[S]en. Bernie Sanders, at a town hall featuring progressive leaders and climate change activists in Washington this week, stressed that lawmakers must act urgently to combat climate change and to move the economy off fossil fuels.
The panel included Vermont environmentalist and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who, along with other progressive House members, is championing ambitious “Green New Deal” legislation to combat climate change.
The discussion on Monday comes after research released in recent months shows that the pace of climate change is accelerating.
It also comes as Sanders, who made fighting climate change a central plank in his 2016 run for president, is strongly considering a presidential run in 2020.
In the report issued by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in October, the world’s leading climate scientists warn that there is only a limited time to keep a rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial temperature. Every fraction of a degree higher than 1.5C greatly increases the risk of natural and economic disasters, the report says.
To avoid serious economic and environmental consequences, including intensified natural disasters and food shortages, humans need to rapidly curb emissions and move the world’s economies away from fossil fuels, the report says.
According to the report, capping global warming at a 1.5 degrees C increase and limiting serious consequences of climate change would require global carbon dioxide emissions to decline 45 percent from 2010 levels in the next 12 years. Humans would need to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
“I think sometimes people may not quite understand just how far into this saga we already are and how immediate the need for action is,” McKibben said during the town hall Monday. “This isn’t something we can postpone a few more legislative sessions or presidential terms.”
Sanders also underscored the need for urgency in taking action and in limiting U.S. dependence on fossil fuels.
“We are living in a moment in history that has never existed before,” Sanders said. “The best minds in the world are telling us literally that we have 12 years, which is no time at all, to get our acts together.”
At the town hall, Ocasio-Cortez outlined a proposal for a Green New Deal, a plan to both combat climate change and boost economic development by creating and filling thousands of jobs in the renewable energy industry, and other sectors.
Cutting carbon emissions in half by 2030, and completely by 2050 is one of the proposal’s defining goals.
“This is going to be the great society, the moon shot, the civil rights movement of our generation,” Ocasio-Cortez said at Sanders’ town hall. “That is the scale, that is the scale of the ambition that this movement is going to require.”
Sanders said that in the next legislative session he plans to craft legislation to combat climate change.
“I will be working on legislation that addresses the scope of the crisis, creates tens of millions of jobs, and saves American families money — all while holding the fossil fuel companies accountable for the enormous damage they have done to our planet and our climate,” he said in an emailed statement Wednesday evening.
