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Only a Global Green New Deal Can Save the Planet And Bernie Sanders has a plan for that.
By Tom AthanasiouTODAY 7:30 AM
Excerpts:
What makes the Sanders plan special is that he accepts the hard scientific truth that steep emissions cuts are essential but he makes such cuts feasible by refusing to limit his vision on how to achieve them. Rather, he adds another hard truth: If humanity is to stabilize the global climate system, rich nations must do their fair share by going beyond domestic action and providing support for emissions reductions in poorer countries. Sanders is the first major American political figure to face the reality and scale of this necessity. His Green New Deal would be a defining act of international solidarity. It would reanimate the Paris Agreement, which is struggling, and cue up a second breakthrough, the flow of financial aid to poor countries that is necessary to ward off climate catastrophe.
Defining a given nation’s fair share of emissions reductions is not a trivial enterprise, and while Sanders’s 161 percent number is not definitive, political and ethical judgments inform it. I know this because the figure is based on an analysis by the Civil Society Equity Coalition, which is supported by the modeling of the Climate Equity Reference Project, which I help to coordinate (though I played no role in designing Sanders’s plan). His 2030 domestic reduction target of 71 percent is based on the work of many experts in many fields, including engineering, economics, and policy. Neither number is beyond criticism, but both are in the right ballpark. And when it’s time to review the details, the climate nerds from the Sanders team will, I’m sure, be happy to show their work.
Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal is a potential breakthrough in climate politics. It would reinvigorate the Paris Agreement to limit temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius, a goal that the agreement’s signatories (195 nations have signed on) will revisit at a UN climate summit on September 23. Indeed, the Sanders plan and the Paris Agreement go together very well, for they meld the twin imperatives of domestic and international climate justice. Combine the two and you get a Global Green New Deal, an idea that The Nation advanced 20 years ago and that today is needed more urgently than ever.
https://www.thenation.com/article/green-new-deal-sanders/