The Green New Deal: What the Resolution Actually Says

The Green New Deal is a fourteen-page nonbinding resolution. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced it in the House on February 7, 2019 as H.Res. 109, with 67 original cosponsors printed on the first page, and Ed Markey introduced the same text in the Senate the same day as S.Res. 59, with the word Senate swapped in for House of Representatives and nothing else changed. It spends no money, creates no agency, and binds nobody. In the formal grammar of a sense-of-the-House resolution, it declares that the federal government has a duty to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and to guarantee a job to every person in the United States, through what the text calls a 10-year national mobilization. The House has never voted on it.

Much of the public argument about the Green New Deal is argument about a withdrawn FAQ, a television segment, or somebody’s guess. Here is what is actually in it.

What kind of document this is

A simple House resolution expresses the sense of the House and does nothing else. Even a unanimous vote for H.Res. 109 would have moved no dollar and created no program; every goal in it would need separate legislation, passed later, by name. The Speaker referred it to eleven committees at once, starting with Energy and Commerce and running through Science, Space, and Technology, Education and Labor, Transportation and Infrastructure, Agriculture, Natural Resources, Foreign Affairs, Financial Services, the Judiciary, Ways and Means, and Oversight and Reform. It gathered 101 cosponsors, came out of none of them, and died with the 116th Congress. Ocasio-Cortez filed it again on April 20, 2021 as H.Res. 332, which drew 104 cosponsors and never reached the floor either.

The five goals

The operative text opens with a duty and five objects for it. The first three:

(A) to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers; (B) to create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States; (C) to invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century;

The fourth secures clean air and water, climate and community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment. The fifth commits to “stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression” of a category the resolution defines by listing it: indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.

Ten years and fourteen projects

Those five goals, the resolution says, “should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization” that will require fourteen lettered goals and projects. They include building resilience against extreme weather, repairing infrastructure and guaranteeing universal access to clean water, “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources,” building smart grids, “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States” for maximum energy efficiency, growing clean manufacturing, working with farmers and ranchers on agricultural emissions, restoring ecosystems, cleaning up hazardous waste sites, and exporting the whole approach abroad so other countries can copy it.

The transportation item is where the claim that the Green New Deal would ban air travel comes from. What it says is that the country should remove emissions from transportation as far as is technologically feasible, “including through investment in” three things: zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; “clean, affordable, and accessible public transit”; and high-speed rail. No mode of travel is prohibited anywhere in the fourteen pages.

The part about workers

The part that gets skipped is paragraph (4), fifteen more lettered items on how the mobilization would treat the people doing it. The resolution asks for jobs that pay prevailing wages, hire local workers, and guarantee wage and benefit parity for workers whose industries change under them. It asks for “strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment” and for labor, safety, antidiscrimination, and wage-and-hour standards enforced “across all employers, industries, and sectors.” That is the same bargaining machinery described at what a union actually does, written into a climate document.

Then comes item (H), a federal job guarantee in twenty-four words:

guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States;

Item (K) asks for trade rules and border adjustments strong enough “to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas.” Item (M) asks for the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples for decisions affecting their traditional territories. Item (O) asks for high-quality health care for all people of the United States without saying how, which is the question worked through at Medicare for All.

What the resolution never mentions

The phrase fossil fuel does not appear in H.Res. 109. Neither does carbon tax, nuclear, coal, gasoline, cow, airplane, or hamburger. The word carbon shows up exactly once, in a line about increasing soil carbon storage through land preservation and afforestation. There are two dollar figures in the entire document, both sitting in the preamble, and both describe what warming is projected to cost rather than what the program would: more than $500,000,000,000 in lost annual economic output in the United States by the year 2100, and a risk of damage to $1,000,000,000,000 of public infrastructure and coastal real estate. The mobilization itself carries no price tag anywhere in the text.

