Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can teach Bill Shorten a thing or two about climate change policy

It is high school students who have helped reinvigorate the climate change debate in Australia and they are preparing to march again this week. The effect they have had is similar to the reaction created by the Green New Deal in the United States in the last month.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Last month newly elected congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brought a new proposal to the Congress: a 14-page vision for a Green New Deal.

More statement than legislative proposal (it was a non-binding resolution), the Green New Deal outlined the total economic transformation required to respond to escalating climate change, then combined that action plan with a values proposition – that the economic and social transition must be just (indeed the resolution began by outlining the combined challenges of climate change and inequality).

The Green New Deal released a rocket into the US climate change debate. Until very recently climate change was not seen as a vote winner. Rather most Democrats saw it as a kind of fringe, green issue that only moved small-liberal middle-class people living in gentrified inner-city pockets of a few “blue” cities. While climate campaigners would shout about how this was wrong, especially after the IPCC’s 2018 dire predictions of rapidly rising temperatures, they struggled to change the conversation.

Read the opinion piece by Amanda Tattersall from The Guardian - “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can teach Bill Shorten a thing or two about climate change policy.”