People could just call anything a Green New Deal. And I can't stop them. But the original Green New Deal resolution that was put forward by [US Congresswoman] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and [US Senator] Ed Markey set out some benchmarks and the first one is that this has to be guided by the best climate science. They cite the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the same one that Greta Thunberg submitted to Congress in her testimony a couple days ago [September 18], that says that global emissions have to be cut in half in 11 years. So if a Green New Deal doesn't have a serious plan to cut emissions at that speed and scale then it really shouldn’t be called a Green New Deal.

What makes this strategy different is that it is really about an industrial transformation. It is about the creation of millions of good, unionized jobs. It is about protecting workers who would lose jobs in high carbon sectors. It's about front line communities who are overwhelmingly Indigenous, black and immigrant communities — whose lands and whose bodies have been poisoned by this industrial economy — needing to have a leadership role in deciding these policies and to benefit from these policies as opposed to being the sacrifice on the alter of other people's progress. Those are some core principles and any plan that doesn’t really have robust policy in all of those areas really isn’t a Green New Deal.

We are in the last moments when we have a fighting chance of averting truly catastrophic and irreversible impacts. We live in a time when we face many crises and they intersect, they interrelate, so we really have to design policies and approaches that are holistic in nature. It’s not about telling people to wait their turn, it’s not about ranking one priority over another, it’s about really multitasking. It’s figuring out how we do several things at once. To me, it’s a no brainer. If we need to transform the building blocks of our economy in order to prevent really unliveable climate impacts, then why wouldn't we seize that opportunity to redress all of these other systemic crises? We're changing anyway, so why would we lock in the same injustices and exclusions that exist today?