On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
Rate it:
Open Preview
Read between May 28 - June 10, 2020
72%
Flag icon
epitaph
72%
Flag icon
the two most powerful industries trying to block it: fossil fuel companies and the banks that finance them.
72%
Flag icon
opportunities for a more level economy and, ultimately, for lower utility bills—but once again, some powerful interests will
72%
Flag icon
never forget: any administration attempting to implement a Green New Deal will need powerful social movements both backing them up and pushing them to do more.
72%
Flag icon
building political power—enough to change the calculus of what is possible.
73%
Flag icon
New Deal was adopted by Roosevelt at a time of such progressive and left militancy that its programs (which seem radical by today’s standards) appeared at the time to be the only way to hold back a full-scale revolution.
73%
Flag icon
probing conversation about the limits of lifestyles that treat shopping as the main way to form identity, community, and culture.
73%
Flag icon
pleasure outside the endless consumption cycle, whether through publicly funded art and urban recreation or access to nature through new protections for wilderness.
73%
Flag icon
equates quality of life with personal prosperity and wealth accumulation.
73%
Flag icon
Kate Raworth calls for in her book Doughnut Economics: “meeting the needs of all within the means of the planet” through economies that “make us thrive, whether or not they grow.”
74%
Flag icon
most of us have been trained to avoid a systemic and historical analysis of capitalism and to divide pretty much every crisis our system produces (economic inequality, violence against women, white supremacy, unending wars, ecological unraveling) into walled-off silos.
74%
Flag icon
be overcome only with a holistic vision for social and economic transformation.
74%
Flag icon
Drawing out these connections in ways that capture the public imagination will take a massive exercise in participatory democracy. A first step is for workers in every sector (hospitals,
74%
Flag icon
And that has everything to do with our capacity to cope with climate disruption, because the more secure people feel, knowing that their families will not want for food, medicine, and shelter, the less vulnerable they will be to the forces of racist demagoguery that will prey on the fears that invariably accompany times of great change.
75%
Flag icon
the entire carceral state is about: locking up huge sectors of the population who are more economically valuable as prison laborers and numbers on the spreadsheet of a private prison than they are as free workers. There is
75%
Flag icon
we will not emerge from this crisis without a shift in worldview at every level, a transformation to an ethos of care and repair.
75%
Flag icon
kleptocracy,
75%
Flag icon
Because it isn’t only the planet’s life support systems that are unraveling before our eyes. So too is our social fabric, on so many fronts at once.
75%
Flag icon
it would give a great many of us a sense of working together toward something bigger than ourselves. Something we are all a part of creating.
75%
Flag icon
expertise of many different kinds of storytellers: artists, psychologists, faith leaders, historians, and more.
75%
Flag icon
that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibility to reach for.
76%
Flag icon
great science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, who delivered a searing
76%
Flag icon
The power of art to inspire transformation is one of the original New Deal’s most lasting legacies. And interestingly, back in the 1930s, that transformational project was also under relentless attack in the press, and yet it didn’t slow it down for a minute.
76%
Flag icon
incalculable power of art, which was embedded in virtually every aspect of the era’s transformations.
76%
Flag icon
Federal Writers’ Project included Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and John Steinbeck. The Federal Music Project was responsible for 225,000 performances, reaching some 150 million Americans.
77%
Flag icon
my husband). It’s a story about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving.
77%
Flag icon
true power of framing our collective response to climate change as a “Green New Deal,” despite
77%
Flag icon
We are part of a long and complex collective story, one in which human beings are not one set of attributes, fixed and unchanging,
77%
Flag icon
but rather, a work in progress, capable of deep change.
77%
Flag icon
Only when we know where we have come from, and where we want to go, will we have a sturdy place to plant our feet.
78%
Flag icon
economy is already creating many more jobs than oil and gas. According to the 2018 US Energy and Employment Report (USEER), jobs in wind, solar, energy efficiency, and other clean energy sectors outnumbered fossil-fuel jobs by a rate of three to one.
78%
Flag icon
billion in the United States alone. The very first thing that should happen is these subsidies should be shifted to investments in renewables and efficiency. It isn’t only the fossil
79%
Flag icon
ten military spenders globally were cut by 25 percent, that would free up $325 billion annually, according to numbers reported by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute—funds that could be spent on energy transition and preparing communities for the extreme weather
79%
Flag icon
Meanwhile, a mere 1 percent billionaire’s tax could raise $45 billion a year globally, according to the United Nations—not
79%
Flag icon
That, in turn, would liberate us all from the debilitating cognitive dissonance that living in a culture that is denying the reality of so profound a crisis requires. The Green New Deal puts us all on emergency footing: as scary as that would be for some, the catharsis and relief for many others, particularly young people, would be a potent source of energy.
79%
Flag icon
emissions by 2050, so why the rush? The first answer is “justice”: wealthy countries that became that way by polluting without limit need to decarbonize fastest, so that poorer countries where majorities still lack the basics of clean water and electricity can have a more gradual transition.
79%
Flag icon
introducing cap-and-trade schemes or retiring old coal plants and replacing them with natural gas. The tough work of confronting the fossil fuel industry’s entire business model was perennially
79%
Flag icon
FDR’s New Deal, the most famous economic stimulus of all time, one born in the teeth of the worst economic crisis in modern history. When the global economy enters another downturn or crisis, which it surely will, support for a Green New Deal will not plummet as has been the case with every other major green initiative during past recessions.
80%
Flag icon
economy; that they have access to basic social protections like health care, education, and daycare; and that green jobs are good, unionized, family-supporting jobs with benefits and vacation time. There will certainly have to be a price on
80%
Flag icon
funded by even bigger winners, as so many politicians are, then your attempts to craft climate legislation tend to be guided by the idea that change should be as minimal and as
80%
Flag icon
One of the knocks on the Green New Deal is that, by linking climate action with so many other progressive policy goals, conservatives will be more convinced that global warming is a plot to smuggle in socialism, and political polarization will deepen.
80%
Flag icon
These forces have been quietly building local models and road testing policies for how to put justice at the center of our climate response—in how we protect forests, generate renewable energy, design
80%
Flag icon
public transit, and much more. “Who is society?” demanded then–British prime
81%
Flag icon
of us, combined, make up the fabric of society. And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve.
1 4 6 Next »