If it’s hard to imagine the sweeping changes proposed in the “Green New Deal” actually happening, don’t blame the Green New Deal. It’s just that it has been so long since any politician suggested something so grand. The wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea level rise that climate scientists have long promised are here, but we could get accustomed to that. We could forget that the world of five years ago or a decade ago was any different. And we got used to elected representatives saying predictable things about it too—doubt and denial, or expressions of concern that climate change is too complicated and too expensive to deal with. We grow accustomed to their farce.

So it’s jarring when something breaks the pattern. A resolution from the US House of Representatives that proposes national, urgent action on climate change and more—well, we’re not used to that. A vast set of policies to fight climate change, prepare for its effects, address income inequality, and save working-class jobs, fronted by a brand-new congressperson with a national profile—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York’s AOC? That’s new. The so-called Green New Deal reads like a wholesale reset to the Democratic Party platform, weaving the existential threat of a warming planet into old-school liberal themes. Defend the working class. Clean up pollution. Give people health care and housing.

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What changed? It’s all emblematic of a significant—and recent—shift in how scientists and local politicians talk about the climate. With a leadership void at the top, other groups have stepped into the breach. Politics made the Green New Deal possible; a new approach to talking about climate makes it plausible.

It’s right there at the top. The Green New Deal’s first four lines call out the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5℃” from last October and the US government’s own Fourth National Climate Assessment, released ignominiously on Black Friday. Past iterations of those reports were stolid accounts of what various computer models said about the potential meaning of limited historical data under certain scenarios as determined by … oh I’m sorry, I must have dozed off. But the latest reports don’t hide under caveats. They are clear-eyed accounts of what's happening today and what will happen tomorrow if humans don’t get their greenhouse gas-emitting acts together. It might’ve also helped that predictions for a once-far-off midcentury are now only 25 years away.

NCA4 and the IPCC 1.5℃ broke through because they put the consequences of inaction into the language not of science but of policymakers—economic losses underway, the new ranges of diseases, the numbers of extra deaths you can expect from extreme heat. Couple that with 2018 being the fourth-hottest year on record (beaten by the previous three years) and having had 241 billion-dollar disasters, and all this climate stuff starts to look true. They’re also things you can put into a House Resolution, right up at the top.

While the federal government was absenting itself from the global fight against climate change, state and city governments have had to go it alone. You could argue about how effective any one city can be when it tries to limit emissions, or how effective an international consortium of cities might be. When states like California and New York determine that they’re going to transition to renewable and environmentally sensible energy sources, that maybe has more oomph—those states buy a lot of power from other places, and the impact a California can have on the electricity market is a lot like the impact a California can have on automotive fuel-efficiency standards: outsized.