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Jessica “Jess” Blane (they/them/she) is the Organizing Director at Climate Justice Alliance and is a bold community organizer, abolitionist, facilitator, orator, and writer. Born and raised in the mighty Midwest, they are a proud alum of Kentucky State University.

Jess’ passion for organizing is carried out as a core organizer for Indy10 Black Lives Matter, Queering Indy, and co-founder the Circle City Community Bail Fund, a recognized formation of the National Bail Fund Network. Their political home is with Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), which provides leadership development, political education in the Black radical tradition, accountability and care, and capacity building for Black organizers. Jess has led local, statewide, and regional initiatives in corporate accountability, policy reform, resource reallocation to support a Guaranteed Basic Income, transformative and restorative processes and justice, and conflict transformation. As CJA’s Organizing Director, Jess enthusiastically leads the Organizing Team in connecting members to resources and strategies that expand, strengthen, and sustain their work. In Jess’ role, they oversee the strategies and implementation of programming, member and member space development, local site fights and campaign support, and building the capacity to prepare members for climate crisis and disaster.

Jess labors to remind people of their past, discern with people their present, and strategize within community their future power.

The post November 2026 LNS Spotlight: Jessica Blane first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

By Joshua Dedmond, LNS Executive Director

Connecting labor rights, environmental justice, and direct action to build a regenerative future for workers and communities.

During NYC Climate Week 2026, the Labor Network for Sustainability (LNS) brought worker power to the center of global climate discussions. From high-impact roundtable convenings to direct actions on Wall Street, LNS helped to advance a bold multi-movement strategy to challenge corporate extraction, deepen labor and environmental justice partnerships, and fight for a truly Just Transition.

Aligning Mass Movements Roundtable

Location & Partners: Hosted at The Tishman Center at The New School alongside The Chisholm Legacy Project, US Climate Action Network (USCAN), Just Transition Alliance (JTA), Taproot Earth, and Flint Rising.

Strategic Focus: Scaling up cross-movement coordination to protect democratic institutions and build a regenerative economy.

Launched in 2024, the Aligning Mass Movements initiative centers labor and environmental justice at the core of our broader movement ecosystem. Participants discussed actionable ways a unified Just Transition framework can resist corporate exploitation, protect democratic space, and build a regenerative economy controlled by workers and frontline communities.

Climate Critical Townhall

LNS leaders joined movement allies at a vibrant town hall hosted by Climate Critical. The panel shared crucial strategies for sustaining movement leadership, organizing effectively across diverse sectors, and safeguarding activists on the frontlines of high-pressure climate campaigns.

Wall Street Direct Action: Mining Accountability in Brazil

Action Leadership: LNS Board Chair Jen Krill, Earthworks and frontline allies.

Demands: Supply chain justice, indigenous rights protection, and strict corporate accountability.

Earthworks quickly convened a protest against Sigma Lithium’s destructive mining practices in Brazil. Organizers highlighted the severe environmental and human costs of unvetted mineral extraction, making it clear that a true clean energy transition cannot replicate extractive capitalism—it must uphold high labor standards and respect frontline and indigenous rights.

Movement for Black Lives: The Black Hive 5th Anniversary

Event Focus: Celebration of 5 years of Black-led climate organizing and global solidarity.

Host: Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) / The Black Hive.

To wrap up NYC Climate Week, LNS stood in solidarity at the 5th anniversary celebration of The Black Hive, the climate and environmental justice arm of M4BL. The all-day showcase featured inspiring art installations, political education sessions, and presentations celebrating Black-led environmental justice victories worldwide.

The post LNS On the Ground: Power, Solidarity & Action at NYC Climate Week 2026 first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Heavy equipment cutting fireline around the Gifford Fire, CA, August 2025. Photo by Los Padres National Forest. Photo credit: Public Domain

A recent opinion piece co-authored by Edgar Franks, LNS board member and political director for the farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, says:

“Someone has to pay for disaster recovery, and for future climate harms. That burden should not fall on workers, families, and overburdened communities. It should fall on the Big Oil corporations that knowingly created this mess and continue to profit from pollution and war.”

