AOC Offers a Visual Vision of Making the Green New Deal Happen

Here's a really cool animated video created by The Intercept, narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, discussing the vision of the Green New Deal, climate change and the history of the use of fossil fuels. AOC talks about finally discussing a solution on the same scale as the problem. She says, "We can be whatever we have the courage to see."

As I view the video, it has 2486 views. I'll be amazed if it doesn't pass half a million quickly.

Naomi Klein introduces the video, saying:

The question was: How do we tell the story of something that hasn't happened yet?

We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That's the message we've been hearing from the "serious" center for four months straight: that it's too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it, and that we are destined to just watch walruses fall to their deaths on Netflix until it's too late.

This skepticism is understandable. The idea that societies could collectively decide to embrace rapid foundational changes to transportation, housing, energy, agriculture, forestry, and more precisely what is needed to avert climate breakdown is not something for which most of us have any living reference. We have grown up bombarded with the message that there is no alternative to the crappy system that is destabilizing the planet and hoarding vast wealth at the top. From most economists, we hear that we are fundamentally selfish, gratification-seeking units. From historians, we learn that social change has always been the work of singular great men.

Science fiction hasn't been much help either. Almost every vision of the future that we get from best-selling novels and big-budget Hollywood films takes some kind of ecological and social apocalypse for granted. It's almost as if we have collectively stopped believing that the future is going to happen, let alone that it could be better, in many ways, than the present.

Read Klein's full extraordinary article here.