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What’s the ‘Green New Deal’? The surprising origins behind a progressive rallying cry.

This story was originally published by Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The man who popularized the phrase that left-leaning Democrats now use to describe a vision for a radical government spending plan to combat climate change is a self-described centrist “free-market guy” with a New York Times column.

It was Thomas Friedman who in 2007 started calling for a “Green New Deal” to end fossil fuel subsidies, tax carbon dioxide emissions, and create lasting incentives for wind and solar energy. At the dawn of the global financial crisis, the “New Deal” concept that Franklin D. Roosevelt coined 76 years earlier to describe the labor reforms and historic spending on infrastructure and armaments that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression proved attractive.

Friedman’s ideas made it into the mainstream the following year when presidential candidate Barack Obama added a Green New Deal to his platform. In 2009, the United Nations drafted a report calling for a Global Green New Deal to focus government stimulus on renewable energy projects. A month later, Democrats’ landmark cap-and-trade bill — meant to set up a market where companies could buy and sell pollution permits and take a conservative first step toward limiting carbon dioxide emissions — passed in the House with the promise of spurring $150 billion in clean energy investments and creating 1.7 million good-paying jobs.

But, by 2010, austerity politics hit. The cap-and-trade bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act, died in the Senate. In Britain, the Labor Party, acting on a proposal that a team of economists calling themselves the Green New Deal Group drafted, established a government-run green investment bank to bolster renewable energy — only for the conservative Tories to sweep into office months later and begin the process of privatizing the nascent institution. Balanced budgets and deficit hysteria became the dogma of governments across the developed world. Talk of a Green New Deal withered on the vine.

Today the phrase is making a comeback among the ranks of Democratic insurgents running on left-leaning platforms in 2018 primaries across the country. Far from serving as shorthand for middle-of-the-road climate policies, the decade-old slogan is being reborn as the kind of progressive platform that increasingly looks like the only policy approach capable of slowing the nation’s output of planet-warming gases and adapting to a hotter world.

Progressive activists have long complained that there is no climate change version of a “Medicare for all” bill — legislation that serves both as a vehicle for sweeping reform and a litmus test for how far a Democratic candidate is willing to go on an issue. Yet the Green New Deal seems to be filling that three-word void.

Defining a ‘Green New Deal’

From the beginning, there were competing definitions of what “Green New Deal” meant.

Friedman’s version focused on policies that compelled the “big players to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” He liked a lot of what Obama enacted — including $51 billion in “green stimulus” and a $2.3 billion tax credit to clean energy manufacturing — even after the administration shelved the Green New Deal rhetoric after the midterm election.

Sure, big-ticket policies like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system and sunsetting the $20 billion in subsidies to oil, gas, and coal each year never came to fruition. Even the regulations the administration did achieve — like tightening fuel economy standards and incentivizing utilities to produce more renewable energy — disintegrated as soon as the Trump administration took over.

Subsidies for wind, solar, and battery technology managed to survive proposed cuts in the tax bill Congress passed last year because Republicans in states that have come to rely on those burgeoning industries saved them. For Friedman, that is proof that lasting climate policies are ones that make private renewable energy companies powerful enough to sway politics.

“The more the market does on its own, the more sustainable it is,” he said. Even as the Trump administration dismantles Obama’s climate legacy, Friedman feels the battle shouldn’t be for more aggressive government intervention to wean the economy off fossil fuels, but on messaging that focuses on the patriotic, nation-building aspects of greening the economy.

“We are the true patriots on this,” said Friedman. “We’re talking about American economic power, American moral power, American geopolitical power. Green is geostrategic, geoeconomic, patriotic, capitalistic.”

But then there’s Richard Murphy, a British tax scholar who also claims to have coined the phrase “Green New Deal” around the same time as Friedman. “I don’t even know who Tom Friedman is. If he used the term, it’s complete coincidence,” he says.

In 2007, Murphy, a political economy professor and founder of the London-based Tax Justice Network, started meeting with a cadre of newspaper editors, economists, and environmentalists to discuss the coming financial crisis and how any fiscal stimulus issued in response could be used to tackle the ecological crisis already underway.

This “two-birds-one-stone” approach proposed an aggressive spending plan that called for investing public funds in renewable energy, building a zero-emission transportation infrastructure, insulating homes to conserve energy, and establishing training programs to educate a national corps of workers to carry out the jobs.

