The March is a huge step in a growing popular demand that the United States squarely face the still growing crisis, the science, the evidence, the necessity that humanity, human beings, act now to save our only planet from our own seemingly blind destruction of it.
The United States is way behind most of the rest of the world in both understanding the crisis and being willing to act.
Hopefully, the march will have put the climate crisis on the political agenda, and that more expressions of the will of the American people follow.
To ensure concrete policy action on the climate and investment in sustainable energy, there must be not only a natural crisis, but also a political demand of sufficient weight. The March is the expression of that demand.
As former Chief of Staff at the Utility Workers Union, I was at the table as we tried to push President Obama’s climate change legislation through the US Senate. We knew that legislation would address both our natural and our economic crisis by creating upwards of 200,000 jobs. That legislation was ready to be passed when Mitch McConnell and other radical right-wing Republicans decided that no matter how important for America, they would deny the President any more victories. As a result, Lindsey Graham did what his boss John McCain told him to and pulled himself off the legislation, denying us the votes to break the filibuster.
We need the jobs that investing in green and sustainable energy would bring–building wind farms in the heart of the country where the wind blows all the time, solar collectors where the sun shines all the time, the upgrading of our electric grid and our power lines aka transmission lines, retrofitting buildings. All this requires investment and work.
And investment and quality, family supporting jobs are just what America needs.