August 23, 2019
Sen. Bernie Sanders unveiled his proposed $16.3 Trillion version of a Green New Deal yesterday, prior to a campaign stop in Paradise, CA, in the midst of an area devastated by wildfires last year.
Sanders has joined other congressional leaders in a push to declare climate change a national emergency, and proposes a mobilization of World War II-style proportions in order to arrest and revers its progress. He also vows to use the EPA to “aggressively enforce” the Clean Air Act, and aims to meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s goal of 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030. Other goals include: cutting domestic emissions by 71% over the same period; creating a $526 billion electric “smart grid;" investing $200 billion in the Green Climate Fund; and prioritizing what activists call a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers who would be dislocated during the transition.
In the process, he claims, 20 million new jobs will be created in “steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants,” and says that the program will “pay for itself over 15 years.”
“We will do this,” Sanders’ campaign says, “by coming together in a truly inclusive movement that prioritizes young people, workers, indigenous peoples, communities of color, and other historically marginalized groups to take on the fossil fuel industry and other polluters to push this over the finish line and lead the globe in solving the climate crisis.”
(Source: KMTV3 News Now, Omaha, NB)