Murphy’s cadre, which named itself the Green New Deal Group, was more ambiguous on how to fund all this green development. He said they supported “straightforward deficit spending” — meaning government money that’s borrowed rather than already raised through taxes — as well as quantitative easing, a strategy in which the government buys bonds to inject money straight into the economy. Rather than buying bank bonds to prop up private financial institutions, Murphy suggested instead establishing a green infrastructure bank that would issue bonds the government could then buy back — a policy with enough leftist bona fides to be nicknamed the “people’s quantitative easing.” He also proposed closing tax loopholes.

The ideas caught on, and in 2010 the ruling Labour Party established a green infrastructure bank. But later that year the conservative Tories swept into office, sold the bank and scaled back renewable and energy-efficiency subsidies.

“The austerity narrative took over,” Murphy said by phone. “This is the polar opposite of the austerity narrative.”

Revival of an idea

Talk of a Green New Deal went quiet for years in the U.S. and Britain. But a new wave of progressive candidates, spurred by the organizing that went into Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic presidential bid, began reviving the term in the past year.

It could be a winning strategy. Polls show that Americans overwhelmingly support efforts to reduce climate pollution and increase renewable energy capacity, even if it comes with a cost. Sixty-one percent of Americans who voted for Obama in 2012 and then for Trump in 2016 supported requiring a minimum amount of renewable fuels even if it increased electricity prices, according to Cooperative Congressional Election Study’s 2016 survey results analyzed for HuffPost by Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank. That increased to 76 percent among voters who picked Obama in 2012 but sat out the 2016 race, and it surged to 85 percent among those who voted for both Obama and, in 2016, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

The data showed similar support for strengthening enforcement of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, even if it cost U.S. jobs. Fifty percent of Obama-Trump voters said they would support such regulations, increasing to 77 percent among voters who picked Obama then sat out the 2016 election, and 83 percent for Obama-and-Clinton voters.

Some have called for federal spending plans similar to the World War II economic mobilization to bolster renewable energy and rebuild roads and bridges to make them more resilient in extreme weather.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialists of America-backed challenger who trounced Democratic Representative Joe Crowley Tuesday night in a working-class Bronx and Queens district in New York City, outlined a similar vision. She called the Green New Deal proposed in Obama’s 2008 platform a “half measure” that “will not work.”

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” she said by email. “It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy but this time green energy.”

Others suggested tying such a plan to a federal jobs guarantee, a policy that has recently gained traction among a similar cadre of candidates.

“Our infrastructure is crumbling,” said Democratic candidate Randy Bryce, a union ironworker and Army veteran running to succeed House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District. “We need to reinvest in our country. I can’t think of a better way than to have that be a future that’s reliant on renewable sources.”

At the heart of this policy is a call for 100 percent renewable energy. Among this group, Kaniela Ing, a state representative running in Hawaii’s 1st Congressional District, stands out as a candidate from the only state so far to adopt a 100 percent renewable energy mandate. To him, a Green New Deal provides a mechanism for meeting that goal.

“The backbone of this proposal will be a jobs guarantee, something like what FDR proposed in the Second Bill of Rights,” he said by phone. “There’s so many jobs out there that the private sector won’t create that would literally help protect our planet and save us from impending climate doom.”

Other candidates were more vague. Kevin de Leon, the California state senator and union-backed progressive who is facing off against U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat, did not identify specific proposals for federal spending policies on climate. But he hinted that he would support large-scale federal spending to bolster a renewable infrastructure push, agreeing that Republican concerns over the deficit — the wellspring of austerity politics — proved bogus as the GOP-controlled Congress passed a massive tax cut law last year.

Left-leaning visions for a Green New Deal have even gained traction in state-level races. Abdul El-Sayed, the underdog progressive running in Michigan’s gubernatorial race, proposed a green infrastructure bank to start building renewable energy projects across the state, and he said he’d use his bully pulpit to push for federal action.

“We’re thinking about it at the state level, which both gives us a level of concreteness that is helpful and also allows us to be very specific about solving these challenges encapsulated under the umbrella of Green New Deal,” he said.

“We’ve watched as our infrastructure has crumbled,” he added. “We understand the responsibility to stand up against climate change, create jobs, and rebuild that infrastructure — it’s a clear, crystalline opportunity.”

Still, some climate activists see the term as trite and ineffective. Some climate organizers say it’s time to abandon the phrase “new deal” and embrace something newer and more forward-facing.

