(i) clean air and water; (ii) climate and community resiliency; (iii) healthy food; (iv) access to nature; and (v) a sustainable environment;
Unplugged translation: A healthy survival rate.
(E) to promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as “frontline and vulnerable communities”);
Unplugged translation: This one kind of speaks for itself.
Climate change is getting more intense as time goes on, and AOC understands the urgency of the issue. “I don’t think that we can compromise on transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. We cannot compromise on saving our planet. We can’t compromise on saving kids,” she says. “We have to do these things. If we want to do them in different ways, that’s fine. But we can’t not do them.”
Climate change is accelerating, and the more storms we experience today will only increase what we see tomorrow. AOC is a millennial, and it’s key that she is leading the charge on this. Her generation and beyond have to live on this planet for many years to come, and if the White House keeps burying its head in the sand on climate change, there could be even more damaging effects on her cohort personally.
Through the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, member nations had committed to try to do what was necessary to restrict the global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius by 2030—increases beyond that would be exponentially more catastrophic to the environment. (It’s also definitely worth noting that the United States joined the Paris accords under Obama and then Trump pulled the country out of the agreement.)
This report described what would be required to limit global climate rise. Radical change is necessary—cutting coal consumption by one-third, ramping up new technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the air, a necessary step toward reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The report indicated that nations had only twelve years to take these steps, otherwise we will have run out of time to make the improvements that were necessary. We had already moved way beyond using easy options to make the change. The report also indicated that every little bit of progress made an impact. No change was too small to contribute to the reduced emissions that were necessary, and if we slammed on the brakes now, we might be able to halt some of the worst outcomes by 2050.
Young people, like seventeen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, take these reports especially personally because it is their future that is being restricted and compromised. The issue was not lost on Alexandria, a woman with a star named after her. She sees climate change as an existential threat to all human and natural life, as well as an issue of equal justice.
Something had to be done, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wanted to be a leader of the charge.
The name “Green New Deal” was not coined by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez though. It had been percolating around the fringes of the mainstream for some time. The term was actually coined by the journalist Thomas Friedman, who at the beginning of the mortgage crisis in 2007 was calling for taxes on carbon emissions, the end of fossil fuel subsidies, and incentives to promote wind- and solar-powered energy. Then candidate Barack Obama added a Green New Deal to his presidential platform in 2008, and in 2009 the United Nations developed a Global Green New Deal, advocating government stimulus for the development of renewable energy technologies. Democrats made a stab at capping carbon emissions in the House, but the bill died in the Senate in 2010. Then the Labour Party in the UK, its democratic socialist political party, established a green investment bank, which was mightily opposed by the Conservative Party and also died.
Her backing of the GND made AOC an enemy of the status quo, in particular the big oil companies’ status quo, and they’ve fought her at every turn. But it’s a worthwhile fight, and we know by now that this queen will fight for us no matter how powerful the adversary may be.