The Sunrise Movement

With the climate change phenomena occurring all over the planet, we all can agree that something needs to be done about it soon. However, the American government does not seem to heed to the warnings, which is why the citizens have decided to take things into their own hands. The Sunrise Movement is a climate change activist movement that has been quite popular and widespread throughout America with their campaigns, policies, and outreach.

A Quick Introduction

Since 2017, the Sunrise Movement has been working on promoting eco-friendly alternatives to every aspect of human life. They have come up with a deal for the government along with the support of U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They call it the Green New Deal. In their own words -

Quote:

“The Green New Deal is a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030, a guaranteed living-wage job for anyone who needs one, and a just transition for both workers and frontline communities.”

How Do Renewable Energy and Jobs Go Hand-In-Hand?

Well, the answer is simple. To make clean energy, you need equipment such as wind turbines, solar panels, and cars that run on biofuel. Human intervention is required for the manufacturing process, hence creating jobs. Recent reports show that there is an urgent need to cut CO2 emissions in half within the next 12 years to prevent drastic consequences — a fact that the U.S. government seems to ignore and deny. The Sunrise Movement suggests remodeling the federal budget to provide more monetary resources for the mass manufacturing of solar panels, hydroelectric turbines, cleaner batteries, and similar environment-friendly sources of energy. By developing technologies to support these massive operations, not only will the government be aiding in halting, if not reversing, the climate change for the worst but also creating a need for hundreds of thousands of federal jobs, which is also a major requirement in the U.S. today. These federal jobs will also provide job security besides solving the unemployment problem.

New Green Deal Resolutions

The Sunrise Movement has penned down a few resolutions that they have forwarded to the government. These are -

1. Generating electricity completely from environment-friendly sources.

2. Creating a nation-wide ‘smart’ grid that is energy efficient.

3. Converting rural and urban buildings into modern, energy-efficient, cheap to maintain, and safe sites.

4. Reducing, or possibly stopping, carbon emissions from factories and vehicles.

5. Remodeling the federal budget to fund capture and reduction of greenhouse gases.

6. Developing Green technology and increasing the manufacture of Green energy equipment to a scale that makes the U.S.A. an exporter to support and help other nations in combating climate change while helping our economy.

Economy

The plans outlined by the Sunrise Movement seem to be dreamy, but is it economically feasible? It is, they say. The U.S. government can afford it if it can manage to maintain the G.D.P. (Gross Domestic Product, an annual measure of the economy of a country) stably. Even if the G.D.P. goes down, as long as it is solving unemployment problems, these measures would gather national and worldwide appreciation. Moreover, the focus here is on Green energy and lifestyle. Spending now is better than the drastic expenditure that will arise later in managing the damages caused by carbon emissions when climate change becomes irreversible and uncontrollable. They are urging the government to focus on the future of the nation and the world instead of just focusing on their short term goals.

Support

The Green New Deal has gathered support rather quickly from not only American citizens but also local leaders. After the sit-in in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in December 2018, the movement has support from 40 members of the Congress including Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, who are also candidates for the next Presidential election. However, the Democratic Party members do not seem happy with this gain in momentum. They have also occasionally stopped activists from protesting. Evan Weber, the co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, said that if the government does not take these suggested measures, they will take it in their own hands to bring together mayors, leaders, engineers, architects, scientists, and city counselors and gather public support. They want to start the national conversion to Green energy within the next two years.

From the rapid growth of support of the Sunrise Movement, it is evident that Americans are now more aware of the issues that are substantial to the planet and are willing to fight for their beliefs. It is now up to the U.S. government to start considering the weight of these issues to modify their budget and priorities and to look beyond the near future for the greater good.

To know more about them, visit sunrisemovement.org.

If you want to get in touch with your local Sunrise Movement group, check out their Facebook page at facebook.com/sunrisemvmt/.

If you live in South Bend, Indiana, you can remain updated about their local activities through their dedicated Facebook page — facebook.com/SunriseSouthBend.

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Originally published at https://eupterra.com on October 4, 2019.