Franks points out that more than 70,000 people were evacuated as wildfires engulfed Spokane WA, reducing entire neighborhoods to ash. Hundreds lost their homes. Damage is expected to exceed $1 billion, the most expensive wildfires in Washington’s history. The damage wouldn’t be nearly so destructive without the dry, hot conditions fueled by climate change.

“When fires, floods, and heatwaves strike, the costs fall disproportionately on taxpayers, workers, small businesses, and vulnerable communities. Meanwhile the major fossil fuel corporations most responsible for the emissions warming our planet get off scot-free.

“Workers bear the impacts in ways that don’t often make the headlines. Firefighters, heavy equipment operators, and foresters risk their lives, with long-term health consequences from exposure to carcinogens.

“And as climate disasters strain state and municipal budgets, public sector workers — teachers, transit operators, service workers — face wage suppression, shrinking benefits, and hiring freezes. We are in the era of climate change where unions and communities alike are being forced to absorb the costs of a crisis they didn’t create.”

Next year the state of Washington will be considering climate “superfund” legislation that would require the largest fossil fuel corporations to pay their fair share for climate damages caused by their historical greenhouse gas emissions.

Rebuilding Spokane, retrofitting homes, schools and community centers for clean air and cooling, hardening the grid, and other resilience measures will all require skilled labor. Franks says, “The sooner polluters pay, the sooner local workers can get to work protecting communities.”

Read the full article: https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/workers-and-communities-shouldnt-foot-bill-big-oils-mess

The post LNS Board Member Says: “Make Polluters Pay” for Climate Damage first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

The Labor Network for Sustainability has joined a broad coalition of national organizations including Climate Justice Alliance, GreenLatinos, Indigenous Environmental Network, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and Western Environmental Law Center to oppose a “dangerous deregulatory permitting reform” proposal, disingenuously titled the ‘Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act’, currently being negotiated in Congress.

LNS executive director Joshua Dedmond said,

“People power is worker power — for too long, labor has been pitted by politicians and corporations against the very people protecting the long-term future of our communities and neighborhoods, like those working to ensure we have clean air, safe water, and healthy neighborhoods, as if we are not all united in a commitment to better futures.”

According to the coalition,

“The Bipartisan Affordability and Jobs Act is not about affordability or jobs — it’s about sacrificing our time and energy, our health, our families’ health, and our current and future generations’ ability to live in a stable economy and healthy environment — just to line the pockets of the super-rich and fast-track dangerous, polluting projects we don’t want.

“The package would further limit communities’ ability to protect themselves from harmful projects by completely gutting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Endangered Species Act, among other bedrock environmental laws.”

The coalition also laid out key ways to protecting workers and communities in the permitting process:

“Communities have already shared practical and evidence-based policy solutions for building clean energy while safeguarding our rights, health, environment, and democratic participation, including:

1. Investing in federal agency capacity through funding and training to build expertise on clean energy development and community engagement;
2. Embedding early and meaningful community engagement into permitting processes;
3. Establishing robust environmental and public health analysis that includes cumulative impacts;
4. Addressing transmission barriers acceleration directly rather than weakening environmental review; and
5. Increasing transparency via publicly accessible information on permitting status, project details, environmental and public health impacts.”

The post A Call to Halt “Dangerously Deregulatory Permitting Reform” first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Man with drill screwdriver installs panels at a solar power plant. Photo credit: Andrii, Adobe Stock.

The pioneering Illinois Climate and Equitable Jobs Act put access to climate jobs front and center in its program for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045 and a net-zero-carbon state economy by 2050. That is now creating a pathway into good jobs for individuals and communities that have been marginalized in the Illinois economy.

The Climate Works Pre-Apprenticeship Program, funded by the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, prepares Illinoisians for “careers in the lucrative clean-energy industry.” It prepares participants for jobs in these fields by providing skills training to be successful in registered union apprenticeship programs in clean-energy construction and building trades.

