The Uncertain Future of the Green New Deal

Since the first day of President Donald Trump’s second term, three little words keep coming up.

In one of his first executive orders, the president instructed agencies to terminate the so-called “Green New Deal,” which he has described as “ridiculous” and “incredibly wasteful.” The administration’s disdain for the concept is clear, with Trump and press secretary Karoline Leavitt referring to it as “the Green New Scam.”

In reality, there is no Green New Deal law in effect in the United States today, despite previous attempts to pass one in Congress. What Trump actually paused funding for in his executive order was the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, a spending bill passed under former president Joe Biden and the largest investment in clean energy in U.S. history. 

The Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, was heralded as a major win for climate organizers—but most of them don’t think the law lives up to their original vision of a transition to renewable energy that creates good, well-paying jobs. In the face of rollbacks, these activists are questioning whether their calls for a Green New Deal have been effective or have divided voters. After Trump won the popular vote in November, some climate advocates are searching for new ways to talk about the changes they want to see, ones that might resonate more broadly across the political spectrum. 

“This is a live question of debate,” said Dejah Powell, membership director of the Sunrise Movement. Some organizers worry the climate movement has failed to move the public, she said, partly because “[w]e actually are missing a total, compelling vision that touches on the undercurrent of where we are in society.”

If you had to pinpoint the moment when the Green New Deal burst into the public consciousness, it would be shortly after the 2018 midterms, when more than 200 young people with the Sunrise Movement orchestrated a sit-in outside Senator Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill. The newly elected representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined the protesters, who urged Pelosi, the House’s Democratic leader, to pass stringent action on climate change. They came prepared with a draft resolution of what they called the “Green New Deal.” It was a reference to the New Deal of the 1930s, a series of ambitious initiatives and reforms—including the Civilian Conservation Corps, Social Security Act, and Works Progress Administration—that President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched to provide economic relief during the Great Depression.

In February 2019, Ocasio-Cortez, joined by Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, introduced resolutions for a Green New Deal in both the House and the Senate. The plan called for a large-scale mobilization “not seen since World War II” to completely transform the economy, eliminate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and create millions of jobs. At the time, people laughed at the idea, Markey said on a mass organizing call last month hosted by more than 50 climate organizations. The measure was largely symbolic: These were non-binding resolutions, meaning that even if they passed a vote in Congress, they would not become law. Either way, opponents made their disapproval known. The resolution failed in a Senate vote mere months later, and a second attempt in 2021 also went nowhere. 

“But you know what we knew?” Markey said. “That we were building a movement that was going to build the momentum that was going to wind up with the IRA being passed.” Since the original resolution, Democrats have introduced a range of more targeted Green New Deal bills, focused on issues ranging from health to urban infrastructure to public housing to public schools. None of these bills made it out of committee.

Many credit the enthusiasm the Green New Deal generated for pushing Biden to prioritize climate change during his presidency, even if it didn’t result in exactly what they were calling for. The IRA is sometimes talked about as a mini Green New Deal—but there are key differences between the two. While both support reducing emissions, the Green New Deal resolutions in Congress called for a massive mobilization effort to reach net-zero emissions and transition to 100 percent renewable energy in 10 years. The IRA was far less ambitious, seeking only to reduce emissions by 40 percent by 2030.  

There is common ground between the two initiatives: Both framed the energy transition as an opportunity to create new jobs. And both placed a unique focus on these being good-paying, ideally union jobs. But here too, the Green New Deal aimed higher, calling for the creation of millions of these jobs, while the IRA was projected to support around 1 million jobs over a decade. (A recent estimate found that the IRA created just under 350,000 jobs in its first two years.) Rather than envision a full-scale transformation of the economy, the IRA focused more on incentivizing decarbonization through tax credits for clean and renewable energy projects. It also offered subsidies for households to install heat pumps and solar panels and buy electric vehicles. This targeted approach also missed some bigger-picture goals of the Green New Deal, like ensuring clean air, water, and access to healthy food for all. 

Even after the IRA, some lawmakers haven’t given up on a Green New Deal—even if it’s bound to go nowhere under Trump. On the call with climate organizers last month, Representative Delia Ramirez, a Democrat from Illinois, said she plans to reintroduce a version of the Green New Deal focused on public housing. “Now, I’m not naive,” she told attendees. “You and I both know that a bill like this will not pass this Congress.” Ramirez hopes that in four years, assuming Democrats regain control of Congress, those demands will become law. 

