The Green New Deal is the battle of our age

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the ‘Green New Deal’ should be the rallying cry for global health & planetary health communities, at least if you haven’t given up on ‘Global Health’ as a force for the better in this world.

The Green New Deal is an agenda fit for the SDG health & planetary health eras. In fact, it’s probably the only agenda fit for our times in which humanity, as Owen Jones put it today in a Guardian op-ed, faces an existential risk, with the risk of overall systemic collapse fast becoming a mainstream topic in scientific journals & publications.

It’s an agenda that connects the dots, as Ann Pettifor already stressed, earlier this week.

“…The Green New Deal demands major structural (governmental and inter-governmental) changes (not just behavioural change) in our approach to the ecosystem. In addition, and as in the 1930s, such change to be driven by radical structural transformation of the finance sector, and the economy. It was developed on the understanding that finance, the economy and the ecosystem are all tightly bound together. Protecting and restoring the ecosystem to balance cannot be tackled effectively without transformation of the other sectors. Financing the transformation of the economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels cannot be achieved without a transformation of the finance sector.”

Owen Jones again: “The magic of the Green New Deal is it argues that confronting the environmental crises cannot be separated from social and economic justice: its other proposals include guaranteeing every American a job with decent wages and conditions, as well as high-quality healthcare, affordable housing and economic security.”   The same is true, at a global level.

It’ll be the Green New Deal, in the coming years and decades, or chaos and systemic collapse. That other ‘systemic agenda for the SDG era’, i.e. “going from billions to trillions’, with plutocrats, Big Finance and the global corporate sector still firmly in control, isn’t going very well, last time I checked. One of the main protagonists even left the Titanic.

Before you go away, feeling this is all too utopian, it’s good to keep in mind Rutger Bregman’s assesmment of our changing times last week, an accurate perception in my opinion, at least in the North:

“I’m 30 years old. I’ve been writing for seven or eight years now. And never before have I had such a strong feeling that the zeitgeist is really shifting and now you can talk about things that were simply not possible just a couple of years ago. It seems like the window of what is politically possible is just opening up, or that what they call the Overton window is shifting. Ideas, according to theory that originated with political scientist Joseph Overton, are seen as somehow acceptable to discuss at a certain creative time, and the real political challenge is to move the window….”

So yes, the replenishment of the Global Fund and other global health Funds is (very) important, given the number of lives at stake, but somehow, ‘Replenishments’ sound so MDG- (and dare I say, neoliberal era-like).  We live in different times now, and it’s time Global Health adjusts. I have a hunch that if we all, instead, rallied behind the Green New Deal, nationally and globally, Replenishments of Global Public Goods would almost overnight also become so much easier. And many more lives would be saved as a result.

I leave you with a nice quote. As a middle-aged person put it on Twitter, earlier this week: “When I grow up, I want to be like Greta Thunberg.”    I’m sure you know the feeling. We need to find back our inner Thunberg. We all had it, when we were young kids.

It’s time to bring her back.