Joe Biden & The Green New Deal
Hey there Green New Dealmakers,
Here we are, days out from an incredibly consequential, high-stakes, anxiety-inducing and altogether unprecedented election. How’s everyone doing? Or, rather WHAT are you doing to save our democracy? Need some ideas--keep reading, or scroll down to the bottom of today’s newsletter for a list of ways to GOTV. But first, we have a message we’d like to share from Sunrise Movement activist and guest on our podcast a few weeks back, Nikayla Jefferson…
On this week’s episode of the GenGND podcast, we’re looking at Joe Biden’s relationship with the Green New Deal. We dive into the youth climate movement’s perspective with Varshini Prakash and Alex O’Keefe of Sunrise Movement, and you’ll hear from David Kieve, climate outreach director of the Biden campaign, as well as David Roberts, VOX climate and energy reporter.
If you want to hear the full story go listen now, but here’s a fun anecdote for ya.
Recently after one of Biden’s televised town halls, Alex O’Keefe got a call from his mom:
“My mom called me the other night and she was confused because she was watching the town hall with Biden. She said, ‘I don't understand. He's basically saying all those things that you put in the Green New Deal, but he says he won't call it the Green New Deal.’
And she was angry like he's stealing our catch phrases, like plagiarism. I'm like, ‘Mom, whatever works, whatever works, if it gets him to that point.’”
That kind of sums up the story of the episode in a nutshell. Biden has repeatedly said that his plan is “not the Green New Deal” and he hasn’t embraced every single point in the Green New Deal Resolution (although his website says pretty prominently “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face”). But his plan looks an awful lot like a Green New Deal. Or at least, the first steps of a Green New Deal.
This election has been remarkable in many ways. One of the most defining elements is just how much Sunrise and the climate movement influenced the entire campaign, both the primary and the general election.
Listening to our episode really brought Sunrise political director Evan Weber back on that journey:
Yes Evan, you all did make it the climate election!
OK GO LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST NOW!
But, before (or, after) you listen, we really, really want you to vote. If you need any information about where or how to vote go to vote.org…DO IT. RIGHT NOW.
GENERATION GREEN NEW DEAL'S CASE FOR JOE BIDEN
So this week in the newsletter, we’re presenting Generation Green New Deal’s case for Joe Biden. He’s not our fave, he’s not our hero, but we think it’s really, really important that you vote for him. Here’s three reasons why:
1) Biden’s climate plan is very good, actually
We did not think we would be writing this a year ago, but Joe Biden has an extremely good climate plan. It is much, much better than any climate plan any major party nominee has ever run on. It is better than the plan Bernie Sanders ran on in 2016. And importantly, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Varshini Prakash played a significant role in making it what it is.
During the primary, Biden had a mediocre, milquetoast, plan that Sunrise controversially rated an ‘F’. But in April, as part of the “Biden-Sanders unity task force” process, AOC and Varshini worked with Biden appointees like John Kerry to sketch out a much, much more ambitious plan. This new plan includes a $2 trillion investment over the next four years, a commitment to clean power by 2035, and net-zero emissions by 2050. Importantly, it calls for 40% of that $2 trillion investment to go to frontline communities (low income communities and communities of color disproportionately affected by pollution and climate impact). If you want to read more about the plan here is a New York Times piece or, check out an excellent Twitter thread from Leah Stokes:
It’s true that there are things the climate movement did not get from Biden. Much ado has been made of his refusal to support a ban on fracking (although as our friend Amy Westervelt has written, fracking is basically a Ponzi scheme and without government subsidies--which Biden has pledged to end-- the industry will probably go broke all by itself.) But on the whole, Biden’s position on climate is extremely good, and it's the first step to making the 2020s the Decade of the Green New Deal.
Here’s what Alex O’Keefe told us:
“If we can win, even in the first couple months of the Biden administration, major pieces of legislation that gives people jobs, give them green jobs, rebuilding America, building America back better, or whatever Biden's slogan is, ‘Come on, man,’ then messaging becomes easy. It's about finding those people who got those jobs and having them say, ‘Hey, this is great. I love my life. You're going to want some more of this.’ So that would create so much momentum for the Green New Deal to be even bigger.”
That brings us to a very important question: how can anyone trust Biden to actually do what he says he’s going to do? Particularly given that his position has changed a lot in the past year.
Well, there are reasons to be genuinely hopeful. Biden is absolutely a calculating politician. He is a weathervane, not a visionary. But fortunately, the climate activists have the wind at their backs. Biden’s climate plan is extremely popular, and he knows it. In a recent New York Times’ poll 66% of voters said they support “Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan”. Biden himself polled at 50%, meaning a decent sliver of Trump voters support “Biden’s $2 trillion climate plan.”
David Roberts of Vox had this to say:
“Polling shows that among wavering Trump voters, this is one of the main things they're wavering about. Young people, even young Trump voters, are coming around on climate and are getting a little nervous that their party is so obviously and openly committed to fossil fuels.”
As Alex O’Keefe put it: “Our vision has become the savviest calculation [Biden] can make.”
And it shows. In his DNC convention speech Biden quoted Sunrise Movement’s first principle almost word-for-word: “We can and we will deal with climate change… and create millions of new good paying jobs in the process.”
The edit on this podcast episode came down to the wire in part because Biden kept making remarkable statements on climate. In the past few weeks he’s called Trump a “climate arsonist”, called for a transition away from oil (it’s horrifying that this is remarkable in US politics, but it is), and on Pod Save America a few days ago host Jon Lovett asked Biden how young voters could trust him to act on climate change, point blank. His response:
“It’s the number one issue facing humanity. And it’s the number one issue for me.”
