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This article is part of Jacobin‘s Green New Deal series. The rest of the pieces in the series can be read here.

At the end of 2018, the Green New Deal (GND) was suddenly on the tip of everyone’s tongue thanks to everyone’s favorite new congresswoman from the Bronx, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But the Green New Deal isn’t a new idea. It’s been bandied about by United Nations economists, Barack Obama, the US Green Party, and even New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (who claims he coined the phrase — Friedman’s version was so unabashedly capitalist that he pitched wind and solar on the grounds that “the only thing as powerful as Mother Nature is Father Greed”). Now the GND is back. This time around, Father Greed is a lot less popular, and Mother Nature looks a lot more dangerous. In the past few years, extreme weather has battered the US, with 2017’s Maria, Irma, and Harvey, and now apocalyptic wildfires in California, topping a long list of disasters. And the fall 2018 climate science report, on our tight window to decarbonize, focused minds across the country. Today’s GND is wildly popular, with the idea polling over 80 percent support in both parties — among those who have heard of it. Just as many respondents haven’t. Support for action on climate has long been broad but shallow. So what exactly would a GND entail? What should it entail? This Jacobin series takes up those questions from a left perspective and with no illusions about the climate science. Time’s running short: this is the moment to start a broad debate on the practical challenges and possibilities of fast, transformative change. The Left can’t afford to sit out the biggest debate in half a century over how to restructure the economy. And we can’t leave saving the species from climatic catastrophe to a handful of politicians, their congressional staffers, and allied think tanks, however good their intentions. We can draw on a rich history of radical ideas, like the vision put forth by workers and communities in the Just Transition movement of the 1980s, which sought to counter the Reagan-constructed dichotomy between good jobs and environmental protection. But what will determine how the GND plays out is more than ideas — it’s who has the power to implement them.

Not Your Neoliberal Columnist’s Green New Deal This time, the GND’s most visible and compelling champion isn’t a cliché-spouting columnist, but a democratic socialist with the political savvy to match her principles: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Within just a few weeks, AOC has reshaped the political landscape, putting everything from the GND to a 70 percent marginal income tax on the table. Her draft vision of a GND calls for a massive increase in federal government spending, paired with a job guarantee, to decarbonize the entire US economy by 2030. So far, so good. But the details are still vague. Which makes it easy to sign onto: politicians from Cory Booker to Michael Bloomberg are signalling tentative support for a GND. We’ve seen the same dynamic with Medicare for All — including the inevitable backtracking. There’s new energy in the Democratic Party, but Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to grant a Select Committee on a GND real power reveals the party’s limits. Growing but ambiguous interest in climate investment is no guarantee that the climate action we get will be big enough, fast enough, or egalitarian enough to prevent climate catastrophe and improve people’s lives in the process. Only a broad coalition built around short-term material gains for working people can muster the political power to force huge change and keep the planet habitable in the long term. The good news is that after decades of political marginalization, the socialist left is gaining momentum. The task is to link the upswell of political mobilization across the country, much of which is implicitly advancing GND principles, to the political savvy of the new wave of insurgent Democrats and an explicit, fleshed-out GND agenda. This January, teachers in Los Angeles struck and won major concessions that will improve their working conditions and students’ learning conditions — better pay, more teachers, more librarians, and more green space. Such achievements are central to a no-carbon good life for all: the “Red for Ed” movement is also green. Shortly after, air traffic controllers and flight attendants showed their disruptive power in forcing Trump to reopen the government — exactly the kind of militant worker organizing we need more of to build public power. But a grand coalition for the GND will take more than simple red-green arithmetic, proclaiming that union militancy + wind power = eco-socialism. We must be more rigorous in identifying the campaigns, ideas, and projects that will win over unions suspicious of anything green after years of environmental scapegoating for job losses; mobilize the vast majority of non-union workers; and, connect to community- and issue-based campaigns around housing precarity, racial justice, gender equality, indigenous sovereignty, and more — and do it all fast.