But for others, the phrase offers a helpful entry point to a policy program that would, in essence, buck with the last 40 years of neoliberal market-based solutionism and government spendthrift.

“The Green New Deal is a great framing, and I’m glad it’s catching on, but this whole thing needs to be at least as comprehensive as the New Deal,” said Ashik Siddique, who serves on the Democratic Socialists of America’s climate working group. “We are talking about the need to transform the physical infrastructure of every sector of the economy.”

“It’s very clear that something possibly even bigger scale than that is necessary now. Getting people used to thinking of it in those terms is welcome,” he said, then he laughed. “Even Tom Friedman is talking about it.”

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What’s the ‘Green New Deal’? The surprising origins behind a progressive rallying cry.

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Trump spun his climate denial to the New York Times and lots of people fell for it

When I first saw New York Times reporters tweet the news that Donald Trump claimed in an interview to have an “open mind” about climate change and the Paris climate agreement, I thought, Who cares? He is packing his administration with fossil fuel promoters, so his latest comments just suggest that he’s camouflaging his climate denial with doublespeak and pandering.

Then I read the full transcript published Wednesday and was horrified by how these comments had been wildly misinterpreted by so many media outlets and commentators. A CNN subhead: “A new view on climate change?” An Associated Press lead sentence: “President-elect Donald Trump changed his tune on several topics — among them climate change and prosecuting Hillary Clinton — in statements Tuesday to The New York Times and on Twitter.”

They’re wrong. If you look at what he actually said in context, it’s clear that Trump hasn’t changed his mind on anything. Consider these six comments from his Times interview:

1. After Trump said “I have an open mind” on climate change, he went on to clarify that he’s open to the “other side,” which consists of people who don’t accept the scientific consensus on the issue.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN, columnist: [A]re you going to take America out of the world’s lead of confronting climate change?

TRUMP: I’m looking at it very closely, Tom. I’ll tell you what. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. It’s one issue that’s interesting because there are few things where there’s more division than climate change. You don’t tend to hear this, but there are people on the other side of that issue … [CNBC news anchor] Joe [Kernan] is one of them. But a lot of smart people disagree with you. I have a very open mind. And I’m going to study a lot of the things that happened on it and we’re going to look at it very carefully.

2. Another of Trump’s much-cited quotes from the interview — “I think there is some connectivity” between human activity and climate change — is not all it seems at first glance.

JAMES BENNET, editorial page editor: When you say an open mind, you mean you’re just not sure whether human activity causes climate change? Do you think human activity is or isn’t connected?

TRUMP: I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies. You have to understand, our companies are noncompetitive right now.

The context suggests that Trump’s acceptance of climate science will depend at least in part on how much climate action might cost American businesses (read: dirty energy companies and fossil fuel–reliant industries). That does not indicate a firm grasp of scientific principles.

3. Trump cited a random local temperature on a random date to suggest that the atmosphere isn’t getting hotter on average:

You know the hottest day ever was in 1890-something, 98. You know, you can make lots of cases for different views. I have a totally open mind.

This betrays a complete lack of understanding of climate change. Global warming means global average temperatures are on the rise. Climate deniers like to cherry-pick specific temperature readings, but those numbers don’t tell us anything about broader averages. The global data tell us that 16 of 17 hottest years on record have been recorded this century.

4. The main authority Trump cited on climate science during the interview was his late uncle, who died more than 30 years ago:

My uncle was for 35 years a professor at M.I.T. He was a great engineer, scientist. He was a great guy. And he was … a long time ago, he had feelings — this was a long time ago — he had feelings on this subject.

Trump did not elaborate on what those feelings were.

5. Trump isn’t too worried about global warming because he believes his golf courses will be OK. Friedman mentioned that Trump owns a handful of “beautiful” golf courses that will be threatened by sea-level rise. Trump, laughing, talked about his Doral course in Miami, which is a few miles away from the coastline:

Some will be even better because actually like Doral is a little bit off … so it’ll be perfect. … Doral will be in great shape.

And after Friedman noted that Trump’s Royal Aberdeen golf course in Scotland could go underwater, Trump responded with an indecipherable, “The North Sea, that could be, that’s a good one, right?”

6. Trump still hates wind energy:

I have a problem with wind … First of all, we don’t make the windmills in the United States. They’re made in Germany and Japan. They’re made out of massive amounts of steel, which goes into the atmosphere, whether it’s in our country or not, it goes into the atmosphere. … I don’t think [windmills] work at all without subsidy, and that bothers me, and they kill all the birds. … With that being said, there’s a place for them. But they do need subsidy. … I wouldn’t want to subsidize it.

