Bernie Sanders released his vision of the Green New Deal, the climate policy plan the 2020 Democratic presidential contender hopes will prepare the nation and the world to cope with and mitigate the potentially disastrous consequences of the climate crisis. According to Vox, it’s his longest policy proposal to date and The New York Times reports that it’s the most expensive climate change proposal of any 2020 presidential candidate so far, making it clear how central the Green New Deal is to the Vermont Independent senator’s campaign.

By making such a bold vision a cornerstone of his run for president, Sanders offered up a reminder of what’s truly necessary when it comes to addressing the effects of climate change.

Sanders’s Green New Deal, released on August 22, is full of specifics and numbers. According to the proposal, the $16.3 trillion plan would create 20 million jobs and pay for itself after 15 years. The plan also calls for transitioning to 100% sustainable electricity and transportation by 2030 and 100% decarbonizing the economy by 2050. It calls for massive amounts of investment into a wide variety of sectors in order to radically reshape everything from school buses to how the United States handles climate policy on the global stage.

It’s hard to know which of these numbers would be non-negotiable to a President Sanders, especially depending on which party has control of Congress. But just as important as any figure in Sanders’s vision are the unquantifiable, rhetorical aspects of policy that speak to the less statistical and more human needs when it comes to addressing climate disaster.

Sanders says the plan will pay for itself through changes like “scaling back military spending on maintaining global oil dependence,” collecting tax revenue on all those new jobs, and making “the wealthy and large corporations” and “the fossil fuel industry” pay, echoing his views of economic power players.

“What I want to say also is we can come up with all the plans we want — and I can give you 20 plans,” Sanders told Teen Vogue during a July interview. “Doesn’t mean anything unless we have the courage to do what? Take on the fossil fuel industry, and they are very powerful. They’re making billions while they’re destroying the planet.”

While he has little warmth for the industry’s leaders, Sanders also calls for a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers, like coal miners and oil-rig operators. Just transition is a framework employed by groups like the Climate Justice Alliance and the International Labour Organization for a move to a sustainable energy system that will account economic and social justice for workers.

Sanders’s plan also calls for declaring a climate emergency, calling it an “existential threat.” He was part of a congressional move to make such a declaration back in July, telling Teen Vogue, “If we’re talking about saving the planet, I think, ‘Duh. Yeah. It is a national emergency.’”

Sanders reminds us that the climate crisis is an existential threat to the entire planet — or at least one for everyone who can’t afford a rocket off this rock — and that nothing short of a World War II-level, 1940s New Deal-style mass mobilization is necessary to address it.

Sanders invokes WWI and the original New Deal several times in the document, at one point calling his plan “in line with the mobilization of resources made during the New Deal and WWII.” He references the World War II-era national recycling program as a model and pledges to reinstate the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).

In using Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as a model, the Sanders Green New Deal also, I believe, hints at a potential not as often discussed. During World War II, the United States saw a massive reorganization of society: Women joined the workforce in unprecedented numbers, gay people started to find each other in sex-segregated settings, and racial minorities seized new opportunities even as they saw the war against Nazi Germany expose the hypocrisy of American pledges of equality.