“Whether you are looking for your first job, returning to the workforce, or anywhere in between, this free pre-apprenticeship program will teach you the skills you need to enter a new industry while providing you with a training stipend.

“HIRE360’s program provides support every step of the way so that you can successfully begin a new career in the clean-energy trades. This includes case management to help you navigate the process and overcome barriers, test prep based on actual apprenticeship tests, career resources to help you choose a trade, and networking opportunities and resources to help you start a new career.”

For more information: https://hire360partners.org/climateworks/?source=Career+Pathways

The post In Illinois, Climate Protection Means a Pathway to Union Jobs first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

Part of AWS’s us-west-2 availability zone, showing three datacenters with a fourth under construction. Photo credit: Tedder, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In a recent article on “Construction’s Data Center Gamble,” Mark Erlich, retired head of the New England Carpenters Union, cautioned that for construction unions, megaprojects like hyperscale datacenters “hold as much risk as opportunity.” Such megaprojects draw unionized workers away from smaller-scale, more conventional projects, opening the door for nonunion contractors.

Erlich points out that “All projects, even megaprojects, eventually come to an end, and the rising level of opposition to these projects may hasten quicker-than-anticipated endings.”

“Rather than seeing the data center boom as a panacea for the ills that have troubled the industry, buildings trades unions need to continue to compete aggressively for the standard sorts of projects that make up the bread-and-butter of construction work, while also seeking to grow their ranks and regain market share from non-union contractors.”

There’s no way to know the future of the hyperscale datacenter boom, but there are straws in the wind that are putting it into question. According to data published in the Financial Times at least 47 major data center projects have been delayed, withdrawn, or blocked so far this year. More than 1,000 communities across the United States now have restrictions on artificial intelligence infrastructure.

The post Betting on the Datacenter Boom? first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

This summer was the hottest on record in the US. Yet worker heat standards proposed by the Biden administration are stalled, few states have more than token standards, and some state legislatures have even forbidden their towns and counties from passing their own heat protections.

An unusual strategy for worker heat protection comes from the “Fair Food Program” of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which represents thousands of workers in the tomato growing region in south-west Florida. Through years of boycotts, hunger strikes, and protests the Coalition pressured food retailers with brand-name reputations to agree to a code of conduct and pay a small premium to buy exclusively from farms that comply. The code now covers 14 major food retailers, including Walmart, McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe’s.

The Fair Food Program code of conduct, which covers tens of thousands of workers, requires participating growers to provide shade, cool drinking water, paid rest breaks, heat illness training for workers and supervisors, and the ability for workers to seek medical attention without fear of retaliation. These are many of the same life-saving heat protection requirements that federal and state governments have refused to enact. This summer, the Fair Food Program added another requirement: access to electrolytes on participating farms year-round.

Other workers around the country, such as members of the immigrant-led WeCount in South Florida, dairy farm workers in Vermont, and construction workers in Minnesota, are now developing codes of conduct with heat protections and “market-based enforcement” like the Fair Food Program.

Source: US workers facing deadly heat borrow from tomato pickers to win key protections | Extreme heat | The Guardian

The post Beating the Heat first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

According to the U.N.’s just-released annual “Emissions Gap Report,” the Group of 20 industrialized nations have reduced climate-destroying emission in 2025, “with the United States of America being the major exception.” The report said that “recent policy changes” in America will lead to 0.9 gigatons of additional emissions by 2030, equivalent to the yearly total of Japan. The U.S. was tied with Russia as the G20 countries with the most per capita emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warning gases. The report warns that the planet is on track for upwards of 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.8 degrees Celsius) of warming this century, which would cause catastrophic impacts, such as massive sea level rise and the mass extinction of plants and animals.