Grace Adcox, the senior climate strategist at the progressive think tank Data for Progress, said the Green New Deal is still a powerful motivator for those who are part of the climate movement. In the organization’s most recent survey, from last January, 65 percent of voters expressed support for a Green New Deal that would create jobs, modernize infrastructure, and protect vulnerable communities. “I don’t think that there’s an argument to move away from it altogether,” Adcox said, even though the phrase is less effective for people who have heard it “being thrown around negatively.”

According to Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way, the Green New Deal catchphrase wasn’t designed to build a broad consensus beyond the left. 

“The proposals in the Green New Deal have never matched the values of anywhere close to a majority of Americans,” he said. “Republicans continue to bring it up as a prop to scare voters, because it’s not popular with voters.” Freed argued that some policies organizations embrace as part of the platform, like banning new fossil fuel projects or , repel the voters that Democrats are trying to win back after losing both houses of Congress and the White House last November.

Freed acknowledged that the idea of well-paying jobs and addressing climate change sounds good in the abstract— “who doesn’t like puppies and candy?” he wrote in a recent blog post. But he said that a Green New Deal becomes less popular when voters learn about the cost. For years, Fox News has harped on the price tag of the Green New Deal, pointing to an analysis that it would cost upwards of $90 trillion. (There’s been plenty of debate over that number.) Of course, the price of inaction is also high. The federal government has calculated that failing to address climate change could cost it $2 trillion a year by 2100 and shrink U.S. gross domestic product by as much as 10 percent.

Ahead of the 2024 election, the economy ranked highest among issues concerning voters, according to Gallup polling. Climate change, meanwhile, was near the bottom of the list of 22 issues. This difference in priorities is something the climate movement is still learning to incorporate into its talking points. 

“Increasingly, we’ve been leaning into this framing of climate as a story about the economy,” Adcox said, pointing to how failing to act on climate change can lead to higher prices for home insurance and groceries. The story of global warming “is a story about costs, and it’s a story that people are facing every day.”

Within the Sunrise Movement, which has over 100 local chapters and groups across the country, Powell said members are wondering how to evolve the organization’s messaging—and potentially expand their demands. The idea of a “Green Reconstruction” has been floated as a way to connect the climate crisis to other social and economic injustices, said Powell, like threats to U.S. democracy and the rising cost of living. The name alludes to two eras in U.S. history: the Reconstruction that took place after the American Civil War, and the Second Reconstruction, the name sometimes given to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Both were times of deep social and political upheaval, when calls for racial justice faced violence and backlash. Under this framework, said Powell, the climate group could push for “reconstructing our entire economy in every sector to address the climate crisis.” But not everyone is convinced: “Some people are like, you know, it’s hard to put on a banner.”

Despite climate activists’ efforts to gin up enthusiasm for a greener, more equitable economy, Trump has consistently painted climate policy as restrictive, designed to take something away from voters. These kinds of talking points are an effective way to activate voters’ fears, according to John Marshall, the CEO of Potential Energy Coalition, a nonpartisan marketing firm focused on climate action. Trump has said that now that he’s killed the Green New Deal—read, the IRA—Americans can “buy the car they want to buy.” With this framing, he’s simultaneously attacking both the actual bill Biden signed into law and any future climate resolutions progressives may introduce. 

Marshall said that approaches that emphasize slow, gradual change poll better than those that call for a complete transformation overnight. Whether or not that’s useful advice to organizers is another story. Daniel Aldana Cohen, who co-wrote the book A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, argued that progressives need to be clear about the scale of the climate crisis and not concede too much to conservatives and others who want to downplay its impacts. And he believes tying climate equity to large-scale public investment is still the right move: “You can’t fundamentally transform the economy in secret,” he said, so the movement might as well talk about it.

Cohen said he doesn’t know exactly what the best message will be. But he said progressives should continue advocating for climate policy “you can touch, like literally touch.” The climate movement has an opportunity, said Cohen, to now demand “not just green jobs and green careers or some, but quality of life for everyone.”