“Every Climate Deadline is Important”: An Interview with Alyssa Battistoni

Alyssa Battistoni is one of our foremost thinkers and writers on the challenge of climate change. She has written widely about the topic for Jacobin, Dissent and other left-wing media outlets. Here, Alyssa speaks with with Socialist Forum about her recent writing on climate politics, the Green New Deal, and the links between democracy and climate justice. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Socialist Forum: Let’s begin by taking stock of our current situation. More and more people across the world are realizing the urgency of this moment, in which we are operating on a time frame of 10 to 12 years, before we see irreversible damaging consequences of the climate crisis. In an article called “There’s No Time for Gradualism,” you argue that it’s simply impossible to kick the can down the road any further, but it also seems that this dire situation has removed many of the barriers about what solutions were and weren’t possible and realistic. We’re now operating with a broader sense of possibilities, than at any point in recent memory.  What do you make of the present conjuncture?

Alyssa Battistoni: I think it’s really interesting to see how fast the sense of urgency around climate politics has shifted in the past few months. “There’s No Time for Gradualism” was written in response to the IPCC report around the very short time frame for the consequences of climate crisis. That was a really jarring report, but there have been a lot of really disturbing climate reports over the years. So it’s interesting that this one suddenly seemed to really hit a nerve. I have to say, at first I was expecting it to be a headline that would fade, but I think it has had more staying power, which is exciting.

I think awareness probably comes in part from repetition, and in part from this general sense of being in multiple, political, economic crises at once. They build on each other and lend a new urgency to that. I think also the sense of the shortening time frame for climate action paired with more of a sense that maybe it is possible to do something about it—a growing sense of political momentum is actually really important for the climate urgency to take hold.

I’ve always thought climate had mobilizing and radicalizing potential. I wrote a piece years ago that was called “Back to No Future” about a Left facing the prospect of no future—saying that actually, maybe instead of being fatalist, the urgency could be potent in loosening the sense of what is or isn’t realistic. Can this get us out of politics that are stuck in some very narrow band of what’s “realistic”— when political realism meets planetary realism. I don’t think planetary realism can or should determine what our politics are, but it certainly should make us rethink what seems reasonable.

Obviously, I don’t see that just happening on its own. But I think it’s been percolating for a long time, and there was something about this combination of this really dire report, which was like, “Yes, we are fucked,” and the growing recognition of the many ways in which it’s clear that the present state of things is really unstable and unsustainable, and that something needs to shift in a drastic way—in that context the message of the report caught on. And that paired with the real push for the Green New Deal (GND) specifically that happened a month later after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected, with help from the Sunrise protests, sustained the momentum.

SF: To date, climate politics has lacked a mass audience. This is at least partially attributable to the fact that it’s often perceived as a program of austerity and lowered living standards for people in the global north, many of whom have been hit hard by decades of neoliberal policies. Some today who acknowledge the severity of the climate crisis nevertheless argue that an ambitious program like the GND will need to somehow disincentivize existing consumption patterns, for example by taxing fossil fuels as Emmanuel Macron tried to do with what we saw were disastrous results. Given this, do you think it’s possible to reduce our impact on the environment without placing undue burdens on working people?

AB: I definitely think so. As you know, decades of neoliberal policies have, if anything, put the burden of environmental harm and re-dumped the costs of capitalism onto working people. Neoliberal climate policies basically push to impose more costs that will be felt most intensely, and something like the fuel tax is supposedly felt across the board or is supposed to be universal in some way, but will obviously pinch harder for people who already are struggling to get by in various ways. I think that is clearly a dead end and is something that we really need to move away from. The point isn’t that we don’t need to change consumption patterns in some way, but that it shouldn’t be “Here’s a new tax on something you need to do to get by, and now you have to figure out how you’re going to transition to a less carbon-intensive lifestyle because you’re being incentivized to do so by this tax.”

So I think it’s really unfortunate that a lot of environmentalism shares a language of austerity, or cutting back, or tightening belts, or reducing consumption, or it’s framed as reducing consumption where you, an individual person, have to take a huge cut in your quality of living and wear the hair shirt or whatever. We do need to lower consumption of some things, like fossil fuels, but not just by individually adopting an ascetic lifestyle. And we need to stop equating some level of physical resource consumption with a standard of living or quality of life or what it means to live a life that is not austere.