Source: Emissions Gap Report Identifies U.S. as Outlier Among G20 Nations – The New York Times

Another new report, the 2026 “State of the Climate Report,” found that global sea level, global ocean heat content, worldwide glacier thickness, the mass of the Greenland ice sheet, and the atmospheric concentration of each of the three most common greenhouse gases are at record extremes. The report notes that in May of this year, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide breached 428 parts per million, which is about 50% higher than pre-industrial levels of the gas.

Researchers tracked 16 “planetary vital signs” in their analysis. Click image for larger version. Credit: Ripple et al. 2026, doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biag125

The rate of global warming is accelerating, according to the report, and has roughly doubled from about 0.19°C (0.34°F) per decade from 1970-2010 to about 0.36°C (0.65°F) per decade from 2010 to present day.

The report’s authors warn that accelerating warming trends raise the risk of parts of Earth’s climate system breaching so-called tipping points, or marks at which the affected processes are so destabilized that they cannot return to pre-climate change conditions.

Source: 2026 State of the Climate

A pair of studies in the journal Nature Health find that severe heat killed more than 50,000 people in European cities and towns this summer. That is three times as many people as would have died had humankind not warmed the planet by burning oil, gas and coal, the researchers said. Their estimates suggest that this summer’s intense heat was Europe’s deadliest by far this century. Clair Barnes, lead author of both studies, said “That mortality has been pushed substantially higher by the human-caused warming, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels.”

Source: Heat Waves Killed an Estimated 50,000 in European Cities, a Likely Record – The New York Times

The post In Case You Haven’t Heard… first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

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This commentary presents an overview of the elements that are necessary for a Green New Deal 2.0 in the era of the Polycrisis.

The Green New Deal 2.0, like earlier Green New Deals, is a project to abolish the extraction and burning of fossil fuels while rapidly expanding equality, justice, and wellbeing. To do that it will have to learn from the earlier Green New Deals but also develop far beyond them. It will be aided in doing so by the radical reduction in the cost of fossil free energy and the ways in which energy is used – the Greentech Revolution. But the Green New Deal 2.0 will also have to function within – and help transform – the period of global disorder that has come to be known as the Polycrisis.

To succeed, the Green New Deal 2.0 will need to be multi-level: local, state, regional, national, and global. From the start it needs to be global in its perspective and to transcend national borders in many of its actions. But it will initially have to be built from the bottom up, community by community, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Eventually it will need to control and wield the power of national governments.

The Green New Deal 2.0 won’t happen all at once; it will have to develop over time. In the U.S. the Green New Deal 2.0 may start with an Emergency Green New Deal addressing the catastrophe now being experienced by the American people and its impending intensification. This catastrophe includes the crises of food, housing, energy, health, public safety, climate, inequality, democracy, and the rule of law – a veritable American Polycrisis. In some ways it resembles the “Yeltsin Era” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union when systems from employment to food to healthcare to housing to the rule of law broke down; male life expectancy at birth fell by six years just between 1990 and 1994.

There is little likelihood of immediate federal solutions to this catastrophe – indeed, those currently in control of the federal government are taking extreme measures to exacerbate it. Addressing it requires people organizing themselves from below to implement an Emergency Green New Deal that will put people to work doing the things are that are necessary to ensure survival and wellbeing in the face of the American Polycrisis.

Achieving the goals of the Green New Deal 2.0 – abolishing fossil fuel extraction and burning while rapidly reducing inequality, injustice, and deprivation – will require simultaneous action at many levels from local communities to global institutions. It will constitute an era of social reconstruction.

Realizing the objectives of the Green New Deal 2.0 –while a gigantic leap forward for humanity – will not in itself be sufficient to put human life on a secure basis that makes possible a good life for all. The Green New Deal 2.0 must make part of its project laying the groundwork for what we might dub the Green New Deal 3.0.

