The Green Deal

In a few hours, Al Gore will appear on stage in Detroit with Barack Obama, and he will endorse Obama for President. I'm hoping that in his speech Obama will do what he did when John Edwards endorsed him at a big event: use the endorsement to talk about the issues identified with the person who endorsed him. His speech after the Edwards appearance was largely about poverty. I'm hoping his speech tonight will be about the Climate Crisis and green energy.

It's true that Obama has not been saying as much lately about the Climate Crisis as he did earlier in the campaign, and that clear leadership on this is going to be necessary. Other issues come and go in immediate prominence. But the Climate Crisis is all its manifestations is going to dominate the foreseeable future.

What Obama has been talking about is green energy, in the more accessible terms of economics and high fossil fuel energy costs. But it's time that Obama integrates the realities of the Climate Crisis into the rationale. Addressing the Climate Crisis can be the key to peace, to social justice and even to a kind of evolutionary leap in global civilization. Not addressing it could mean catastrophe for most of the life forms on the planet, and the end of civilization as we know it.

Addressing the Climate Crisis will mean more than ramping up green energy, but that's an important and indispensable part. One of these days--and I hope it is today--Obama should describe his vision for the effort that will rival if not exceed the New Deal in its necessity and its sweeping transformation. The 21st century equivalent might be called the Green Deal. It is a vision of change but it is also eminently practical as well as exciting. Sustainable clean energy technologies are either ready to go or nearly there, and need commitment and resources to make them real on the appropriate and needed scales. The Green Deal, which needs to include the equivalent of the 1930s Civil Conservation Corps--what Bill McKibben calls the Green Corps.

But the Green Deal also has to address the problems we're going to face as a consequence of the global heating induced climate change already underway, which can't be stopped by cutting emissions because they are the inevitable result of past emissions. That means preparing for disasters and working to prevent predictable ones. It also means addressing the grave threats to many animal and plant species, because our survival depends on the whole earth.

It's odd that this is happening today. I've been planning to write precisely this post for at least a week, anticipating the Gore endorsement. I actually thought it would be closer to the convention. So this becomes a hope, rather than a bee in the bonnet.