Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for Governor in 2018, submitted testimony to today to a legislative hearing on climate policy.
“Climate science indicates that industrial states like New York must build out a 100% decarbonized clean energy economy by 2030 if the world is to preserve a climate that remains safe for human civilization. The climate clock is ticking down. Strong climate legislation must pass this year,” Hawkins said.
How the plan from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a version from presidential candidate Jill Stein match up — and where they don’t
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7, 2019.
The “Green New Deal” isn’t actually that new.
Released last week by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey, the much-ballyhooed plan to combat climate change and create jobs has some broad goals in common with an identically named blueprint that Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein ran on in 2012 and again in 2016.
Stein herself said as much on Twitter on Feb. 7, and said credit was actually due to her party’s Howie Hawkins, who ran for governor of New York on such a platform in 2010.
“This bill encompasses the key concepts of the Green New Deal for New York that the Green Party has been campaigning for since 2010—the science-based climate safety target of 100% clean energy by 2030, the linkage of climate action to economic rights and security for all, and the urgency of doing the plan and draft legislation within one year," said Howie Hawkins, Green Party of New York State.
As 2018 New York gubernatorial candidate and long-standing union activist Green Howie Hawkins has warned, such collaboration can only lead to the Green Party ending up as a “satellite” of the Democrats, like the Working Families Party, which, like Bernie Sanders did at the DNC in 2016, runs populist candidates who end up encouraging supporters to vote for his or her Democrat counterpart, in the end.
The original “Green NewDeal” was the centerpieceof Jill Stein’s 2012 and 2016Green Party presidential campaigns, and of GP foundingmemberHowie Hawkins’ 2010,2014, and 2018 New York Stategubernatorial campaigns—unpublicized by mainstreammedia and unacknowledged byOcasio-Cortez.
Howie Hawkins has been an organizer for peace, justice, labor, the environment, and independent politics since 1967 when he got active in "The Movement" as a teenager in the San Francisco Bay Area. A former Marine, he helped organize opposition to the Vietnam War. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was a leader in the anti-apartheid divestment movement to end US corporate investment in the system of racist labor exploitation in South Africa. He was a co-founder of the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in 1976 and the Green Party in the US in 1984.
I campaigned for governor with the slogan of “Demand More!” because Gov. Cuomo has governed as a social liberal but as an economic conservative. Although he touts the agenda he outlined in his January 15 State of the State and Budget presentation as “progressive,” New York progressives should not be satisfied. It is still a conservative economic program. Progressives must demand more.
Meanwhile Green Party Gubernatorial Candidate Howie Hawkins says the reforms don’t go far enough on environmental and economic measures.
“Progressives should not let progress on social issues obscure the economic problems so many New Yorkers face every day,” Hawkins said in a release. “Inflation-adjusted wages have been stagnant for decades. Today more than 2 in 5 New York families suffer through periods without food, health care, housing, and/or utilities. 1 million New Yorkers lack health insurance. More than half of children in our cities are poor and attend segregated, underfunded public schools. Over half of New Yorkers pay a third or more of their income on rent. Gentrification and displacement is driving working class New Yorkers out of their own neighborhoods in the cities, while chronic rural depression in upstate New York is driving family farmers and small-town businesses off the land.”
Some advocates and activists were not satisfied with the details of Cuomo’s Green New Deal. The Green Party former gubernatorial candidate Howie Hawkins said it was “watered down." He backs a 100 percent carbon free economy by 2030.
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