Hi there Green New Dealmakers!
What a week! The (high-speed, electric) train has left the station—the Biden-Harris Administration is in office, and a Democratically controlled Congress is now officially in session!
Anyone else feeling exhausted by all the (good) news and change of pace? It’s like everything is happening at warp-speed now (because it needs to!) and we’re just trying to keep up with the pace.
On Day 1, President Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Accord…
…Cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline, after a decade-long battle…
…Which was led by indigenous organizers…
…Who are now calling on the Biden administration to shut down the Dakota Access Pipeline…
…As well as the Line3 pipeline in Minnesota…
…And the countless other existing fossil fuel pipelines…
…The Biden Administration also signed an Executive Order curbing oil-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and a 60-day freeze on all new drilling permits on federal lands…
…During the campaign, Biden pledged to permanently halt drilling on public lands, so we’ll keep a close eye on that promise. President Biden also announced a review of all of Trump’s many environmental and climate rollbacks…
…And the new Administration also named a flurry of fantastic, and diverse, climate and environmental team appointments across various departments, including renowned Energy Justice scholar and activist Shalanda Baker, who will be the Department of Energy’s first Deputy Director of Energy Justice…
You can read an informative Q&A with Baker, from WBUR in Boston, HERE.
And check out her new book, Revolutionary Power, released this week, HERE.
It seems like President Biden and Vice President Harris have heard the climate movement’s message, and these are all positive first steps, but there's so much more to be done to win a liveable future...We fought for them, they need to keep fighting for us.
…If you listened to last week’s podcast episode with the #GreenNewDealmaker, Senator Ed Markey, you’d know that he told us…
…And since we heard from a lot of folks how much they enjoyed that episode, we decided to release our full interview with Senator Markey this week!
…Stay tuned for next week’s episode about Charles Booker’s Democratic Senate Primary race in Kentucky. And in the meantime, check out this incredible first installment of a new series of videos from our friends at the Justice Democrats calling on the Biden Administration to ‘Begin the Decade of a Green New Deal’!
…And, if you haven’t yet watched it again, here’s Amanda Gorman’s incredibly powerful poem from the inauguration…
…You can learn more about how Gorman’s work is interwoven with climate messages in yesterday’s edition of Eric Holthaus’s must-read newsletter, The Phoenix, HERE.
Also on this week’s Green New Reading List…
AFTER CLIMATE ALARMISM, By David Wallace-Wells for NY Mag’s Intelligencer
THERE’S A BIG WHOLE IN THE ARGUMENT THAT DITCHING FOSSIL FUELS WILL KILL JOBS, by Amy Westervelt for HuffPost
A ‘NERVE CENTER’ FOR CLIMATE IN THE BIDEN WHITE HOUSE, by Lisa Friedman for The New York Times
A GREEN NEW DEAL IS STILL POSSIBLE, JUST NOT THE WAY YOU IMAGINED, by Geoff Dembicki for Vice News
THESE CLIMATE ACTIVISTS EXPECT A LOT FROM PRESIDENT BIDEN AND AREN’T AFRAID TO MAKE THAT CLEAR, by Cara Korte for CBS News
BACKLASH TO THE FUTURE, HOW THE CLIMATE MOVEMENT CAME OF AGE UNDER TRUMP, by Shannon Osaka & Kate Yoder for GRIST
…And finally, we couldn’t leave you without a few of our favorite Bernie Memes…
…And this final parting thought…
Indeed it has…And we’ll be there along the way helping to document it.
Please help us do just that by supporting our work…