On Earth Day 2021, Rhythm Nation held a Green New Deal Party with a panel of climate experts and musical performances from @maarquii, @cay-horiuchi and Cee White (in that order) This is a recording of the entire event that was livestreamed from Holocene.

The Green New Deal is both a specific piece of legislation, but also a framework for dealing with climate change through bold and equitable investment. It was introduced. by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 and re-introduced in a bill last month that calls for a decade-long mobilization to achieve a zero emissions economy, create good paying jobs, and invest in communities of color and low-income neighborhoods. It’s the first proposal to seriously confront climate change at the scale necessary to address it and it’s popular with the vast majority of voters. Perhaps most significantly, though, it's having a clear and beneficial influence on nearly every other Democrat-backed climate policy that's not called the Green New Deal.

While the Biden administration does not endorse an explicit “Green New Deal”, per se, the stated goals of his administration would achieve many parts of a Green New Deal. The Biden Sanders Unity Task force, which included representative Ocasio-Cortez and Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, increased the ambition of the Biden Administration’s climate goals to achieve 100% clean energy by 2035 and carbon neutrality by 2050. Pieces of a Green New Deal with these goals in mind are already making their way through congress in the form of the Biden infrastructure package and a number of other proposals.

Just like the original New Deal, which was not one piece of policy but a collection of policies, a Green New Deal will be a number of pieces of legislation on a state level but also a local level. Unlike the original New Deal, which made no substantive effort to rebuild in an equitable manner and explicitly left Black people out of key pieces of legislation like the GI Bill, a Green New Deal must tackle equity head on.

In this moment, there’s an appetite for bold change on climate justice and racial justice unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes. You can be a part of that change. To show you how, listen to the event and hear from a panel of local and national Green New Deal leaders about the path forward.

For more information, visit https://petermarks.us/podcast/22

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