Elements of the Green New Deal 2.0

Photo taken at the 2017 DC Climate March on April 29, 2017. #RESIST. Credit: Mark Dixon from Pittsburgh, PA, Wikipedia Commons, CC By 2.0

Here are some of the ways in which the Green New Deal 2.0 can incorporate but go far beyond previous Green New Deals:

The Greentech Revolution Protecting the climate by replacing fossil fuels with fossil free energy was the central pillar of the original U.S. Green New Deal. Since then, climate catastrophe has truly arrived. But the global Greentech Revolution has created a new basis for moving to fossil-free communities, countries, and world. The Green New Deal 2.0 will accelerate the timetable for the transition to climate safety, while utilizing it as the pivot for other transformations.

Green Jobs The original U.S. Green New Deal resolution noted a “4-decade trend of wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and antilabor policies.” It proposed to use climate mobilization as a vehicle to transform the world of work through high-quality union jobs, worker rights, labor standards, and a “job guarantee” that would ensure a job for every worker who wants one doing the work that is necessary to protect the climate and create a more just society. Since then, inequality has exploded and artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to eliminate millions of jobs and turn millions of others into excruciating daily oppression. The Green New Deal 2.0 will expand the jobs programs proposed by the Green New Deal, ensure that there are good jobs for those affected by AI, and empower workers to organize and act collectively on the job.

Affordability Rising prices for the necessities of life are a crucial concern for working people today. The Green New Deal 2.0 will address this from the start by replacing fossil fuels with far cheaper fossil-free energy, reducing the price of everything that uses energy – that is to say, everything. It will also make massive investment in energy-conserving housing, food production, and other necessities of life that will both protect the climate and reduce the cost of living. It will tax the rich to reduce inequality and provide resources for the 99%.

Human Needs The Green New Deal specifically addressed the unmet needs for housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities of life as part of the transition to a climate-safe society. Recent bills in Congress have proposed Green New Deals for housing and education. The Trump administration has devastated all aspects of our already inadequate social provision and is taking aim at what’s left. The Green New Deal 2.0 will establish new systems of social provision that empower local communities while providing the resources necessary to meet individual and social needs.

Justice and Equity The original Green New Deal resolution proposed to use its programs to “promote justice and equity by preventing current and repairing historic oppression” of “indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” Today the further degradation of all these groups is being actively promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters in all spheres of life. The Green New Deal 2.0 will use resources, policies, democratic processes, and law to reverse both historic and new forms of injustice and inequality.     

Democratization The original U.S. Green New Deal was defeated in large part by the inordinate wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry and its power base within both Republican and Democratic parties. Since then, the Trump administration and the forces of plutocracy have further degraded our democracy and empowered the billionaire class. The initial U.S. Green New Deal resolution called for “ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal 2.0 will rebuild democracy from the bottom up. That includes establishing democratic institutions at the grassroots and establishing genuine political equality for all people. It will also extend democracy within workplaces and the economy. Donald Trump has greatly expanded the role of government in the economy for the worst of purposes, to enrich kleptocrats and war contractors. The Green New Deal 2.0 will utilize that expansion of powers to provide planning and investment to serve the common good.

Constraining Corporations and Technologies The original New Deal of the Great Depression aimed to control the anti-social behavior of “malefactors of great wealth.” The startling growth of hyperscale data centers controlled by a handful of tech billionaires has forced new attention to the need to constrain corporations and their technology. To realize its objectives, the Green New Deal 2.0 will have to go far beyond previous green new deals in halting the anti-social behavior of today’s malefactors of great wealth, the corporations they control, and the destructive technologies they are seeking to impose. It will need to implement the “precautionary principle” that forbids introduction of new technologies until they are proven safe. More broadly, it will need to make the actions of private economic entities accountable to the public and those they affect.

Global Cooperation Neither the climate nor the economy can be fixed at a purely local or national level. The growing chaos of the global Polycrisis with its breakdown of international cooperation has led to a collapse of climate protection, proliferating warfare, economic chaos, and an inability of any nation to provide security and wellbeing for its people. The Green New Deal 2.0 will treat a worldwide Green New Deal as a common project of the world’s people and will make cooperation among movements and nations a primary part of its local and national programs. It will promote mutually managed international trade in the interest of protecting the climate and the world’s people rather than either economic nationalism or unconstrained globalization.