SF: On a related note, there are others who will argue that the language of the GND actually remains mired in more mainstream economic orthodoxy of growth. These critics instead suggest that we need to outline an even more radical ecosocialist or ecocommunist vision that’s centered on a principle of de-growth. What do you make of these claims? Do you think it’s possible to step outside of this logic of growth, and if so, is it desirable?

AB: Growth is a big question. Some people say that growth can continue once you detach it material consumption and fossil fuels and the like. I have yet to see convincing evidence of that, and I think it’s notable that both the postwar growth boom and the idea of growth as the political objective coincides pretty neatly with what environmental historians call the Great Acceleration of various worrisome trends in environmental indicators, including climate change. In general, growth is not a good metric for the things that I think we, on the Left, should care about.

Obviously, the revival of American growth from the 1980s-2000s, and then again since the financial crash, has been not something that most people saw or benefited from at all. I don’t think we want to accept the idea that growth alone will somehow lift all boats, or will trickle down or the like, because it hasn’t. So growth is not the objective—and in any case, growth is stagnating regardless of whether we’re pro-degrowth. I think that we really do need alternatives to growth for many reasons. So we certainly shouldn’t suggest that the GND is a way to restart the engine and bring back the postwar era. That’s the language that somebody like Trump uses about bringing back this golden age, which is clearly not golden in many respects. At the same time, I don’t think that the GND needs to style itself as a de-growth position. For AOC to go out and say, “We’re going for de-growth,” is probably not the best political move right now.

That said—it is really striking, and something that I was frankly surprised by, is that the GND resolution doesn’t actually use that kind of language that says it is going to restart the American economy or stimulate innovation or similar  language that you’re used to seeing when justifying major governmental programs, wherein stimulating growth is presented as the only reason for government action. There is some brief mention of investment in infrastructure and so on. But I do think it’s actually notable that that kind of language is much more absent than I was expecting it to be, and that’s exciting.

SF: On this topic of the GND, what’s interesting is that right before our eyes, it’s turning from a political platform to a political demand that is really defining this generation in many ways. It has the potential to bring together a number of different constituencies, including blue collar organized labor, white collar professionals, students, activists, and organizers from progressives and left liberals to the more radical Left. You write that the original New Deal was, to quote, “A broad suite of policies imposed by militant social movements and some leftist politicians and operatives and others who had no choice but to go along.” And so I want to ask, what are the social forces that you think will have to be mobilized in order for the GND to succeed? In addition, FDR’s New Deal was also largely shaped by financial and corporate interests. What do you think will be the main obstacles and interests trying to shape the GND that we are going to need to overcome?

AB: That is definitely the big question, because we have a lot of good ideas and then making them reality is always the trouble. Certainly, many of the constituencies that you note are really important. Labor is obviously key, and labor-versus-environment is often the frame for climate—but I don’t think it should be or has to be. A lot of green jobs energy has been focused on trying to move blue collar workers in jobs in extractive industries out of those kinds of work and into  alternatives. That’s important and there are a lot of potential jobs in clean energy but we should also think beyond that baseline.

Connecting climate to “pink collar” labor is also really important. That’s where the biggest gains are happening in the labor movement—there was a recent report about how educational services and healthcare and social assistance industries accounted for 90% of workers going out on strike in 2018.

Red for Ed is also really exciting, both because a lot of workers in those sectors and more generally doing what we call feminized labor have typically been underpaid, but also because those can become good low carbon jobs that are offering public access to education and improving people’s quality of life without intensive resource consumption—going back to the point I made earlier about detaching quality of life from resource consumption. I think there are similar opportunities with care work.

So as we’re thinking about what the job guarantee actually looks like, we should be thinking about what kinds of jobs a job guarantee could offer, and I think there’s a lot of possibility for a new blue collar and pink collar environmental coalition.  

The climate movement has really reoriented in the past several years to put the focus on climate justice, following the environmental justice movement’s focus on communities of color and working class communities who have borne the brunt of environmental harm. Socialists should absolutely see those struggles as struggles against externalizing the costs of capitalism, and connect to that organizing as part of a GND coalition.

It’s important to note that indigenous organizers have been out in front raising the alarm on climate and fighting the fossil fuel industry for a long time. They’ve been organizing against oil pipelines and other forms of fossil fuel extraction and trying to figure out how to stop these incredible powerful industries for a long time, and it’s crucial to bring indigenous demands and communities into GND planning and organizing.    

