350PDX Green New Deal Team
Green energy projects must follow fair labor standards, benefit local workers and advance workforce equity!
The 350PDX Green New Deal team’s mission is to provide education and advocacy for a Green New Deal. We perform outreach to neighborhood associations, faith communities, and other communities to raise awareness and foster involvement in promoting and advocating for Green New Deal policies.
Please contact us at GreenNewDeal@350pdx.org to request a presentation about the Green New Deal to your community!
The Green New Deal Resolution
The Green New Deal establishes core principles and goals to mobilize every aspect of American society to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030, a guaranteed living-wage job for anyone who wants one, and a just transition for workers and frontline communities. It acknowledges the current ecological climate crisis, economic crisis and historical oppression and marginalization of people of color, indigenous peoples, and working people drawing upon a long-standing climate justice movement that frames climate change as a justice issue as well as an environmental issue.
The key principles of the Green New Deal, which aim to transform our economic system to resolve these crises and inequities, are listed below. Click here for the full text of the Green New Deal resolution that has been put forth in the US House of Representatives (HR109) .
- Achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers.
- Create millions of good, high wage jobs; and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.
- Invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century.
- Ensure public wellbeing through universal access to healthy food, energy-efficient housing, mass transit, childcare, and healthcare.
- Secure clean air and water, climate and community resilience, access to nature, and a sustainable environment for all.
- Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities.
Just as the original New Deal emerged as a series of policies and programs over time , we envision the Green New Deal expanding beyond the goals and projects stated in HR109. Regional and local Green New Deal initiatives, such as the Oregon Green New Deal (here), are also emerging to mobilize the specific actions relevant to the region and/or local community.
Green New Deal Team Statement in Solidarity with the Movement for Black Lives
August 6, 2020
We stand in solidarity with the world-wide uprising for Black lives and respond to this moment with the following statement: A Green New Deal advances the idea that action on the existential crisis of climate change must simultaneously respond to another existential crisis – the long assault on Black life. We call for a Green New Deal that makes reparations for the damage 400 years of white supremacy has done specifically to Black people. We acknowledge the harm caused by the deliberate exclusion from the opportunities and protections of its namesake, the New Deal.
We endorse the Movement for Black Live’s vision, including the call to divest from the police, fossil fuels, and the military, and to invest in what generates life. We join with the Poor People’s Campaign in calling for a Third Reconstruction, and with Critical Resistance in demanding abolition of the prison-industrial complex and detention camps. We support Black movements in calling for solidarity with struggles against oppression everywhere – from Minneapolis to Palestine. Black radical thought explains that capitalist exploitation and dispossession emanate from a racist foundation. The twined effect of racism and capitalism, with state sanction, results in vulnerability to premature death in Black and other communities. For true Black and non-Black freedom, we must recognize and confront the role of racial capitalism in the particular suffocating of Black life and in the generalized crises it creates – planetary warming, escalating misery of the many, and persistent gender, class and race inequalities. In the vision of care advanced by Black feminists past and present, we see the world we want. We know that when Black lives matter, everyone’s lives will be better.
***
This statement was informed by the work of Black thought leaders including those linked in the text and also available here.
Picture credits
- Top: Molly Crabapple (http://art.350.org/kits/green-
new-deal-arts/) - Middle: Mona Caron (http://art.350.org/kits/
green-new-deal-arts/) - Bottom Photo 1: Black Lives Matter
Photo 2: Steve Pavey, Hope in Focus (www.stevepavey.com)
