Saturday, February 09, 2019

Fight for a Green New Deal in Seattle Socialist Alternative

Socialist Alternative<newsletter@socialistalternative.org>
Al,
Billionaire in Chief Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address was, unsurprisingly, filled with lies, distortions, and fear mongering. But also notable were the glaring omissions, including any plan to address our growing climate crisis.

As Bernie Sanders said in his State of the Union response: “How can a president of the United States give a State of the Union speech and not mention climate change when the leading scientists of the world tell us that climate change is real, is caused by human activity, and is already causing devastating harm in the United States and in much of the world? Further, they tell us that we have a very short 12 years in order to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into energy efficiency and sustainable energy if we are going to have a planet that is healthy and habitable for our kids and grandchildren.”

The last five years have been the warmest on record. We’re seeing an alarming regularity of extreme weather events, from wildfires across Washington State and in California, to a new normal of  “once-in-a-lifetime” storms super-charged by global warming, to the recent polar vortex. With a climate change denier in the White House who has filled his cabinet with fossil fuel interests, we need immediate action to address the climate crisis.

The idea of a Green New Deal, which has been called for by environmental activists and strongly supported by democratic socialists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, is a crucial step in the right direction. Unfortunately, Nancy Pelosi 
struck down calls for a select committee on climate change to propose a Green New Deal, replacing it with a toothless committee, and the Democratic Party leadership backed down from an effort to bar candidates who accept fossil fuel contributions.

It will take building powerful movements to win a Green New Deal in Seattle and nationwide.

Here in Seattle, we need to lead on the environment and clean energy. We should create our own aggressive targets to make Seattle 100% renewable by 2030. 
Traffic gridlock in Seattle is the 9th worst of any city in the country —we need to develop a world-class, fully-electric mass transit system, free at point of use, to provide a viable alternative to reliance on car-based transit. This must be financed by taxing the rich, not with regressive tolls on city streets or in the new tunnel. We need a major green public works program which can create thousands of family wage union jobs for Seattle workers through a major expansion of clean energy, free energy conservation retrofitting in homes and apartments, and repair of broken and increasingly unsafe public infrastructure. Let’s fully electrify our working waterfront, for port worker safety and a sustainable environment.
 
Can you donate $15$50, or $100 to re-elect Councilmember Kshama Sawant and build the fight for a Green New Deal?

Just today, 45,000 students walked out of classes in Belgium to protest climate change, and students across the world, including in the U.S., are building for a major climate strike on March 15. We need elected officials who aren’t bought off by Big Oil, and who use their positions to stand with movements fighting the fossil fuel industry, like Kshama did during the successful struggles to block access of a Shell oil rig to the Seattle Port and to divest Seattle from Dakota Access Pipeline-investor Wells Fargo.

We need a new party for working people that will fight to stop climate change. We need to take the big energy corporations into democratic public ownership and re-tool them for clean energy and mass transit. The fossil-fuel reliant capitalist system has failed to address the urgent climate crisis  we need a democratic socialist green economy that bases itself on the needs of people and the planet.

 
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