The more forces disrupting daily life there are, the better. It’s interesting to see these student strikes that have been happening mostly in Europe so far, but I think they’re now spreading to the U.S.— these are elementary school and high school students going out “on strike” from school. The kids who confronted Dianne Feinstein as part of the Sunrise Movement were actually out of school because Oakland teachers were on strike.

The power of labor has always been to shut down business, and right now we need to be shutting down business as usual—business as usual being what climate models call the trajectory we’re currently on, the one that leads to climate disaster. So the more people who are just like, “We are going to somehow disrupt daily life and make it impossible to keep deferring climate action,” the better.

Next is figuring out how to get these different constituencies and forces together as people who are organizing on different but quite related issues. This is another place where I see the teacher strikes to be really fitting, because they have been really engaged in organizing labor but also organizing in communities, trying to bring in people in the communities where teachers are working, parents and students, and the working-class people who are also affected by these labor struggles.

So, for example, construction work doing building retrofits have often been part of green jobs proposals, but you could go much further. Daniel Aldana Cohen wrote a piece proposing housing for all as part of the GND, which would commit to a huge buildout of no-carbon public housing. You could imagine really interesting coalitions bringing construction workers and other people who would be doing the work of building public housing together with housing movements, which have been organized largely by working class people living in cities, especially working class women of color who have been at the forefront of organizing around affordable housing. In general housing is really ripe for becoming a much broader issue. It’s been addressed primarily at the municipal and local level but clearly points to a broader crisis of social reproduction, and has major implications for the built environment that structures material consumption. So what kinds of politics are possible around that? There are a lot of other possibilities for similar organizing across labor and working class movements around issues that are part of the GND.

Of course, as you note, the New Deal was also shaped by corporate interests. I think in the short term we do need to peel off and basically isolate fossil fuel companies—to split capital against fossil fuel companies, because our number one priority for now is just to stop using fossil fuels as quickly as possible, and so we have to liquidate them. They’re extremely rich and powerful, and they will be very hard to beat. We are going to have to have some kind of support for action against fossil fuel companies from other financial and corporate interests, but right now I don’t see much evidence of that happening. So far it seems like capital is still just trying to get everyone on board for a carbon tax at some really low and ineffective level.

And as far as the GND as it’s been put forth by AOC, there aren’t actually these big profit opportunities for sectors to latch onto. Access to healthcare, a job guarantee—these aren’t going to be profits. I think that’s cool but it does make peeling off sectors of capital away from fossil fuels to back the GND for the time being a more difficult project. Maybe after the next recession things will look different. We do need to be ready for the next recession!

SF: I agree that it’s going to be tricky to challenge the balance of these different interests. Regarding the proposals for the GND, it’s not entirely clear about whether it’s the government or the private sector that is going to make these new investments and develop new technologies or own and control new enterprises. At the same time, those advancing these proposals have not really talked about what role labor unions or worker self-management can play in these projects. Speaking in terms of labor strategy and the organizing of workers, how do you think the Left should raise and deal with these issues?

AB: As I said, I think it’s interesting that they’re not saying that the role is to stimulate private sector investment, and it seems to be suggesting that this is the government’s role. However, it’s definitely thin on who will own and control the technologies, and that is going to be a huge question, because we’ve seen a lot of technological development models based around early government support for research, with private companies then coming to skim off and privatize these really lucrative technologies. That would be disastrous both politically and for actually deploying green technology on this scale in the US and abroad, to use the GND as a way for U.S.-based tech companies to claim IP and then sell it, sell the IP around the world to the places that are most affected by the climate change that we have caused. So it’s something we should keep an eye on.

There is some kind of vague support for union rights in the resolution, that you should be able to unionize, that people should have good union jobs, but not much more. I’m not sure the answer there is different than on any other question of labor strategy—we need to keep organizing unions and building the strength of labor and pushing candidates on support for labor. The more that the power of labor and labor organizing advances, the more we can remind politicians that they need to answer to an increasingly militant labor movement, the more we’ll probably see serious commitments to labor inclusion in these policies.