Of course, no major climate legislation will be won without an enormous fight, and Sunrise is already planning and mobilizing for that fight. But electing Joe Biden is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for anything that could look even a little like a Green New Deal happening in the first half of this decade.
2) Trump is anti-livable future, and pro-hate
Mary Heglar wrote a remarkable piece in The New Republic about this earlier this week. This paragraph stuck out:
“It’s ridiculous to say that Donald Trump does not have a climate plan. He absolutely does, and it’s terrifying. His plan to “mitigate” the crisis is to egg it on by pouring money into the fossil fuel fiasco; his plan to adapt to the crisis is to dehumanize and deny the waves of climate refugees as the blood of needless deaths coats his hands and the children kidnapped by the U.S. government cry out for their parents.”
When Joe Biden called Trump a “climate arsonist” he was absolutely correct. Trump is not just “not acting” to stop the climate crisis. He is actively making it worse. He is actively trying to squeeze every last drop of money out of the Earth. If he cares about the future for anyone at all, it's for his children and his rich friends. He is not just a climate denier. He is pro-dystopia.
Nothing says more starkly why Donald Trump must be removed from office than his handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
The horrors we’re now dealing with in this pandemic parallels what would come from his “climate plan”, but on a much shorter time scale. Trump, simply put, actively made the COVID crisis worse. When you consider the wealth and power of the United States, it's pretty easy to argue we have had the worst COVID response in the world. And we will soon reach 250,000 deaths because of it. And next to what the world would look like after another decade of failing to decarbonize, COVID will look paltry by comparison.
3) There is no alternative
As Alex O’Keefe put it in this week’s podcast:
“All I can say is if you're sitting out because you think Biden is far from perfect, you’re completely right, but do you have a better strategy? That's what I ask people. Okay. I agree with you. I would rather have somebody else. Do you have a plan?
I don't hear the alternative to voting right now besides maybe fleeing the country, maybe building a compound. That is not an alternative that people from where I'm from can even use. What is going to give you the best possible chance at living?”
Arguments against “lesser evil voting” tend to revolve around the idea that not voting will either de-legitimize the system or punish the Democratic party and change its behavior. But there’s no evidence that 3rd party votes change the behavior of a party in a significant way. After the 2000 and 2016 elections Ralph Nader, Jill Stein and their supporters became a convenient scapegoat for Democrats rather than a motive to move left. And if not voting de-legitimizes the American system of government, would Republicans be trying so hard to make it difficult to vote? Our “democracy” was established on the suffrage of solely white, land-owning men and Republicans might prefer that group remain the dominant voting bloc today.
There is a tendency, which is often heard on the Left but is actually derived from neoliberalism, to see voting as a deeply personal, weighty and emotional choice. This is the same kind of mindset that says our consumer choices say a lot about our moral integrity as a person -- and it is a fundamentally flawed conception of how political change can actually be achieved.
As Jesse Meyerson writes in the New Republic:
“Against the backdrop of thousands still dying and millions still unemployed because of a pandemic response that has rejected political planning and collective solutions in favor of individual “personal responsibility,” the left must insist that, far from a personal act that expresses the hot feelings of one’s heart, voting is instead a stone-cold political tactic for achieving defined aims in a collectively waged struggle.”
In this case, the “defined aims” being ending the ascendant authoritarianism of Donald Trump, having a competent administration that won’t needlessly let hundreds of thousands die in a pandemic, and having a real shot at passing serious climate action among other progressive priorities. We will not get everything we need to create a just America in this election, but a Biden presidency is massive harm reduction.
And frankly, if you think ‘we survived the first Trump term, and we can survive the second’, well, first of all a whole lot of people did not survive, but also there is good reason to believe that a second Trump term will get much, much worse. Authoritarian leaders around the world like Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey all were in some form or another seen as “not as bad as expected” in their first term in office--but upon reelection became even more brutal and authoritarian. For example, after winning re-election in 2019, Modi launched a massive and brutal crackdown in Kashmir and pushed a racist, anti-Muslim citizenship law. Given Trump’s brutal rhetoric and behavior towards protestors and seizure of the Supreme Court, we can expect an even more grave situation should Trump keep power for another four years.
As Mary Heglar wrote in The New Republic:
“Once the climate that fostered human civilization is gone, it’s up in the air whether you can ever get it back. The same is true with democracy. And as goes one, so goes another. We’re not just voting for a president. We’re voting for a chance at something that should be the bare minimum: a livable future. The bar has never been lower, and the stakes have never been higher.
As a Black woman, I’m under no illusions that American democracy was ever perfect, but it did offer the chance to wake up and fight another day. There was at least the specter of recourse. And I am terrified at the prospect of losing it altogether.”
So are we.
Now, here’s where we normally do our Green New Reading List. But we’ve linked to a number of important articles in today’s newsletter…And honestly, when you’re done reading those pieces, it’s time to do everything you can to GOTV down the homestretch. So, we wanted to give you a few (GenGND approved) ways to do that:
Join The ‘Biden Climate Voters’ Group: https://joebiden.com/climate-voters/
Mobilize Voters with Sunrise Movement: https://www.mobilize.us/sunrise/
Join Sunrise Movement’s Victory Fest: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/victoryfest/
This week’s newsletter was written by Sam Eilertsen & edited by Nate Birnbaum