Barack Obama’s US Election Victory Means A Green New Deal To Stop Climate Change

5 November 2008

Barack Obama has won the election and will go on to make history, as the first black President of the USA. The planet will sigh with relief because President Obama has a clear electoral mandate on the biggest issue in the world, stopping dangerous climate change.

Our own ‘change generation’ PM, Kevin Rudd, is now under real pressure to start Australia’s Energy [R]evolution, not just wait for the carbon market to start in 2010.

The mainstream media are starting to sketch a roadmap for Obama, Rudd and other leaders and explaining why the only good economics is ecological.

One example is New Scientist magazine, who just published a compelling special report “How our economy is killing the Earth”. New Scientist shows that economic growth is incompadible with ecological limits. Inventing the new economic paradigm will take a while, but climate change demands immediate cuts in fossil fuel consumption.

This is why Al Gore’s climate organisation We Can Solve It has launched a campaign for the US to quit its addiction to fossil fuels in ten years and it is already setting the agenda.

The inspiring US magazine Mother Jones also has a special report in its current issue, ‘How to rescue the economy and save the planet’.

Even Newsweek magazine is backing calls for “A Green New Deal“, as Simon Roz discussed on this blog two weeks ago.

The original New Deal that US President Franklin D. Roosevelt implemented between 1933 and 1936 was an Obamaresque enterprise. It did not just drive private sector activity and change economic policy settings, it also paid vast numbers of men to work in forestry, farming and conservation.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) used the US Army to run over 4,000 camps where more than 3,000,000 young men from unemployed families were housed, fed, put to work and paid around $30 per month.

When I was in the USA in 1990 I volunteered for the California Conservation Corps, a successor to the original CCC. I worked at the snow line in Yosemite National Park and other wonderful places, alongside lost young Americans who needed some structure in their lives.

This showed me the positive side of America, which Obama roused into an electoral force this year. President Obama can draw on these venerable traditions of conservation and community to rapidly transform the economy.

The world has passed into a new era, from debate to action. Greenpeace and the rest of the climate movement needs to regroup and seize the moment. Once you have celebrated, sign up to Greenpeace or get involved, to help us ensure the planet is the biggest winner in this historic election.