A beach near my house on Cape Cod (picture taken by me)

How can the “Green New Deal” be the pinnacle of climate policy if it leaves out over 70% of our planet?

The Green New Deal was unveiled in February 2019. It addressed and emphasized the clear link between environmental, economic, racial, and social justice, with the main goal being to achieve a 100-percent clean energy future in a way that is “fair and just” to all communities. The congressional resolution itself was striking, but it had one enormous gap:

The Green New Deal only mentions the oceans once.

To fully address the threat of climate change, we need a complementary policy that centers oceans and coastal communities. 

Senator Elizabeth Warren has offered such a plan.  She included the “Blue New Deal” in  her 2020 Presidential campaign platform. It calls for an inclusion of the oceans in the policy agenda of the Green New Deal, both by focusing on the need to protect it and nearby communities as well as centering how much our oceans can help us reach our goal of a net-zero emissions future.

Forty percent of the United States population lives on the coast. As climate change progresses, these communities will face more coastal flooding, erosion, sea-level rise, and intensifying storms. Many of these communities are poor, making them especially vulnerable to the severe impacts of a warming planet. 

The oceans themselves are at risk too. Between ocean acidification, coral bleaching, changes to fish migration and breeding patterns, and loss of biodiversity, we cannot forget to protect our oceans in our vision of a sustainable future. 

Omitting the oceans from the Green New Deal means failing to protect a large number of people and a large percentage of our planet. This, however, is not the only issue with excluding oceans and coastlines from our climate-friendly future.

In the year 2018, coastal counties provided 58.3 million jobs and over $9.5 trillion worth of goods and services for the U.S. economy. If the coastal counties were their own country, the GDP of that country would be the third-largest in the world behind only the United States and China. Coastal environments can also be places that naturally absorb carbon, allocate space for clean energy efforts, and provide good-paying jobs in a number of industries.

I was born and raised on Cape Cod, MA. The beach is my home. I have been privileged to witness the ocean’s beauty, its power, and the contributions that  coastal communities can make toward a more just, clean-energy future.

The Green New Deal cannot stand alone. We need a Blue New Deal too.

So—what exactly is the Blue New Deal? Why did oceans get forgotten in the first place? What is the best way to combine efforts of the Green New Deal and the Blue New Deal? What are the most effective ways oceans and coastal communities can contribute to climate solutions? Who is hard at work on this already and how can we help? These are some of the questions I hope to explore in the coming months as I cover the Blue New Deal.