Bonus: Game Changers, Part 4

save our global resources. In this fourth and final episode, A Green New Deal, because today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America. That's what this agenda is all about, because climate change, climate change in our environmental challenges are one of the biggest existential threats to our way of life, and in order for us to combat that threat, we must be as

ambitious and innovative in our solution as possible. Since it was announced in February, the Green New Deal has sparked intense debate, championed by New York Representative Alexandria Occasio Cortez, who you just heard. It contains a plethora of ambitious ideas. The Green New Deal maps out a plan for the US to step away from its dependence on fossil fuels, but also to create high paying jobs in the process. Many have praised it. Here is Canadian author Naomi klein Well.

I think it is the first time that we have politicians putting a response to the climate crisis on the table that is on the scale of the actual crisis. But many have vocally opposed it, like Utah Senator Mike Lee. Unlike some of my colleagues, I'm not immediately afraid of what carbon emissions on address might due to our environment

in the near term future or our civilization. Rather, after reading the Green New Deal, I'm mostly afraid of not being able to get through this speech with a straight face. There's no doubt the Green New Deal has accomplished one thing, generating attention to the global climate crisis. But much of the plan that has attracted so much attention and political jockeying was actually drafted by a political newcomer. My name

is Rihanna Gunnright. I'm the director of Climate policy at the Roosevelt Institute UH and I helped develop the Green New Deal. Rihanna only had three years of political experience when she accepted the task of writing the Green New Deal. Hailing from Chicago, Illinois, she originally cut her teeth as a policy analyst for the Detroit Health Department, and Detroit is a hotbed for environment to injustice. When I was working there, there was an incinerator in the middle of

the city right and around that area. Asthma rates were like three times the state average. Residents were complaining that they couldn't go outside because it smells so bad, etcetera. It just became clear that these things had health effects. In the aftermath of the Flint water crisis, Health Department Commissioner Abduel el Sayed decided to run for governor. Rihanna joined his campaign. L say Ed's race was unsuccessful and Rihanna moved on applying for law school. But she needed

something to do for the rest of the year. So I emailed Representive Okazy, the Cortes's campaign manager, because she had endorsed a duel, and I just reached out to say, hey, uh, do you all need any support on policy? Do you think you will want support in Congress? You know, just doing what I have to do to try to get

a job, and they email me back consent. So we are developing a Green New Deal, which is a World War two style mobilization on climate to restructure the US economy and reduce emissions, uh and also create I think at the time it was zero waste, zero poverty, zero racial wealth gap. And so they were like, oh, so you can write this whole thing in like four months, right, And I was like, no, but maybe if you give me to research assistants which can draw uh. And so

that's what we did. Zero waste, zero poverty, zero racial wealth gap. Therein lies the origin of much of the praise and ridicule of the Green New Deal. The fourteen page document covers a lot of ground and goes beyond just counting parts per million. It not only promises to get carbon emissions to zero, but to add thousands of green new jobs and makes the argument that climate issues like fossil fuel emissions are social justice issues. This is why Rihanna was the perfect pick to write the text

for her. Pollution and social issues go hand in hand. I've always been interested in working on systems, so I care a lot about specific issues, but ultimately what I'm interested in is how do you change conditions? Right, Because

conditions actually shape what happens. Because if you think about it, for most people, when we talk about climate change, and I feel like this was one of the biggest innovations if there was one for a Green New Deal, is that most times people were talking about super scientific stuff carbon footprints, parts familiar, how much carbon is in the atmosphere. Right. But the fact is that most people experience climate change is economic effects and health effects. They experienced it as

Hurricane Katrina, right. They experienced it as the wildfires in Paradise. They experienced it as this heat wave where they don't have money to afford air conditioning. For Rihanna, it all comes down to racial inequality. People of color are more likely to live near power plants and other polluting factories, and they suffer higher levels of asthma and greater risk of early death from air pollution. For Rihanna, this hits

close to home. So when I was growing up, I had asthma, and I had asthma to the point that by the time I think I was in like third or fourth grade, I was out for like a week. Every spring I would get sick. I would have to be put on like a breathing machine, one of those nebulizers. Uh, and I would be out of out of school. We know today that Rihanna's asthma, like many other children should grew up with, was most likely linked to the air

pollution in her neighborhood. This had enormous consequences. Now, my mom was a single mother who had her own nonprofit right, so every year she had to take off time to take care of me. There was always a limit on how much time she could take off because she didn't have childcare. My mom, in a lot of ways, was sort of protected from the worst of our sort of economic system. She had a college degree, right, she ran her own business. She could control her own time off.

But the situation for a lot of other kids was that their parents worked hourly jobs. Right, So every time your child is out of school, not only are you hurting their educational outcomes, you have mothers trying to figure out what to do about childcare right, how to take care of their babies. They're getting docked at work. The fate of the Green New Deal is up in the air, but Rihanna is busy putting thought into action via the Green New Deal Network. A coalition of movements and activists,

and there's no shortage of issues to tackle. A stark example of the domino effect pollution can bring is the story of Lucy Valez. I thought, you know, my cough was just a cough. All these uh congestion issues in colds were just things that normally, you know, most people experience. Like Rihanna, Lucy suffered from persistent medical issues that could be traced back to pollution. Some of Lucy's health problems were likely linked to the Peace Bridge connecting Buffalo to Canada,

where cars released emissions into the surrounding neighborhoods. In the year I getta house and I thought that that house was was good, in good condition. And about the year two thousand and sixteen, I started to get a lot worse and the I was hospitalized with like a long and brown kill infection. And when Lucy returned from the hospital, so I went into a room which happened up in my office at the time, and uh, as I walked in,

there was this black, fuzzy mold. That's when a member of the organization People United for Sustainable Housing or PUSH, knocked on Lucy's door one day by complete chance pushes associated with the Green New Deal network, and they were able to help Lucy fix her house. This is pushes John Washington. It took a while to figure out how to find different funding sources to add up to the amount of money it was required to fix Lucy's home

because it was in pretty bad shape. The clost to my house was dollars, which is really unheard of because that is more than most grants out there. They had to look for a second grant to cover the things that I needed. So Lucy got her home fixed. She got the resources to get her home fixed. But a few months later, if she gets a she gets a thing from Key Banks saying that they're redoing her mortgage.

Right because the value of her home has gone up, they're redoing her mortgage, and now her mortgage payment was doubled. I didn't have the money. I couldn't find the money to pay for you know that kind of that kind of jump. And ultimately we were not able to win that fight. And so she used part of her burial fund to pay her taxes so she could keep her house.

That's exactly the type of systematic domino effect the Green New Deal is trying to prevent summer calling Joe Biden's one point seven trillion dollar Green Initiative plan his spin on the Green New Deal. But Rihanna still knows she has a long, hard fight ahead of her to achieve her goal, because ultimately changing an entire system means getting

citizens to realize their own power over that system. You ran into a lot of people who would talk about how they felt powerless, and so I think that's just like really important to remember. We all have the ability to emotionally affect another person to make them feel connected, right, and that is powerful. There is always an element of power that you have that no one can take away. This episode of Game Changers was produced by Magnus Henrykson

and presented by Yours Truly Matt Goldman. It was based on reporting by Michael Bihaf. For a visual experience of Game Changers, check out our videos at Bloomberg dot com slash Green. Francesca Levi is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts. Thanks for listening.