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This story was originally published by Slate. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

There might be no better monument to the limits of American environmentalism in the climate change era than a parking garage in Berkeley, California. It’s got “rooftop solar, electric-vehicle charging stations and dedicated spots for car-share vehicles, rainwater capture and water treatment features”—not to mention 720 parking spots. It cost nearly $40 million to build. At night, it positively glows. And it’s a block from the downtown Berkeley BART station.

That America’s most famous progressive city, one where nearly everything is within walking distance, spent $40 million to renovate a parking garage one block from a subway station suggests that progressive Democrats remain unwilling to seriously confront the crisis of climate change. America’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions is transportation. In California, the proportion of CO2 from transportation is even higher: above 40 percent. Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín anticipates that the Center Street Parking Garage will out-green all others in the state with a LEED Silver rating, making it a perfect example of our approach to climate change: glibly “greening” the lives we live now rather than contemplating the future generations who will have to live here too.

On Thursday, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey unveiled just such a fix: the Green New Deal, a proposal that bills itself as a plan for the environment and the economy in equal measure. It is designed to steer America toward a low-carbon economy, fulfill the right to clean air and clean water, restore the American landscape, strengthen urban sustainability and resilience, and put a generation to work. With prominent endorsements from leading Democratic presidential candidates, Ocasio-Cortez has brought more attention to climate change in two months than her Democratic peers did in the past two years.

But the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography—where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places—is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else. The proposal encapsulates the liberal delusion on climate change: that technology and spending can spare us the hard work of reform.

The environment

America is a nation of sprawl. More Americans live in suburbs than in cities, and the suburbs that we build are not the gridded, neighborly Mayberrys of our imagination. Rather, the places in which we live are generally dispersed, inefficient, and impossible to navigate without a car. Dead-ending cul-de-sacs and the divided highways that connect them are such deeply engrained parts of the American landscape that it’s easy to forget that they were themselves the fruits of a massive federal investment program.