And Trump claims his views have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he’s fighting a wind farm proposed near his Aberdeen golf course.


By taking a few stray quotes out of context, journalists are giving the public a completely inaccurate picture of what Trump is saying and what he’s likely to do once he takes office. If Americans are to understand what’s actually happening during a Trump presidency, the media are going to have to do a lot better.

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Trump spun his climate denial to the New York Times and lots of people fell for it

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Lena Dunham’s New Documentary Puts You in a Trans Man’s Shoes

Mother Jones

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If you’ve ever gone clothes shopping after gaining some weight, you might be familiar with the particular dread the experience can stir up: You sift through the racks and face your reflection in a full-length mirror, feeling like every piece of clothing is accentuating things you wish you could hide. For transgender and gender-nonconforming people, the feeling goes even deeper. “I would be thrilled about encountering these on anyone but myself,” says writer Grace Dunham, glancing down at at her T-shirt-covered breasts, which she says are “extraordinarily beautiful” when she’s not binding them. But “that doesn’t mean they feel good.”

Suited, a new documentary premiering on HBO on June 20, tells the story of a Brooklyn-based tailoring company, Bindle & Keep, that makes custom suits for transgender and gender-nonconforming clients. Co-produced by Lena Dunham (of Girls fame), the film is most moving in its depiction of the complicated lives of clients like Grace—Lena’s kid sister—and five others who have long struggled to find the right fit.

Among them is Everett Arthur, a black transgender male law student and cellist who needs a new suit for job interviews. “I want to be stealth,” he says, sporting a red, white, and blue flannel bow tie. He wants to hide his curves and the fact that he was born female, he says, partly because an employer recently told him he was qualified for a job but couldn’t be hired because he was transgender.

Then there’s Aidan Star Jones, a 12-year-old trans boy from Arizona who shows up to Bindle & Keep with his grandmother—looking for something to wear to his bar mitzvah. With emo-style black hair and hipster glasses, he shrugs and stares at his feet frequently: “I’m just nervous, I suppose,” he tells the tailors. He’s never looked good in clothes and is afraid this suit will be “more of the same.” He takes a sip of water and clutches a stuffed dinosaur after explaining that his dad doesn’t support his gender identity and he doesn’t have many friends at school.

Rae Tutera takes Grace Dunham’s measurements. JoJo Whilden /Courtesy of HBO

Suited‘s director, Jason Benjamin, approached Lena Dunham about the documentary after reading a profile on Bindle & Keep in the New York Times. Bindle & Keep’s founder, Daniel Friedman, who is straight and cisgender—meaning he identifies as the gender of his birth—had originally intended to cater to Wall Street businessmen. Then he met Rae Tutera, who convinced him to make masculine suits for people like her who don’t identify with their feminine curves. They began working together, and now serve hundreds of clients with a range of identities—from a trans-male nurse preparing for his wedding to a trans woman attorney looking for a conservative suit to wear when she argues a case in front of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

“Fashion is universal. Everybody has to get dressed. Everybody has to be comfortable in their clothing,” Lena Dunham told the Hollywood Reporter. “We all live in this complicated world where we are navigating our own relationship to our bodies, and to what’s been assigned to us culturally and what our own desires are.”

The film asks us to consider tough questions as its characters talk candidly about their lives. “When I was a kid, I did fucking want to be a boy,” says Melissa “Mel” Plaut, 39, a gender-nonconforming cabbie. “The problem is like, did I want to be a boy, or did I just want to be treated like a boy? Right, like treated the same way the world treats boys, but still be okay to be me? And that where I think I’ve landed.” Mel, who’s in the market for a suit for a birthday celebration, recalls fighting to get out of frilly dresses as a kid and into Metallica T-shirts and skin-tight jeans as a teenager. Female pronouns don’t sit right, but neither do male ones: “I don’t feel like any of it quite fits.”

Some of the most touching moments come during interactions with family members, such as when Derek Matteson, the nurse, hugs his gray-haired mother before going under the knife for a hysterectomy, or later knots his father’s tie before getting married to the love of his life. Or when Aidan, the 12-year-old, comes back for a fitting with his dad, whose cutoff denim vest reveals tattooed arms. “You look sharp,” he says to his son, who’s smiling in his new suit.

