While the Green New Deal started as a proposed national program, some of the most impressive implementations of its principles and policies are occurring at a municipal level. Part 1 of “The Green New Deal in the Cities” provides an extended account of the Boston Green New Deal, perhaps the most comprehensive effort so far to apply Green New Deal principles in a major city. Part 2 presents Green New Deal-style programs developing in Los Angeles and Seattle, and reviews the programs and policies being adapted in cities around the country to use climate protection as a vehicle for creating jobs and challenging injustice.

American unions increasingly recognize the threat of climate change to workers and their communities. Yet some unions continue to promote programs like Alaska’s Willow Project that violate the basic requirement of climate safety: that fossil fuel extraction and burning must be subject to a rapid, managed decline. Fortunately, they are not the only voices in the labor movement. 

Climate protection will create jobs for workers and economic development for communities. But as fossil fuel facilities are closed down there will also be some jobs lost and some communities will lose taxes and other economic benefits. This Commentary recounts what communities around the country are doing “on the ground” to protect workers and local economies from collateral damage from the transition to climate-safe energy.

Workers’ problems are not limited to their relationships with their immediate employers. How can they gain the power to affect the hidden decisionmakers who affect them both at work and in the rest of their lives? Two new books shed light on that question.

While the national media have largely gone silent on the Green New Deal, evidence shows that its vision remains vibrant with much of the public – and that it is being implemented all over the country at a community, local, and state level.

As the Green New Deal program has met headwinds in Washington, many states have plowed ahead with efforts to correct injustices and create good jobs as part of programs to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “The Green New Deal in the States –Part 1” reviewed the climate, jobs, and justice programs in Hawaii and Illinois. This commentary examines the extensive Green New Deal-style programs that California has instituted this year and draws conclusions from the experience of many states.

In the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA, the state of Massachusetts successfully sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to require it to address greenhouse gas [GHG] pollution under the Clean Air Act. In this summer’s West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency case the Supreme Court forbade the EPA to implement just the kind of climate protection that followed from Massachusetts v. EPA. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court held that the EPA did not have authority to implement emissions caps that would shift power generation from coal to renewables like wind and solar energy.