Moms Clean Air Force wholeheartedly supports the spirit, the vision and the ambition of the Green New Deal. We’re excited and impressed by its urgency and scope. And most of all, we are thrilled by the hope it has generated.
Right now, the Green New Deal Resolution is the only thing on the table that comes anywhere close to addressing — on a national level — the challenge of civilization-threatening climate change. Many states have taken leadership and stepped up to cut methane and carbon climate pollution, but under President Trump, until now, even the most timid federal efforts at tackling this life-threatening crisis have been DOA, dead on arrival.
We’re thrilled that finally, the conversation about how to address global warming has been amped up; the Green New Deal might well shake loose years of inertia on the part of federal lawmakers, and generate more robust policy proposals.
Is the Green New Deal a Green Dream? Indeed, it is. But that’s not a problem — that should be celebrated as the vibrant opening in a new chapter of our country’s evolution. Dreams are essential to epic change. They help us calibrate our moral compasses. Without bold dreams, we won’t get a Green New Deal. We must resolve to do great things.
As we see it, the Green New Deal is not the end of a conversation. The proposal lays down a challenge: Let’s get going with the nuts and bolts of the kind of large, urgent law-making, across all sectors our society, we need to get our country on a path to climate safety. Let’s show how we can strengthen the economy with green innovation. And let’s stop holding our children’s futures hostage.
We are deeply grateful to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement for their fierce, determined and creative leadership in tackling this crisis We’re grateful to Senator Ed Markey for decades of concern and sheer hard work tackling the climate crisis.
The Sunrise Movement is a movement of young people. As a grandmother, I can testify that all generations are, and should be, and must be, concerned about the profound threat of climate pollution to our world. We cannot simply leave this problem behind for our children to clean up. Millions of us have worked for decades to try and solve it — and there is nothing better, more gratifying and more exciting than to see a new generation step up and shake loose the shibboleths and inhibitions that have held back progress.
I’m more excited about this movement, with its ambitious vision, than anything I’ve heard about in the last ten years.