They also aim to put pressure on world governments ahead of the United Nations climate talks, COP 26, set to take place in Glasgow, Scotland, this November; a study released late last year found that G20 governments are committing 60 percent more to fossil fuel–based activities than to sustainable investments in their Covid-19 responses.
The Global Alliance for a Green New Deal, launching Monday, counts among its initial group lawmakers from every continent except Antarctica, belonging to both opposition and governing parties from Tanzania to the United States, represented by founding member Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. Their goal is to put the principles of a Green New Deal at the heart of a global recovery from Covid-19, united “in the pursuit of economic, social, racial and ecological justice and in global solidarity,” the group’s founding declaration states. “We are at one in our belief in the need for a rapid and just transition to an economy that operates within planetary boundaries and supports human flourishing.”
That means “significant” public investment in clean energy and conservation, coupled with policies to reduce resource use in the global north. They also plan to tackle problems they say are hampering countries’ ability to adapt to and reduce climate change, like tax dodging, vaccine inequality, and debt burdens. Among the founding calls of the alliance, accordingly, is to “dismantle the systems of predatory finance that are responsible for keeping governments on a debt-treadmill, undermining public services and contributing to social and environmental destruction.”“There’s this big force of neoliberalism that is a boat keeping on in the same direction. We need to join our forces to divert the direction of that boat.”
They also aim to put pressure on world governments ahead of the United Nations climate talks, COP 26, set to take place in Glasgow, Scotland, this November; a study released late last year found that G20 governments are committing 60 percent more to fossil fuel–based activities than to sustainable investments in their Covid-19 responses.
The idea “is that all of us are fighting at all levels, but we have something bigger in front of us,” founding alliance member Manon Aubry, a French member of the European Parliament who co-chairs its Left Group and co-founded its Inter-Group on the Green New Deal, told me by phone. “There’s this big force of neoliberalism that is a boat keeping on in the same direction. We need to join our forces to divert the direction of that boat.”
…As the U.S. political class this week focuses on the infrastructure battle on the Hill, the Alliance offers a much-needed reminder of climate change’s international context. Even the progressive edge of climate politics in the U.S. can be a bit parochial, omitting questions of climate finance, debt, and historical responsibility that are roiling in U.N. climate talks and other multilateral institutions. As Congress haggles over the details of a clean energy standard and electric vehicle chargers, it can be easy to forget that the U.S. is not, in fact, the center of the universe. For the planet’s sake, that’s almost certainly a good thing.
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