Read on Twitter
Climate-heads: this is a really good reporting, and I highly recommend reading it. (some thoughts below) https://twitter.com/leee_harris/status/1388131421089316871
The climate/enviro movement, as the story documents, is getting hosed. We have not, to date, built the types of high-pressure multi-racial campaigns that are needed to get funding at the scale needed.
@nychange, along with our allies, has been mobilizing protests and actions to tax the rich fora Green New Deal. But we started too late to get any real traction onthe spending side this year (though I like to think that effort helped to win some taxing of the rich)
There are various efforts to try and get money for climate programs. The @nyrenews effort to pass the Climate & Community Investment Act is the most prominent in policy circles. Hopefully it succeeds this sessions!
Another one is to get Cuomo to add New York into the Transportation and Climate Initiative, which would raise about $1B per year. We think that'd be good (if the NYRenews bill passed, it would subsume that since it's bigger).
There are other proposals too. But what's lacking is a big, aggressive, multi-racial pressure campaign. Such as there has been on housing, tax the rich, and excluded workers. And therefore, we lost again in the past budget, even as other priorities got big increases.
I don't have a good solution to this (and note that foundation funders, as far as I can tell, seem wholly uninterested in funding tax the rich for a green new deal, even though that's an obvious tack). I'm hanging out a shingle here, funders, if any of you read these rants lol!
But really, I think a big problem, as it has always been on environment, is there are a lot of mainstream entities who will praise any little thing a democratic executive throws them as a little reward. That hurts on the PR etc.
Like on other issues where the solution isn't a policy tweak, I believe the only solution is to build a movement and then an effective, aggressive campaign on top of it. That's the only reliable way to win, build power, and sustain it for more wins, imho. end rant