SF: One of the defining features of neoliberalism, at least when it comes to culture and ideology, is that it represents social processes as matters of individual responsibility. When it comes to the climate crisis, in the past, addressing it has been a question of more ethical individual consumption. Flying and driving less, purchasing more commodities made from recycled material, and just generally leaving a smaller ecological footprint. Often these become the preferred solutions advanced by well-meaning liberals and progressives. But do you think that now there’s a real opportunity to push back against this way of thinking, and to emphasize that the climate crisis can only be tackled by fundamentally transforming our social relationships, and framing it as a collective responsibility rather than an individual one?

AB: I’m glad you asked. I definitely think there is an opportunity, and that it’s certainly necessary to do that. The individual responsibility/personal choice model has failed. It’s ludicrous on its face in many ways. We don’t have meaningful choices! If you need to get somewhere that you can only get by flying, if there’s not a train, you’re not going to take the train. It’s not possible. If you have to get to work, and there’s no bus to get to work, or the bus runs once an hour, you aren’t going to take the bus—you’re going to drive. The idea of choice puts the burden onto individual people, when we live in a world that shapes and constrains what choices are possible. The systems that produce our food, that move us around, the places we have to live, way we heat our homes—all of those are huge collective projects. There’s no way to just opt out. You can spend a lot of time driving yourself crazy, trying to do all the right things, but at the end of the day we have to change collectively.

SF: Recently you published an article in your new series in Jacobin with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos. There you outline the five freedoms that the GND can allow us. Specifically, these are the freedom from fear, freedom from toil, freedom to move, freedom from domination, and freedom to live. In that article you write that “Freedom has to mean something more than the capitalist freedom to invest, or the consumer’s freedom to buy.” Can you say a little bit more about why you think it’s important to frame the GND through this language of freedom? What about it allows us to rethink the relationship between freedom as a collective social phenomenon and the ways that we produce, consume, and just generally shape and alter our surroundings?

AB: The Right has just owned freedom for a long time. The Friedmanite-Hayekian language of freedom and liberty has been the language of neoliberals and of the right in the years of that project. It is really important to reclaim the language of freedom on the Left more generally, and to rebuke more actively the idea that freedom is what the right says it is, that it’s this language of Milton Friedman—the freedom to choose, to go back to our previous point about consumer politics. That freedom, the freedom of choice, is completely limited by both collective relationships and social relationships, and by the amount of money you have and all these material realities. That freedom is constituted through material reality. I think it’s particularly true when it comes to climate change and the GND, because so much of climate politics has been framed as limits to freedom, or constraints, or as asceticism and self-sacrifice and so on, rather than freedom. On the right, climate action is framed as somebody taking away your freedom to live however you want, or take away your freedom entirely.

On the Left, though, there’s been a challenge in grappling with Marx’s idea about freedom as beyond the realm of necessity. It’s not just in Marx, but in a lot of political and economic thought, about the imperative to free yourself from necessity of nature, and get to this realm of freedom beyond. And I just think that we need to abandon that dichotomy. We can’t fully get out of nature, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have flourishing and real freedom and liberation within recognition that we will always live in a material world, and are material bodies, and we cannot transcend those. I don’t think that Marx thought we were going to transcend all those things in that way, but we need to reckon with the fact that there isn’t some point where suddenly you have enough abundance as determined by some biophysical metric, and then everyone can be free. You have to make freedom. We have plenty for everyone to have their needs met and live a free life. But it is the social relations that we need to change.

SF: Much of the science says that the major steps towards transforming our energy and social systems need to begin immediately to stave off the worst aspects of the climate crisis. Considering the scale and speed at which we need to move, this implies massive mobilization of state power, the likes of which have not been seen outside of periods of total warfare. How might it be possible to reconcile this reality with our commitment to democratic politics? How should we try to combine leveraging state power with more grassroots, local, and regional initiatives for democracy and self-management?

AB: That is a tricky question. I’ve often been resistant to the World War II mobilization language because I feel anxious about suggesting we are entering into war time. There are a lot of things that aren’t very desirable about living basically in perpetual war time conditions! We’re talking about a more permanent shift in how we live. That said, the intense mobilization won’t last forever—it’ll for a few years in service of transforming energy, agricultural, etc. systems. But even then, I worry about a full embrace of the wartime state, which does not usually suggest an embrace of democracy.

That said, I think there’s probably more support for large-scale, aggressive climate action than we tend to think. One of the things that’s been interesting is seeing, both with the GND and a lot of other things that AOC has been said to “shift the Overton window” on, is that there is actually a huge amount of popular support for a lot of ideas that have just not been on the table at all. She can move the window really fast on things from taxing the rich to the GND, because there is real interest and support for a lot of things that nobody has talked about. It’s not like she’s moving the window so much as she’s saying, “you’re looking at a wall, the window’s over here.”

