Fires in Australia and California. Floods in South Asia, West Africa and the Midwest. Droughts in countries around the world. These natural disasters can no longer be considered outliers — they are a preview of what will become the new normal if climate change is not confronted with plans that are both comprehensive and ambitious.
The Democratic presidential primary will begin with the Iowa caucus on Feb. 3. More than two-thirds of likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa selected climate change as an issue that is extremely important to them, according to a recent poll by the Des Moines Register, emphasizing the need for presidential campaigns to outline how they plan to combat the crisis to gain support as they approach the caucus.
As nonprofits, think tanks and grassroots organizations have released assessments of the candidates’ climate proposals, one thing has become quite clear: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, is the best candidate to tackle the climate crisis.
Sanders, an early supporter of the Green New Deal framework, released his own plan to combat climate change in August 2019. Most notably, Sanders’ plan says it will decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2050, declare climate change a national emergency and include $200 billion in aid to poor nations to help them cope with the climate crisis. It also aims to create 20 million new jobs and provide assistance to both the displaced employees of the fossil fuel industry and American farmers.
In the months following the plan’s release, Sanders has received the highest scores of any presidential candidate from Greenpeace, 350 Action and the Sunrise Movement, which are climate-focused organizations, and Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank. The Sunrise Movement also endorsed Sanders with support from 76% of its members.
Eliza Dowd, a student leader for the Sunrise Movement’s Bloomington hub who has been active in Bloomington’s climate strikes, told me she saw Sanders’ consistency on climate change as a major factor in the endorsement.
“Bernie has been saying the same exact thing for his entire political career. He was talking about climate justice when it wasn’t trendy to do that,” Dowd said.
Dowd said she appreciates not only Sanders’ plan but also his campaigning style and values.
“He is the only candidate with an entire movement behind him,” Dowd said. “He very deeply knows that climate justice is housing justice. He knows that climate justice is about racial justice and immigration justice.”
The Sunrise Movement launched in 2017 with the goal of ousting politicians who accept money from the fossil fuel industry and replacing them with supporters of renewable energy. The youth-led organization supports the Green New Deal framework proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and has helped pressure House Democrats to support her climate legislation .
“The Green New Deal is about bringing about the economic resurgence that we need in a way that is for the people and not just the wealthy few. It’s all about putting humaneness into the transition to a sustainable world,” Dowd said.
Sanders’ Green New Deal plan is ambitious and would cost $16.3 trillion over a decade. However, his campaign has outlined a plan to pay for it and also warns that choosing not to act will actually cost the country more in the long run. Combating the climate crisis won’t be easy or cheap, but it is necessary to ensure a safe and inhabitable world for generations to come.
Dowd also emphasized that the existential crisis posed by climate change requires a bold vision. Sanders provides that vision.
“The climate crisis is a life or death issue for so many people,” Dowd said. “The most important thing is having the political and societal imagination to see what it looks like to create the kind of world we want to be living in. What does it look like to create a world that is sustainable and just?”
A sustainable and just world is possible, even though it sometimes seems incredibly far out of reach.
It is time for countries around the world to start treating climate change like the existential threat that it is. The climate crisis requires an economic mobilization within the United States on a scale unseen since World War II, and the only candidate proposing both the climate plan and structural change necessary to bring about that mobilization is Sanders.
Jerrett Alexander (he/him) is a freshman studying international relations and environmental sustainability. He currently sits on the Bloomington Commission on Sustainability.
