Activist Groups Demand Pelosi, Castor Implement Green New Deal

Congress - Think stock

Two hundred fifty nine activist groups are demanding that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis Chair Kathy Castor (D-FL) stop being wimpy about the “climate emergency” and enact the Green New Deal.

The groups’ November 22nd letter urges Pelosi and Castor to go beyond “incremental or isolated policy tweaks” and concentrate on “the most critical components of the climate fight: (1) addressing structural inequities that perpetuate injustice and the disproportionate impacts to frontline communities, and (2) ending fossil fuel production—the major driver of climate change.”
 
I used to think it was rude, indiscriminate, and needlessly polarizing to call climate activists “watermelons”—green on the outside, red on the inside. But nowadays “environmental justice” is deemed a core component of “social justice,” and both purportedly require wealth redistribution via centralized planning. 
 
The groups writing to Pelosi and Castor call for “transformative action” to combat the “intersecting crises of climate change, increasing income/wealth inequality, and rising white nationalism and neo-fascism.” Specifically, the groups want Congress to:

  • Create a “federal jobs guarantee with collective bargaining rights and family-sustaining wages”
  • Enact “policies that protect the right to housing and healthcare” 
  • Immediately halt “all construction, leasing and permitting for resource extraction, processing and infrastructure projects affecting or on Indigenous lands” (apparently, whether indigenous peoples want such projects or not)
  • Halt “new fossil fuel production” everywhere
  • Hold fossil fuel companies and utilities “accountable for the damage their actions have caused for communities across the country”
  • Use antitrust and other policies to transition from “industrial agriculture” to “diversified, resilient local and regional food economies”
  • Adopt measurable and enforceable emission reduction goals consistent with a 45 percent reduction in global emissions by 2030 and establish “key interim targets on the way to zero U.S. emissions well before 2050.”

Lest anyone suppose the Green New Deal merely repackages the Clinton or Obama administration climate agendas, the groups declare: “To succeed, we must reject policies that worsen inequities, such as carbon trading schemes, carbon offsets, and unproven technologies associated with geoengineering, all of which can concentrate dirty projects in marginalized communities and encourage land grabs. We must also reject expensive false solutions that extend our reliance on dirty energy, including biomass, nuclear, and carbon capture and storage that enables continued fossil fuel extraction or is so costly that it takes resources away from cheaper, proven solutions.”