Still—that’s at the level of ideas, but a lot of the GND is going to happen in the nitty-gritty, literally on the ground, and there are going to be a lot of tensions and at times real conflicts along the way. In the same way that there are efforts to block fossil fuel infrastructure, there are also a lot of projects to block clean energy, green energy infrastructure, and that’s going to be a source of real tension. But I don’t know that there’s any way to go but through. It’ll require some amount of organizing and engaging people around their concerns—about what these actual changes can look like in a way that’s not just completely imposed from some big government that people hate. That kind of work is going to be important, because otherwise we are going to potentially end up in a Yellow Vest-type situation where you do have major resistance emerging.

So we have to look at the nitty-gritty and try to figure out, where are the sticking points, and how can we be positively working through them. I do think that having a huge amount of federal support and money for local projects and regional projects makes a different kind of conversation possible. And there have been actually a lot of efforts at local, city, and regional levels to do climate policy, for example cities trying to improve public transportation. Because there’s been so little action at the federal level, and so little movement nationally and internationally, people have been experimenting locally and regionally. So there’s going to be resistance in places, but I think there’s also a lot of possibilities for infusing existing local, municipal, and regional projects with federal money and resources. In any case, working across different scales is always a tension in democracy, so that’s not totally new. The time question is the tough one.

SF: Last year, there was a widely shared article in the New York Times that described how we just fell short of doing something about climate change in the 1980s. And it concluded that, “Democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem.” This argument essentially reasons that there are too many competing interests, that the collective action barrier is too high and that politics in a liberal democracy is basically too pluralistic and messy both nationally and then even more so on the international level. This messiness makes climate change a complex problem that is very difficult to address. It seems like these arguments are one step away from suggesting that only authoritarian political systems can provide feasible fixes. What do you make of these claims? Can we make the case that the expansion of democracy is the best means by which we can stem the climate crisis?

AB: I think we should. That article’s critique is a common one. People will often suggest that climate change is something that democracies can’t handle, that it’s too complicated for people to understand, and people won’t accept the sacrifices, and all of the other reasons you mentioned. There are a lot of real challenges there, but I also just find it perverse that democracy is being indicted for being the cause of not doing anything about climate change, because the US did democratically institute some pretty strict environmental regulations in the late 1960s and ’70s. And then there was a huge effort to either dismantle them, overwrite them, escape them through outsourcing pollution and jobs, to mobilize this idea of the people against the environment by Reagan and backed by the business community, and to create the sense that it was labor versus the environment. But environmental protections were very popular, and they remained popular throughout Reagan’s presidency, even though he tried really hard to turn everyone against them, basically saying “Environment is the reason that we’re outsourcing jobs,” even as his administration was backing capital in  forcibly breaking the power of unions and trying to cut costs in every possible way. Don’t blame democracy for that.

I don’t think that means all the challenges go away, but we haven’t actually seen a real chance to have a real democratic approach to climate change. And I do think we’re now in a struggle over what democracy means, or who claims democracy in a way. In the Cold War, democracy used to be almost a stand-in for liberal democratic capitalist society as opposed to totalitarian socialism. It’s really interesting to see liberals abandoning democracy in favor of addressing climate change, where it becomes “Actually maybe we just need some benevolent technocratic dictator or something,” and then blaming democracy for the mess we’re in. The democracy-capitalism nexus seems to be breaking down, and a lot of people are not choosing democracy.

So it’s very interesting to see that shifting, and at the same time, the Left reclaiming democracy from this kind of minimalist proceduralism that’s democratic in a very thin sense. And on the Left, we’re trying to say that democracy means something more substantial, that it’s connected to a political economic program and material reality. It is struggle and conflict. It’s not always going to be pretty. But I think that’s exciting. We are overdue for a lot of these struggles they have been putting off. We have to go through those conflicts instead of trying to just avoid them.

SF: I think you’re absolutely right to say that democracy is about contestation and struggle just as much as it is about cohabitation or consensus.

