09/11/2019
"A Green New Deal-style approach — which fuses the battle against planet-warming pollution with the kinds of universalist health, housing, and transit policies that make daily life less stressful and more humane — is not, therefore, one of many possible climate solutions. Having exhausted every other option, it is the only kind of climate response that stands a chance of not going up in smoke.
Put bluntly, we will not do what is required to confront the climate emergency unless we are willing to confront the economic and social emergencies produced by decades of neoliberal policy. Or, as Stemen said, “For Chico, a Green New Deal is a way that we can have housing that both the people and planet can afford.”
Because it isn’t only our dry and overheated forests and grasslands that are tinderboxes, just waiting for a tiniest spark to go up in flames. All around the world, our human societies, scorched under the stresses of late capitalism, are political tinderboxes as well.
In the short window that remains, we need policies capable putting out all these flames."
Days before the anniversary of the deadly Camp Fire that killed 86 people, a community in California unveiled a plan to adopt its own Green New Deal.
