7. Only large scale transformation like the GND can stop climate emergency

(Brad, Climate activist/author, , 3-3)

It’s time for America to be ambitious again. Congressional advocates of a Green New Deal are calling for a “national, social, industrial and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal era” in order to decarbonize the US economy by 2030. Taking the climate crisis seriously means getting the United States to net-zero or negative carbon pollution within ten years while working to undo the damage already done. Doing so involves reconstituting not only our electrical grid, but also our transportation system, agricultural system, financial system, built infrastructure, medical system, trade and manufacturing, land use, political system, gender relations, military — our entire economy, our entire relation to each other and to the rest of the world. While all that may seem impossible to those on the fossil fuel industry payroll, it can be done if the United States mobilizes at a scale achieved in our nation’s history during World War II. The Green New Deal resolution calls for the United States to reach “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” “through a ten-year national mobilization.” This target of rapid, total decarbonization is at odds with the goals of Trump’s administration and the projections of carbon polluter giants such as ExxonMobil; and is considerably more ambitious than recent Democratic Party leadership plans, which have been fixed on an 80 percent reduction from 2005 levels by 2050 benchmark since the Step It Up campaign of 2007. Rapid, total decarbonization is also what is needed in this time of climate emergency. The consequences of extracting and combusting hundreds of billions of tons of fossilized carbon in recent decades are with us now. Nation-states are crumbling from a degraded climate, with catastrophic droughts, floods, fires, storms, ocean rise, glacial retreat, and biodiversity collapse putting people in all corners of the globe in biblical peril. If humanity does not end the burning of fossil fuels and reverse deforestation, the possibility that it will share the fate of the vast majority of all species to have existed on this planet — extinction — is unreasonably high. The price tag of insufficient action, as Harvard economist Martin Weitzman’s “dismal theorem” finds, is potentially infinite, “since catastrophes that would cause human extinction remain too plausible to ignore.”