AOC’s Green New Deal Is Just the Start. Next Let’s Make It Global.

"In the U.S. alone, government subsidies for fossil fuel consumption and coal production suck about $9 billion a year from public coffers.... The benefits of avoiding total climate catastrophe go far beyond protecting the environment — they could form the germ of a more equitable social system."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez speaks about the Green New Deal at a town hall organized by the Sunrise Movement, May 13, 2019.

By Michelle Chen

The resolution for a Green New Deal (GND) made a splash in Washington earlier this year. It was an ecological moonshot—calling for a wholesale decarbonization of the economy by 2030 and total transformation of the U.S. energy grid. But the resolution also attests to a greater ambition: bringing the U.S. back to the frontlines of a global struggle against climate crisis. And now it is becoming the opening salvo in an international campaign for climate justice.

A decade before the GND resolution was proposed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) in Congress, the United Nations Environmental Programme issued a plan for a Global Green New Deal based on similar principles—ending dependency on fossil fuels, creating a green workforce and reducing poverty. Like the U.S. GND, the global version did not detail how it would be financed. U.S. lawmakers are reviving the GND concept in Washington, with a hugely ambitious goal of zeroing out emissions by 2030 nationwide. It’s increasingly clear from the size, scope and urgency of the climate threat worldwide that the U.S. needs to play a chief role in spurring a global GND alongside a domestic one.

The People’s Policy Project (PPP) has mapped out a financial plan for a global Green New Deal, which centers the U.S. as a primary financial supporter of the energy transition and decarbonization process in poorer countries. The premise is that the U.S. carries a huge global ethical and economic responsibility to the current worldwide carbon crisis — not just because the U.S. is one of the largest emitters, but also because the poorest countries are extremely geographically and economically vulnerable to the extreme weather and mass displacement that climate change is rapidly intensifying.

Nonetheless, since the national GND resolution — which is focused almost completely on domestic goals for decarbonization and job creation — faces fierce criticism within the U.S., is it realistic to latch it onto a much wider agenda to deal with climate crisis around the world? In a follow-up exchange with Truthout, Jacob Fawcett, co-author of the PPP report, argued that the political challenge of financing a GND on a global scale “mostly comes down to whether we’re willing to take climate change seriously or not.”

For the global Green New Deal to work, the U.S. would have to work on two parallel tracks: dramatically cutting emissions domestically while fostering similar efforts in poorer countries.

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