Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) came to Congress with the promise to create an economic plan to dramatically reduce—and later, to eliminate—the US’s share of climate change-driving greenhouse gas emissions.
On Thursday (Feb. 7), the newly-sworn-in Democratic representative from New York, along with Senator Ed Markey, the Democrat from Massachusetts, finally unveiled the plan, laying out the Green New Deal in 14 pages in the form of a House Resolution.
You can read the Green New Deal here, thanks to NPR, which uploaded the document this morning.
The document is a 10-year plan to eliminate the US’s carbon footprint by 2030 through a massive mobilization of renewable energy and energy-saving projects; It posits, among other things, to:
- Lift the share of power generated by wind and solar energy from the 10 percent it produces today, to nearly 100 percent within 10 years.
- It advocates dramatically upgrading local infrastructure, including upgrading all existing buildings in the US to “achieve maximal energy efficiency.”
- It proposes to “work collaboratively with farmers” to reduce the share of US emissions that come from agriculture.
It is an ambitious resolution, and the only one put forth from the US Congress that is in keeping with the scientific consensus of what must be done to avoid global climate catastrophe.
The plan is broad in its approach by design; it is meant to spur specific legislation to achieve each of the goals it lays out. “Each of the national projects we lay out might be their own bills,” Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti told Vox.
Enacting the Green New Deal would require massive federal investment, much like what has been done in other moments of national emergency. “The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she told the Huffington Post back in June.
It acknowledges that climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the US, which is also the position of the US Military. Considering that the US is responsible for roughly one-fifth of global emissions, and also has the capacity for developing high-tech solutions, it declares that the “the United States must take a leading role in reducing emissions through economic transformation.”
As promised, it is an economic plan, with the intention to “create millions of good, high-wage jobs in the United States.”
Read the plan in full here.