Laying the Groundwork for the Green New Deal 3.0

The Green New Deal 2.0 will not solve all the world’s problems; that will require more fundamental forms of change, including a changed relationship between humans and nature and new ways of guiding human society as a whole. Part of its objective, therefore, must be to lay the groundwork for further change – the Green New Deal 3.0. While the parameters of that change can be seen only hazily from the vantage point of today, we can aim to ensure that the Green New Deal 2.0 opens rather than closes the way to a peaceful, just, and climate safe world order.

The elements of the Green New Deal 2.0 will rapidly improve the lives of workers, communities, and ordinary Americans. The Greentech Revolution will not only retard climate devastation, it will reduce pollution and reverse soaring energy costs. Putting millions of people to work addressing human and environmental needs will not only provide quality employment but rapidly expand provision of food, housing, medical care, public safety, and other necessities of life. Rebuilding democracy from the bottom up will offer protection against the aggressions of authoritarian government and promote our ability to control our common life.

By itself the Green New Deal 2.0 won’t quell the global Polycrisis. But working with other forces it can begin to constrain Polycrisis dynamics while also starting to transcend them. The rapid reduction in burning fossil fuels and the transition to fossil free energy can slow and eventually reverse the destruction of the earth’s climate. The reduction in inequity and injustice, the meeting of social needs, the provision of full employment, and the constraining of corporate power all address the inequality promoted by rightwing policies and the Polycrisis. The drive for international cooperation can help begin to bring warmaking, war crimes, nihilistic geopolitics, and global plunder under control. Cooperation of diverse forces can begin to bring together “patchworks” of order and justice that can constrain the Polycrisis and develop toward an alternative world order.

The Green New Deal project has been promoted by a wide array of social forces. It has brought together people operating inside political systems with social movements organizing outside of them. It has used both the institutions of representative democracy and the direct-action power of the people to implement its objectives. The Green New Deal 2.0 will draw on comparable sources of power – but on a more continuous and more extensive scale.

(The next commentaries in this series will delineate the American Polycrisis and the Emergency Green New Deal.)  

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The post What Is the Green New Deal 2.0? first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

The post Transit Labor Roundtable first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.

By Jeremy Brecher,
Senior Strategic Advisor, LNS Co-Founder

Listen to the audio version >>

This is the first of a new series on the Green New Deal 2.0.

Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General, United Nations, New York addresses the audience during the session ‘Time Is Running Out for Water’ at the Annual Meeting 2008 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 24, 2008. Photo credit: Remy Steinegger, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

In 2008, in the depths of the Great Recession, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for “investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs and spurs green growth.” He said what the world needs, in short, is a “Green New Deal.”

The project of a Green New Deal rapidly picked up momentum around the world. Green New Deals became official policy in many countries, endorsed by the UN, the international trade union movement, and even by the IMF. China, India, and the European Union began “implementing some of the policies envisioned by the Green New Deal.” But within a couple of years a global counterattack demanding austerity stymied much of the drive for massive investment to implement climate protection and economic justice. The Green New Deal appeared dead.

The Green New Deal was reborn a decade later when the youth Sunrise climate movement in the U.S. held a sit-in in the office of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi demanding she support a resolution for a Green New Deal proposed by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Drawing on the proposals a decade earlier for a Global Green New Deal, the resolution called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” The Green New Deal amassed support among congressional representatives, progressive organizations, and young people across the country. A poll found that more than 80% of registered voters “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the general concepts behind a Green New Deal. A poll five years later found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.”

Notwithstanding its popularity with the public the Green New Deal met implacable opposition from the fossil fuel industry and hostile forces in both the Democratic and Republic parties. Upon his election as president, Donald Trump declared the Green New Deal dead and proceeded to devastate both climate protection and social justice.