“It’s all about just feeling great in your body,” explains Bindle & Keep’s Friedman. “Especially when people have been struggling their entire lives, and they finally get into something that really fits them, that really fits them the way they’ve always envisioned something would fit them. That’s not fashion anymore. And that’s what we’re after.”

Suited premieres at a time when Americans are growing more aware of transgender issues, with Caitlyn Jenner coming out and ongoing battles over which bathrooms trans people are allowed to use. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re trans or you know someone who is or you only just recently learned what the word “transgender” means. The film is a testament to the courage of embracing who you truly are, whoever that may be, and a poignant reminder that one size rarely fits all.

From – 

Lena Dunham’s New Documentary Puts You in a Trans Man’s Shoes

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Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

The White House

President Obama explained his thinking about climate change during a sit-down interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman; it will air Monday night during the final episode of Showtime’s climate series “Years of Living Dangerously.” Friedman also shared lots of the good bits in his Times column on Sunday. Here are some highlights:

Obama would love to make polluters pay for their CO2 emissions:

“[I]f there’s one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions. … We’ve obviously seen resistance from the Republican side of the aisle on that. And out of fairness, there’s some Democrats who’ve been concerned about it as well, because regionally they’re very reliant on heavy industry and old-power plants. … I still believe, though, that the more we can show the price of inaction — that billions and potentially trillions of dollars are going to be lost because we do not do something about it — ultimately leads us to be able to say, ‘Let’s go ahead and help the marketplace discourage this kind of activity.’”

He knows we can’t burn all proven reserves of oil, gas, and coal and still keep warming below 2 degrees C, an internationally agreed-upon target:

“[T]here is no doubt that if we burned all the fossil fuel that’s in the ground right now that the planet’s going to get too hot and the consequences could be dire. … [W]e’re not going to suddenly turn off a switch and suddenly we’re no longer using fossil fuels, but we have to use this time wisely, so that you have a tapering off of fossil fuels replaced by clean energy sources that are not releasing carbon. … But I very much believe in keeping that 2 [degree] Celsius target as a goal.”

Obama recognizes that methane leakage from natural-gas systems is a problem, but he is not necessarily inclined to address it at the national level:

Natural gas, the president said, “is a useful bridge” to span “where we are right now and where we hope to be — where we’ve got entirely clean energy economies based around the world.” Environmentalists, he added, “are right, though, to be concerned if it’s done badly, then you end up having methane gas emitted. And we know how to do it properly. But right now what we’ve got to do is make sure that there are industry standards that everybody is observing.” That doesn’t “necessarily mean that it has to be a national law,” he said. “You could have a series of states working together — and, hopefully, industry working together — to make sure that the extraction of natural gas is done safely.”

He says it’s hard to get our political system to tackle a long-term problem like climate change:

“I don’t always lead with the climate change issue because if you right now are worried about whether you’ve got a job or if you can pay the bills, the first thing you want to hear is how do I meet the immediate problem? One of the hardest things in politics is getting a democracy to deal with something now where the payoff is long term or the price of inaction is decades away.”

He wants to shift public opinion on the issue:

“The person who I consider to be the greatest president of all time, Abraham Lincoln, was pretty consistent in saying, ‘With public opinion there’s nothing I cannot do, and without public opinion there’s nothing I can get done,’ and so part of my job over these next two and a half years and beyond is trying to shift public opinion. And the way to shift public opinion is to really focus in on the fact that if we do nothing our kids are going to be worse off.”

Lastly, Obama warns against cynicism:

“I want to make sure that everybody who’s been watching this program or listening to this interview doesn’t start concluding that, well, we’re all doomed, there’s nothing we can do about it. There’s a lot we can do about it. It’s not going to happen as fast or as smoothly or as elegantly as we like, but, if we are persistent, we will make progress.”

Ezra Klein, are you listening?

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Obama really wishes he could put a price on carbon

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Quote of the Day: Milton Friedman? Yeah, That Name Rings a Bell.

Mother Jones

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From Fed chair Janet Yellen, responding to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s deep concern that perhaps the Fed still hasn’t learned the inflationary lessons of the 1970s:

The Federal Reserve is very well aware of Milton Friedman’s theory.

Question: would you say that Grassley was guilty of mansplaining? Click the link and you be the judge!

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Quote of the Day: Milton Friedman? Yeah, That Name Rings a Bell.

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