Origins of the Green New Deal Slogan

I was the first candidate in the US to campaign for a Green New Deal while running for Governor of New York in 2010. Coming out of the Great Recession, it was as much a program for economic recovery as climate recovery. The slogan was soon picked up by Green candidates across the country and we issued a joint statement calling for a federal Green New Deal. The Green New Deal became the signature program of the Green Party in the 2010s. The slogan of Green presidential candidate, Jill Stein, in 2012 and 2015 was “A Green New Deal for America.”

The central theme of the Green New Deal—large-scale public investment in clean energy for jobs and economic justice as well as environmental protection—is something I have worked on since I was involved in organizing the anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance in the 1970s and we made alliances with Richard Grossman’s Environmentalists for Full Employment and Tony Mazzochi of the OIl, Chemical, and Atomic Workers for a Just Transition program to enable workers to maintain wages and benefits while they transitioned from closing toxic industries and into the new clean industries.These policies were central themes in my campaigns for US Representative in 2000, 2004, and 2008 and US Senator in 2006.

I had tried to get a Global Green New Deal plank in the Greens/Green Party USA platform in 2000, but for those convention delegates “New Deal” was too associated with the Democratic Party, so we called the plank a Global Green Deal. It called for redirecting most of the military budget into basic human needs and ecological conversion to sustainable systems of production globally.

By 2010, Caroline Lucas, the Green Party Member of Parliament in the UK, had been campaigning since 2008 for a Green New Deal in response to the twin crises of the climate and economy. The European Greens made the Green New Deal the slogan of their 2009 campaign for the Europarliament. I still got some initial resistance to the slogan from New York Greens when I first proposed it for our 2010 gubernatorial campaign because New Deal was too associated with the Democratic Party. But soon Greens were persuaded by the fact that European Greens were using the slogan now and by my argument that it would appeal to progressive Democratic voters who were angry that their old New Deal Democrats had been replaced by corporate New Democrats.

~ Howie Hawkins

Howie Hawkins statements in New York gubernatorial debate, Hofstra University, 10.18.10;