AB: And class struggle! Democracy used to be understood as the rule of the poor, the poor against the oligarchs, and it was most threatening when the poor were in power. Maybe we should just remember that about democracy, that it is a challenge rooted in material and class politics. I think we need to be clear that we do live in a very hierarchically-organized society and polity, and we are not all just equal citizens. We have a ruling class.

SF: On this question of democracy, speaking more concretely and in the short term, what do you think is going to be the role of the Left in advocating for eco-socialism in the lead up to the 2020 elections? And by the Left, I mean the broader Left of the political spectrum in the US. How should we think both politically and strategically about the climate crisis in light of the current balance of forces, and what role do you see an organization like DSA playing in relation to prominent advocates of the GND like AOC and Bernie Sanders and others?

AB: I think the Left has a really important role in advocating for eco-socialism. It is not a coincidence that the only remotely close to ambitious enough proposal that we’ve seen on climate has come out of the Left, out of a candidate who ran backed by DSA, is a member of DSA, is explicitly affiliated with the socialist Left. That’s huge, and I think we can’t emphasize enough that we are the only people who are getting real about climate. Liberal critics have said, “Oh this is a nice wish list, but come on. Let’s be realistic—climate is only about these five technocratic things.” But we should stick to our guns because we have a stronger analysis of climate and how it is about our systems of production and consumption and daily life—about capitalism. The liberal attempt to solve it through economic tweaks like the carbon tax has not worked. If they want to go ahead and put a $250/ton tax on carbon, go for it. Propose a giant tax on carbon and let’s see what Exxon does. I don’t think they’re going to be behind that one.

So we should own the fact that we are not just slapping the socialist wish list onto the urgent climate issue—rather, AOC’s proposal is much more in line with what the science says, and what the consensus is regarding the scale and type of actions we need. We are confronting it as a really significant issue that is going to be the frame for all of politics for basically the rest of our lifetimes. And we are out in front of that, and I find it very exciting. I think more people are going to be coming around to that perspective as they look more closely at the climate crisis so we should keep pushing and leading, because the Left is leading on this right now.

I was really surprised to see that all of the Democratic presidential nominees were cosponsors or signed on to the resolution, because it’s much more radical than anything the Democratic Party has put forth in a long time. Certainly on climate, but in general, it is much more left-wing than a lot of things that any of those candidates would have just put out on their own. AOC uncapped a huge amount of political excitement in the same way that Bernie revealed that there was a huge amount of desire for somebody with a genuinely Left agenda.

It’s good that Kamala Harris and Cory Booker think they have to be following AOC, but we obviously should not trust any of these people who have just jumped on the GND train. At least Nancy Pelosi was honest about it—like, “Yeah, this is just like some bullshit green dream.” She’s backed down a little bit, but we know where she stands. Same with Dianne Feinstein. But the others aren’t our friends either. A lot of Democrats came out in favor of Medicare for all, and now they’re backtracking to “Medicare for More.” There need to be more political repercussions for backing off, and so whatever the DSA and other groups on the Left can do to create real repercussions, real consequences is important.

That’ll probably take a lot of different forms of organizing, but it’s also a real moment to bring a lot of different people and issues together in thinking of climate as a frame for all other issues rather than another issue to tack onto a list. We need to work out our long-term vision and how the GND moves us toward the ecosocialist horizon, not just treat the GND as one bill or piece of legislation. Obviously in the short term, it’s going to be really important to get someone who supports the GND into office. Both to elect someone who’s not Donald Trump in 2020, but especially somebody who is actually committed to climate action and, more importantly, accountable to Left movements.

SF: How much does the fate of the GND rest on whether or not Trump gets reelected in 2020? Is this something that’s the imminent threat to this project?

AB: I definitely think we need to get somebody who’s not Donald Trump in office. 2020 is a really important election for climate. A Democratic president obviously won’t solve all of these other political problems, and if Trump is re-elected, we’re going to have to come up with some other plan. There’s not going to be a moment where it’s all over. Every climate deadline is important. We have missed a lot of them and we’ll miss more. But the sooner we can start trying to hit some targets, start trying to actually do something, the better. So we really need to get Trump out and put in, ideally Bernie, but at least somebody who has been supportive of some version of the GND, and we need to be ready to hold their feet to the fire on Day One. We need to be able to start turning things around really fast. And the GND can help us beat Trump! It’s a way to hit him on his strengths, jobs and infrastructure, and Republicans have zero credibility on climate or taking on the fossil fuel industry. Bernie 2020!