photo: the living green new deal website.

During the 2020 US presidential election, I spent a lot of time working with the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate organization. That also meant I spent a lot of time talking about the Green New Deal. The policy’s slogan of “the right to millions of good jobs and a livable future” was usually warmly received, but explaining the details was hard. 

While phonebanking or tabling, I would get questions like:  “What would life be like under a Green New Deal?” “Who wins and who loses?” Despite my enthusiasm for the Green New Deal, I didn’t know how to answer those questions. 

In A Planet to Win, authors Daniel Aldana Cohen, Alyssa Battistoni, Thea Riofrancos, and Kate Aronoff provide those answers. They detail what life under a Green New Deal would be like, why it is necessary, and what it will take to get there. 

Each author’s path to climate activism is different, and each has a different academic background, but in the book, they speak with one voice. Among their ranks are a sociologist, two political scientists, and a journalist, all of whom have spent years reading about and researching the scientific and social intersections of climate change. 

The book is first and foremost a pitch for a Green New Deal. Though the authors draw on the proposal first introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019, they do not limit themselves to it. Pushing beyond the boundaries of the original proposal, the authors discuss the international implications of an energy transition, and make explicit the need to shift away from capitalism. 

When I spoke about the Green New Deal with voters during the 2020 cycle, the economic cost of the proposal was always a top-of-mind issue. Surprisingly, the authors don’t linger on the topic. Funding, they argue, is always available for federal priorities. The trick is making the Green New Deal a legislative priority, so, instead, they dive immediately deeply into a visionary, optimistic exploration of all that a Green New Deal could be. 

Using historical examples and their own imaginations, the authors ask the reader to picture a world where electricity is free to everyone; where jobs, healthcare, and homes are guaranteed; where we work less and play more, enjoying new hiking trails, nature reserves, and urban green spaces; where public transportation is free and electrified; and where democratic processes are a given, not fought for. 

Beneath the almost utopian descriptions of life under a just energy transition, the authors weave together a persuasive argument for action by focusing on four strategic “battlegrounds”: fossil fuels and private utilities, labor, the built environment, and the global supply chains of a renewable transition.

Talking to voters, and even my college peers, the questions I got most frequently after concerns about economic cost were about what would happen to fossil fuel industry workers. In other words, what does a just transition really mean? We were trained to keep it simple: a just transition would be ensured through a federal jobs guarantee buoyed by large-scale infrastructure projects required to enact the Green New Deal. 

Planet to Win expands upon this idea. Yes, a federal jobs guarantee is one solution, but, they argue, “mere job training…isn’t going to cut it.” The authors rely on the idea that, in coal mines and on oil rigs, many fossil fuel industry jobs are harmful to the environment and workers. A just transition would empower all workers by strengthening labor rights, and making work healthier and more democratic. 

With a federal jobs guarantee, and with thousands of new infrastructure projects from retrofitting buildings to expanding clean energy, jobs would be plentiful. Even after the energy transition, there will always be low-carbon care and environmental work available. Coal miners in West Virginia or Wyoming, for example, could be paid by the government to turn abandoned coal mines into national parks.

A year and a half after its original publication in 2019, the book seems more urgent than ever. In 2020, there were 22 major weather and climate disasters in the US, the most in history. Around the world, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, as does the sea level, and the Arctic is melting much faster than expected.

While I found myself inspired by the picture of the future painted by the authors, I also found myself wrestling with a nagging question: can a book like this really reach the people it needs to? I may be drawn in by the image of diverse neighborhoods, electric buses on every street, and a just transition for fossil fuel industry workers… but will everyone be? 

The authors recognize the need to build a movement that meets the needs of all people, but there is no clear roadmap for how to really build a coalition-based movement, or how to bring those not already signed onto the vision into the fold. Maybe, it starts with all of us who advocate for the Green New Deal reading A Planet to Win, internalizing what the vision we are fighting for actually looks like, and conversation-by-conversation moving us towards a common hope for the future, rather than regurgitating catchy slogans. 

Now is a critical moment. Many of the political and social conditions the authors call fertile ground for the Green New Deal are now here. We have a more progressive president, a slim majority in the Senate, and an active climate movement. Even more importantly, according to the authors, we are in the midst of a serious social crisis (the Covid-19 Pandemic). If the US is going to take the first big steps towards realizing a Green New Deal, this is the moment. A Planet to Win offers a vision of what that would mean.