Nonetheless, even in the Trump era the Green New Deal has continued as a force in American life – from below. It has continued to be implemented through little-noticed initiatives by community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other nonfederal actors pursuing the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. I have described it as the “Green New Deal from Below.”

The Green New Deal has proved perennial because it addresses the basic problems faced by our people and planet. It is a project that in all its varied manifestations takes the necessity for climate protection as the basis for a broad program for social reconstruction — a visionary program designed to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. It can be the basis for what many have called a “just transition” to a climate-safe world.

The Green New Deal 2.0 and the Polycrisis

Environmental activists protesting for change – A group of activists gather in an urban setting, holding signs that call for action against climate change. Their placards bear powerful messages. Photo credit: Lomb, Adobe Stock

The Green New Deal project is more necessary than ever. But many things have changed since the earlier Green New Deals. We need to redefine the Green New Deal for today, tomorrow, and the long-range future. Let’s call it the Green New Deal 2.0.

The Green New Deal 2.0 will not be defined by one or another thinker or leader, but by a broad social process of dialogue and experiment. This series is offered as a contribution to that social process.

In earlier Green New Deals, the elimination of fossil fuel extraction and burning was a costly though necessary duty. Today, “Greentech” — technology that reduces or repairs harm to the environment – is transforming the economics of energy and therefore of the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal 2.0 will be potentiated by a Greentech revolution that makes fossil free energy cheaper and more competitive than fossil fuel energy.

The emergence of the first Green New Deal coincided with the end of a long period of economic globalization combined with the geopolitical hegemony of the United States. That has been followed by what is often referred to as the “Polycrisis,” a period of global disorder that continues to intensify day by day. The Green New Deal 2.0 will have to survive and develop under the conditions created by the Polycrisis. And to succeed it will need — working with other forces — to quell the Polycrisis and establish a viable world order.

Here are some of the key dynamics of the Polycrisis that a Green New Deal 2.0 will have to contend with:

• Climate devastation: The extraction and burning of fossil fuels has continued to grow, leading to a rapid increase in fires, floods, storms, heatwaves, and other devastating manifestations of global warming.
• Inequality: The world’s 12 richest billionaires now have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, or more than four billion people; meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.
• Democracy Deficit: Countries around the world face autocratic, plutocratic, and kleptocratic rule; repression of political opposition; degradation of electoral procedures; and monopolization of communications media.
• Rise of Fascist and Para-Fascist Movements: Parties and movements with fascist characteristics, such as authoritarianism, racism, hostility towards migrants, abuse of women, suppression of dissent, expanded policing powers, celebration of violence, and might-makes-right ideologies control many countries, exercise de-facto veto powers in many others, and impose terror and brutality on many peoples.
• Fragmented Globalization: While globalization as a regulated system has largely broken down, international trade has continued to grow, but it is increasingly shaped by geopolitical economic warfare focused on the struggle to control global economic networks, such as data flows, platform rules, AI systems, and the critical minerals and energy infrastructures that power them.
• Unleashed Warfare: There are at least 65 active conflicts across 35 countries, the highest number recorded since World War II – with a doubling of international conflicts from four to eight since 2024. The objectives of military power have expanded from defense and domination to outright plunder; as the International Crisis Group put it, Trump’s “lawlessness, revisionism and cavalier use of force” risk “normalizing the idea that war is an OK way for powerful states to get what they want.” According to an analysis of “Systemic Risk And Escalation Dynamics In Global Politics,”

“The 2026–2027 period marks a critical phase in the international system, best described as a systemic crisis of governability. Across multiple regions, crises—both active and latent—are increasingly interconnected, creating conditions in which local tensions can quickly escalate into broader instability. . . and trigger escalation beyond political control.”

• Vicious Circles of Conflict: Conflicts aggravated by tit-for-tat escalation are creating dangers that are in nobody’s interest and that nobody can control. The war between Ukraine and Russia, with their European, Chinese, and other backers and their American manipulator seeking opportunities for plunder provides a prime example: the war has produced growing levels of devastating bombing of civilian areas on both sides; cycles of drone war escalation; and threats of nuclear escalation.

