This is the base for countering Trump’s destructive policies.
As the Green New Deal languished in Congress for five years, community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes and others outside the federal arena were creating their own Green New Deal agendas—from below. This “Green New Deal from Below” could be an important base for fighting Trump’s destructive policies.
As a historian of social movements, I am always alert for signs that new forms of action may herald new forms of organization and action by ordinary people. The green new rate below has all the signs of such a development. my new book Green new rate from belowdetails more than a hundred such initiatives in more than 40 states. I believe this development could go a long way in inspiring and building power in the coming Trump era.
Some of these initiatives have names like the Boston Green New Deal and the Green New Deal for Education; others do not use the shortcut but follow the same principles. For example:
• In Boston, the city’s Green New Deal provided free, healthy breakfasts, lunches and snacks to 50,000 of the city’s public school students, produced by a black-owned, worker-owned cooperative in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
• In a Chicago neighborhood threatened by gentrification, residents protested destructive development — and the city responded by demolishing a parking lot and replacing it with affordable housing.
• In West Virginia, a miners’ union has recruited unemployed coal miners to work at a new battery plant designed to expand solar power.
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• In Los Angeles, the city’s Green New Deal cut climate-destroying emissions 36 percent below 1990 levels in its first three years. The Green New Deal policy will see 97 percent of the city’s energy produced from renewable sources by 2030.
• In Mississippi, the state subsidizes rooftop solar, including rebates for low- and moderate-income customers and incentives for schools that go solar.
New green proposals in cities like Boston and Los Angeles are reducing the greenhouse gases that are destroying our climate. They create climate-protecting jobs and train the workers to fill them. They mobilize urban resources to reduce poverty. They invest in climate-friendly buildings and technology in low-income areas. They expand low-cost or free public transportation to reconnect isolated neighborhoods, give people without cars access to jobs, and reduce greenhouse gas pollution.
In states like Illinois, California, and New York, Green New Deal-style programs are channeling major resources toward climate-safe energy. Illinois has set goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and a schedule for closing facilities that produce and use fossil fuels, and is on track to meet them. California is reducing fossil fuel use by making buildings, transportation, agriculture and other energy users more energy efficient and investing in infrastructure to correct historical injustices, such as polluting facilities concentrated in poor communities. New York creates jobs in a green economy with high labor rights and standards, and provides job training, jobs and career ladders for people who find themselves marginalized in the labor market.
Unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers promote renewable energy expansion programs, build coalitions to support them, train the workers needed to implement them, and monitor the results to ensure they create good union jobs. Teachers’ and nurses’ unions are fighting for—and winning—green schools and hospitals.
Green New Deal from the Bottom Up events aim to make concrete changes in people’s everyday lives, whether it’s closing a polluting coal-fired power plant in an asthmatic community in Massachusetts or providing free rides or free bikes to young people in Washington state.
With Trump and the Republicans ruling the country, we can still establish cities like Boston as part of a Green New Deal that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and protects the poor and minorities from both climate change and environmental racism. As in Chicago, we can still build affordable, climate-protective housing and connect it to affordable, climate-protective transit. As West Virginia has done, we can help workers transition from extracting and burning fossil fuels to jobs that expand renewable energy. And, as in Los Angeles, energy use can be shifted from fossil fuels to renewables, saving money while protecting the climate and the health of poor communities. And, as in Mississippi, public policy could expand the use of climate-protecting solar in ways that would particularly benefit low- and moderate-income customers and public utilities like schools.
A new green deal from below could help bypass an authoritarian national government. To resist and ultimately defeat such forces, we need to create bastions of what Polish activists who overthrew their country’s dictatorship in 1989 have called “public self-defense.” This will involve many methods, including mutual aid, protection of attackers on the ground, combating lies and slander, and many others. Green New Deal initiatives from below can be an important component of this social self-defense.
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We cannot retreat
We now face a second Trump presidency.
There is nothing to lose. We must use our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger to oppose the dangerous policies that Donald Trump is unleashing on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as principled and honest journalists and authors.
Today we are also preparing for the future struggle. It will require a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis and humane resistance. We are faced with the passage of Project 2025, a far-right Supreme Court, political authoritarianism, rising inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis and conflicts abroad. Nation will expose and propose, develop investigative reporting and act together as a community to preserve hope and opportunity. NationThe work will continue — as it has in good times and bad — to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and in-depth reporting, and to expand solidarity in a divided nation.
Armed with 160 years of courageous independent journalism, our mandate remains the same today as it was when the Abolitionists were founded Nation— to defend the principles of democracy and freedom, to serve as a beacon in the darkest days of resistance, and to see and fight for a bright future.
The day is dark, the forces are building tenaciously, but it’s too late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is just the time when artists go to work. No time for despair, no room for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we make language. This is how civilizations heal.”
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Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, Nation
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