Thank you for asking your members of Congress to support the Green New Deal (GND) resolutions introduced in the U.S. House and Senate.

Could you take the next step, and join others at a meeting at your Congress members’ offices? Please use this map to find and sign up for a meeting in your district. Then download this Fact Sheet and hand it to your Congress member (or their staff person) and other meeting attendees.

The GND twin resolutions were unveiled yesterday. Already, some lawmakers and media outlets are calling the GND  “unrealistic” and “unaffordable,” despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Powerful corporations—especially the fossil fuel, agribusiness, chemical and pharmaceutical industries—want to kill the GND before it can get off the ground.

The only way the GND will fly, is if we build a powerful social movement to lift it up.

There’s another reason I’m asking you to attend a meeting with your member of Congress—to help us get the message out that only by using the power of organic regenerative agriculture and land restoration, can we actually achieve the GND’s ambitious goal of net zero emissions by 2030-2050.

So far criticism of the GND has focused not on whether we need a GND to head off our climate crisis, but whether it’s possible to do what global scientists agree we must do to avoid catastrophe: reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 45-percent within 12 years, and by 100-percent by 2050. Some critics say we can’t do it.

Those critics are right—if all we focus on is reducing emissions.

That’s why it’s critical, especially in this early stage, to get the word out that in addition to reducing emissions, we must draw down and sequester the carbon already in the atmosphere.

For the GND to accomplish its climate goals, it must spur two large-scale transitions: the transition away from fossil fuel use toward renewable energy, and the transition away from industrial agriculture toward organic regenerative practices that draw down and sequester carbon.

For more than two decades, I’ve led OCA’s efforts to pass laws that stop factory farms (and the GMO crops that supply their feed) from polluting our air and water, and igniting a global health and global antibiotic-resistance crisis.

We’ve worked on Farm Bills to divert taxpayer-funded subsidies away from industrial agriculture, and provide more support for farmers whose practices heal soil and produce healthy food.

We’ve lobbied for state laws to ban dangerous pesticides that end up on our food and water.

Not in my lifetime, have I seen a plan that has the potential to do all of this, while at the same time providing better incomes for all workers, reviving local communities and economies, and pulling us back from the brink of a climate disaster.

I so appreciate your support so far for this transformational resolution. Please consider taking the next step, by joining a meeting in your Congressional district. And don’t forget to distribute this Fact Sheet to everyone there.

Thank you!

 

 

Ronnie Cummins

International Director