Top 15 Rhiana Gunn-Wright Quotes

The details will keep changing as we learn how best to decarbonize equitably and mobilize the American people-our hands, our creativity, our resources-to remake our economy, while caring for one another every step of the way. But no matter what we encounter in the weeds of policy blueprints and implementation, the vision of the Green New Deal provides the compass we'll need.

GND policy works to shape markets and create demand so that low-carbon and no-carbon goods become the default, rather than the alternative to carbon-intensive goods.

all GND policy, whether narrow or broad, serves a triple bottom line: achieve the decarbonization goals set out by H.R. 109, reduce income inequality, and redress systemic oppression.

Critics who doubt our nation's capacity to achieve a transition of the scale and speed the Green New Deal proposes should heed the lessons of the World War II mobilization: set the production targets you need to win, even if they seem impossible at the outset, and then hustle to meet those targets through massive, coordinated, strategic public investment and collaborations with private industry.

Given the time frame, the climate crisis-vast, existential, worsening by the day-is solvable only through an economy-wide energy transition, which requires an economic mobilization. Only a national coordinated all-out push can ramp up production of clean energy infrastructure fast enough-and ramp down emissions fast enough.

The success of the Green New Deal depends on the ability to reroute power away from the 1 percent and the political and economic institutions designed to serve them. If we are going to become an economy that serves people and the planet, then the people-all of the people-need power, and we need it now.

the climate crisis can continue unabated only with immense concentrations of economic and political power.

The GND's vision of power is one of redistribution: from private to public, from employer to worker, from the historically advantaged to the historically disadvantaged.

Highway expansion and urban renewal programs during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s displaced hundreds of thousands of residents-mostly people of color-without adequate financial assistance, erasing decades of wealth for those who owned homes and businesses. Because of this, the thought of an economic mobilization understandably frightens millions of Americans. The Green New Deal must directly address these fears, or risk losing the public support it needs to sustain itself across a decade.

Every economic mobilization in American history has exploited marginalized people. The Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC)-created during the New Deal to provide loans to homeowners facing foreclosure-often labeled predominantly black neighborhoods as "high risk," which discouraged lending and encouraged redlining. Today, 74 percent of the neighborhoods labeled "high risk" are low- to middle-income neighborhoods, and 64 percent are predominantly minority-meaning that these areas are still racially and economically segregated to this day.

Only the federal government wields the power to lead a national mobilization that can decarbonize the economy fast enough.

The Green New Deal is designed, first and foremost, to address the climate crisis at the speed, scale, and scope required to prevent catastrophic levels of warming.

The Green New Deal is a new policy vision-one that will guide government and society through the biggest task in modern history: decarbonizing our global economy within the next ten to twenty years.

The GND resolution proposes to achieve these goals in two ways. The first is through a set of "projects" that, if completed, would nearly eliminate carbon emissions in the US. The second is through a set of policies that aim to protect Americans from the disruption and instability that transitioning away from fossil fuels will create and reduce inequity.

Fossil fuel impunity requires intense concentrations of economic and political power among corporations and the wealthy who profit from them.