Where the cow line came from

Not from the resolution. FactCheck.org, reading the February 2019 rollout against the text, found two separate FAQ documents coming out of Ocasio-Cortez’s office: a fact sheet sent to NPR, and a version posted to her website that was taken down. The NPR fact sheet is where the cows live. It explained that the target was net-zero rather than zero “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” Both versions promised economic security to “all who are unable or unwilling to work,” a phrase that appears nowhere in H.Res. 109. Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, said “an early draft of a FAQ that was clearly unfinished and that doesn’t represent the GND resolution got published to the website by mistake.” The website FAQ came down. The cows stayed in the argument for years.

The name is twelve years older than the resolution

Thomas Friedman used the phrase in a New York Times column on January 19, 2007 titled A Warning From the Garden, arguing that the country needed more of everything at once: solar, wind, hydro, ethanol, biodiesel, clean coal and nuclear power, plus conservation. Neither clean coal nor nuclear power appears anywhere in the 2019 resolution. He expanded the idea in his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded. In Britain that same year, on July 21, 2008, the Green New Deal Group published A Green New Deal through the New Economics Foundation, subtitled “Joined-up policies to solve the triple crunch of the credit crisis, climate change and high oil prices,” and defined the triple crunch as “a combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices underpinned by an encroaching peak in oil production.” The UN Environment Programme adopted the label for a Global Green New Deal in 2009.

How it reached a floor

On November 13, 2018, a week after the midterms, Sunrise Movement activists occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding a Select Committee for a Green New Deal with the authority to write legislation. Capitol Police arrested 51 of them for unlawfully demonstrating. Ocasio-Cortez, in Washington that week for freshman orientation, joined the sit-in and told the crowd, as Common Dreams reported it:

I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our generation, and our future.

Pelosi revived a Select Committee on the Climate Crisis instead, chaired by Kathy Castor of Florida. The House rules package that created it, H.Res. 6, agreed to on January 9, 2019, wrote the limits into the charter: the select committee “shall not have legislative jurisdiction and shall have no authority to take legislative action on any bill or resolution,” and on subpoenas it could only “recommend subpoenas and depositions and submit such recommendations to the relevant standing committee.” Sunrise had asked for a committee that could write bills and got one chartered not to.

The resolution arrived just under three months after the sit-in. Markey’s office announced it the same day, listing eleven Senate cosponsors and a claim about what the document was for:

A Green New Deal is about jobs, and it is about justice. It would be the greatest blue-collar jobs program in a generation and repair the historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities that have born the worst burdens of our fossil fuel economy, all while saving the planet.

The only vote it ever got

Mitch McConnell introduced the Green New Deal. On February 13, 2019, six days after H.Res. 109, the majority leader filed S.J.Res. 8, which recast the preamble as a findings section and then repeated the goals and projects word for word, handing him a vehicle he could take to the Senate floor. On March 26, 2019, cloture on the motion to proceed failed, 0 to 57. Forty-three senators voted present, Markey included. Four members of the Democratic caucus voted no alongside every Republican: Doug Jones of Alabama, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and Angus King, the independent from Maine.

What has been signed

One statehouse got the name onto a statute book. In 2019 the Maine legislature took up An Act To Establish a Green New Deal for Maine, filed by Representative Chloe Maxmin of Nobleboro. As introduced it would have required competitive electricity providers to source 80 percent of their retail supply from renewable resources by January 1, 2040, established a Task Force for a Green New Deal and a Commission on a Just Transition to a Low-carbon Economy, and ordered up draft legislation for a program to get solar panels onto public school roofs. The committee amendment that carried the bill struck everything after the enacting clause. What Governor Janet Mills signed on June 17, 2019, as chapter 347 of that year’s public laws, makes anyone building a generating facility of 2 megawatts or more hire apprentices at rising percentages from 2021, sends the Efficiency Maine Trust after conservation in new school construction, and has that trust arrange power purchase agreements for solar at new schools. The renewable target and both new bodies were gone. The title stayed.

The federal resolution ends on paragraph (4)(O), which reads:

providing all people of the United States with— (i) high-quality health care; (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate housing; (iii) economic security; and (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.

That text has been public since February 7, 2019. No House committee has reported it, and no member of the House has been recorded voting yes or no on it.