It sounds like a fairy tale, but it isn’t.

The Green New Deal (GND) is a political and grassroots movement that links climate change with poverty and aims to solve both crises at the same time.

The young movement originated in the U.S. but has quickly gained adherents in Canada and Europe.

The GND is one of the most positive developments of our time, though its staying power is by no means assured.

At least for now, the GND has captured the imagination of America’s political class because of the remarkably wide sweep of its ambitions.

On the premise that environmental destruction is a cause of poverty, and is also in part caused by poverty, the GND links global warming with deprivation.

That’s a connection that experts have been making for at least a decade. But only now is it becoming a potentially powerful movement that is pressing, with urgency, for a multitude of reforms.

Take a deep breath.

The Green New Deal proposes replacing fossil fuels with alternative forms of energy in every part of society. It would also provide universal health care, free college, abundant affordable housing, a federal guarantee of a job and a universal basic income . (I wrote about that last week.)

In confronting poverty, the GND also calls for ending racialized discrimination and confronting abysmal living conditions in Indigenous communities.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

The GND got its official launch only last week. But nascent though it is, GND is the leading topic of discussion in U.S. politics.

Most Democratic candidates seeking the presidency in 2020 have embraced it. Liberal Democrats are joining the GND vanguard at a rapid clip. Many Republicans and conservative Democrats are afraid to criticize it, and some have cautiously endorsed it.

The relative sudden emergence of the GND gives it the appearance of a flash-mob movement.

It is anything but.

The GND is actually a long-delayed, inevitable counter-reaction to decades of middle-class decline and resulting wage stagnation. It is a response to the widening gap between rich and poor — income inequality — that holds back economies such as Canada and the U.S. with skills shortages and diminished consumer spending.

The GND effectively proposes an unofficial merger of environmental and social-justice progressives in hundreds of fields, strengthening the causes of each.

The GND’s overarching mission is rooted in the humanistic theology that Pope Francis drew upon in his milestone 2015 Encyclical on Climate Change and Inequality, a precursor to the GND manifesto in linking global warming with poverty.

The GND’s roots trace to landmark periods of social-justice reform, including the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the New Deal, the adoption of universal health care by every advanced economy except the U.S. and Pierre Trudeau’s Just Society.

In business parlance, the GND would have progressives in various fields leveraging their association with the broad GND coalition to achieve goals that have long eluded them. That would mark a lessening of progressives working at cross-purposes in pursuit of narrow goals.

For instance, the environmental, or green, movement is so fractured that Paul Hawken, the pre-eminent environmentalist, has said that it “cannot be seen … by anyone.”

As such, the green movement’s objectives are easily denied sufficient priority by politicians.

The social-justice movement is similarly “atomized,” as Ann Pettifor, a fellow of the London-based New Economics Foundation recently noted.

Anti-poverty advocates fighting for social-welfare reforms and environmentalists intent on curbing the CO2 emissions that kill about 4,000 Chinese each day are engaged in a “competitive game of raising profiles” to advance their causes in isolation. And they’re doing so with minimal success, rather than collaborating, as the GND proposes.

The GND would be fantastically expensive, costing trillions of dollars to fully implement.

It seeks to retrofit hundreds of millions of buildings in the U.S. alone, to make them more energy efficient. And it calls for reinvention of a U.S. education system, currently ranked about 30th in the world, to prepare students for the high-skill jobs of the 21st century.

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If that seems fanciful, the GND would actually roll out over decades. It would see fierce debates and difficult compromises. And it would create hundreds of millions of jobs and unprecedented economic dynamism and tax revenue. It would ultimately be self-financing.

And that money has to be spent in any case.

Our species is at stake. Rising ocean levels that force the relocation of coastal populations will cost trillions of dollars and cause massive economic disruption. And we stand to lose entire inland cities such as Fort McMurray to more frequent and destructive forest fires.

The current global crises of food and freshwater shortages will become more acute as the impact of climate change worsens and as the world adds another 1.3 billion people by mid-century.

“If the Green New Deal is infeasible, what do you call managing climate-change impacts?” Sarah Ladislaw, a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote recently. “Surely that’s infeasible.”

In the vast low-income population worldwide, discontent is already manifesting itself in xenophobia, racism and the emergence of demagogic leaders. The consequences of chronic low-income life range from Brexit, a backlash against immigrants, to the violent racist confrontation in Charlottesville, Va.

The GND movement could fade, of course, as Occupy did. Outside the GND movement, hardly anyone knows what it is.

Society could kick the ball down the field yet again.

But the GND is politically potent.

All movements go too far. The reactionary decades of bitter partisan gridlock, fear-mongering and character assassination have about run their course. They have yielded only social divisions and widespread economic misery.

A Corporate America at odds with public policy on climate change, immigration, stalled infrastructure investment and underfunding of education and scientific research will not stand in the GND’s way. Neither will the U.S. Defense Department, which warns that climate change is America’s biggest national-security threat.

The GND, with its hopeful, constructive message, is tailor-made for U.S. politicians now embarked on the next election cycle.

And a Trudeau government now mired in scandal, and already musing about running on a UBI platform in this year’s election, is likely to take up other winsome GND proposals. It needs to change the topic to have a hope of retaining power.

Finally, as a political phenomenon, the GND commands interest because it cleverly co-opts Trumpism. It embraces Trump’s America First populism, but replaces the hollow promise of the Trump version with an optimistic vision that taps into America’s can-do spirit.

Trump recognizes the threat and has quickly begun to demonize the GND. It is, Trump told a rally last week, a socialist plot “that sounds like a high school term paper that got a low mark.”

That, of course, was among the strongest endorsements GND advocates could hope for.