Climate Strikes

Tired of waiting for the Green New Deal? Thousands of individuals and communities, cities, and states are taking climate protection into their own hands by creating their own “Green New Deal from Below.” This commentary portrays how people are using energy efficiency and conservation locally to realize the climate, jobs, and justice goals of the Green New Deal.

Climate-safe energy is being produced locally all over the country in ways that also produce jobs and increase racial, social, and economic justice – fulfilling the basic principles of the Green New Deal.

As the world’s governments escalate the threat of human annihilation through climate change, nuclear holocaust, and burgeoning injustice, it is hard to see what alternative world order could restrain their depredations – let alone how such a world order could be achieved. Richard Falk is one of the few thinkers who has addressed those questions both in his writings and in his life. In this commentary I tell the story of his impact on me over the past half century to suggest what we all can learn from him.

The leaders of the world’s countries gathered in Glasgow signed a death warrant for the world’s people. Is there anything the world’s people can do about it? To answer effectively, human solidarity may have to challenge the very legitimacy of the nation-state system.

The Green New Deal is a visionary program to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. Its core principle is to use the necessity for climate protection as a basis for realizing full employment and social justice.