  Address by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the Parliament of Lithuania. Photo credit: The Presidential Office of Ukraine, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

• Breakdown of International Cooperation: International cooperation for peacekeeping, arms limitation, climate protection, economic cooperation, water use, fighting pandemics and other public health threats, and action to address threats from new technologies, such as nanotechnology, drones, and Artificial Intelligence, have atrophied or worse. Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. entirely from 66 international organizations responsible for addressing such global needs.
• Rising and Resisting Powers: The Polycrisis is marked by the rivalry between China and the U.S. –an example of what is sometimes known as the “Thucydides trap” of conflict between rising and dominant powers.
• War Crime Wave: Israel, backed by the U.S., has conducted what the International Court of Justice has found may constitute genocide in violation of international law. Both Russia and Ukraine are conducting massive attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure that are clearly crimes against humanity. The US attack on Iran is nothing but a war of aggression – itself a war crime. International law, often flouted in practice, is now being openly scorned in principle. Donald Trump said in a recent interview with The New York  Times, “I don’t need international law.” His aide Steven Miller explicitly spelled out the doctrine of might makes right: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
• Geopolitics Trumps All: The wellbeing of people, democratic governance, and even the survival of humanity have all been made subservient to the pursuit of superpower domination. This reality was recognized in Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s widely publicized Davos proclamation of “a rupture in the world order” where “geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no constraints. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.” Polycrisis geopolitics is now shifting, to borrow a term from Richard Falk, toward “nihilistic geopolitics” oblivious to meaning, morality, or knowledge. Rational, realistic pursuit of national self-interest is increasingly passing over into bullying and plunder, with little regard to their actual consequences.
• Incoherence: The Polycrisis is complex, contradictory, and chaotic. Apparent trends and tendencies conflict. Policymaking is increasingly erratic, incoherent, and self-contradictory, with results far different from those intended.
• Unpredictability: The world order has become even more unpredictable. As Margaret MacMillan put it in the New York Times, “We are living in a time of what’s been called radical uncertainty. We are in a transition in which the previous system is unraveling but we don’t yet know what comes next.”
• Decline of Social Learning: World actors increasingly plunge into self-destructive actions without recognition that past experience has proven their futility. Aggressive use of tariffs in the past has regularly led to trade wars and mutual impoverishment, yet it is burgeoning. Rearmament and other preparation for war predictably leads not only to mutual impoverishment, but to increased likelihood of military conflagration, yet it continues to escalate. Maniacal investment in bubbles like AI have repeatedly led to devastating crashes, yet the mania continues without either public or private restraint.
• The folly factor: As the Polycrisis deepens, the gap between rational self-interest and foolishness grows wider. As Monica Duffy Toft pointed out in the New York Times, the withering of cooperation to address common threats leads to “more flashpoints among nuclear-armed powers, more nuclear proliferation, less cooperation on global threats and a system structurally incapable of mitigating the risks it creates.”

While each of these dynamics is devastating in itself, their interaction makes the Polycrisis appear even more intractable.

Every aspect of a Green New Deal 2.0 will be affected by every aspect of the Polycrisis. Obviously, the Green New Deal 2.0 will not be able to quell the Polycrisis all by itself or all at one blow. But quelling it must be the horizon and provide the perspective from which it works. In particular, the Green New Deal 2.0 must

• Halt fossil fuel burning to halt global warming
• Implement the Greentech revolution to halt fossil fuel burning
• Use the Greentech revolution to reverse deteriorating social conditions for people in the U.S. and around the world
• Establish global cooperation sufficient to achieve these objectives

The next commentary in this series will present an overview of the Green New Deal 2.0. 

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The post The Green New Deal 2.0 vs. the Polycrisis first appeared on Labor Network for Sustainability.