I’m reporting from Trinity Episcopal Church on the south edge of downtown Houston, where Green Party leader Jill Stein is promoting her vision of an American future built on clean, green renewable energy. She calls her set of progressive proposals the “Green New Deal.”
A physician turned political candidate, Dr. Stein is testing the waters for a second run at the presidency in 2016. She’s speaking before about 50 friendly faces crowded into the church library.
“Politics,” she says, “has become the playground of billionaires.” While prospective Republican and Democratic candidates are prospecting for gold in the deep pockets of their parties' richest benefactors, Stein seeks financial support from small donors at the grassroots level. She pledges not to accept contributions from corporations, and she urges concerned citizens to visit her website at jill2016.com and contribute what they can to promote her vision of a renewable American future.
Stein’s political focus is on the urgent need for an accelerated transition to renewable, sustainable energy in the U.S. and around the world. Her Green New Deal would create an “emergency back to work program” in the sunrise industries of solar, wind and other green power resources, creating essential work for jobless Americans still stranded in a struggling economy.
For example, she proposes that instead of drilling for oil along the Atlantic coast, we should instead promote the harnessing of coastal wind, creating twice as much energy and twice as many jobs as oil drilling, but in a manner that does not jeopardize coastal wildlife habitats, tourism and recreational opportunities.
Climate change, she says, is the ecological equivalent of a medical emergency. The warming of the oceans now threatens the survival of large populations of organisms at the base of the ocean’s food chain, and continued heating of the seas could result in the collapse of marine ecosystems, with disastrous consequences for the world biosphere as a whole.
As a physician, Stein argues that the transition from dirty fossil fuels to renewable energy would be largely self-financing through improved health and lower healthcare (actually sickcare) costs as we move toward a cleaner, less toxic, more organic, well-exercised and healthful way of life.
Optimistically, Dr. Stein believes it is possible for the U.S. to make the transition to a 100% renewable energy economy by 2030. I note to myself that her 2030 target date outruns the more measured timeline of the fifty-state roadmap advanced by Stanford engineer Mark Jacobson and his colleagues, who propose realistic ways to reach a fully renewable economy by 2050. (Jacobson seems to have stepped back from his own earlier claim, in a Scientific American cover story, that the entire world could go renewable by 2030.)
Stein takes progressive stances on a broad range of other issues as well, including immigration, Middle East conflict (fueled by competition for oil), our “trigger happy” foreign policy, the militarization of our police and borders, a punitive and disastrous “war on drugs” that has widened racial and ethnic divides, voter disenfranchisement, hyperinequality, the student debt crisis, and the plutocratic and predatory politics of the right, so much of which relies on bullying and the exploitation of fears.
Stein believes that many populist constituents on the right share with Greens an anti-corporate and pro-people power agenda, and she hopes the respective sides can come together on shared issues to make politics more responsive to the concerns of ordinary Americans, and less reflective of the entrenched interests of the financial elite. Stein agrees with other aspiring third party leaders that national presidential debates should include a wider range of voices than they have in the past, and that the time is right for the emergence of a third-party alternative to the jaded and cynical politics of the two major parties and their leaders. (She prefers to call them “misleaders.”)
While Stein addresses a broad spectrum of issues, the centerpiece of her Green platform remains the renewability and sustainability of the American economy, and the equitable sharing of its benefits among all citizens, not just those who fly in the higher circles.
FDR had his New Deal. Now Jill Stein has her Green New Deal, a vision of a renewable and sustainable future for the United States and the world. Under whatever political banners that vision comes into being, may it be so, and soon.
-- originally posted in Danagram at opensalon.com
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