Photo by Stephanie Bergeron on Unsplash

NRDC has a list of all of the environmental bills up for consideration this year in California. One in particular, AB1839, looks remarkably similar to the Green New Deal presented on the federal level. And, it’s supposed to. It’s even called, “The California Green New Deal.”

It’s got me wondering, could a state-by-state approach to passing a federal Green New Deal work?

Gay marriage was a complete impossibility for, well, ever. The 90’s were some bullsh*t with the Defense of Marriage Act and a slew of bans on same-sex marriages all the way into the early 2000’s. And then, in 2004, after years of city hall protests in San Francisco, then-mayor Gavin Newsom said, “Eh, go ahead. Get your happy selves married.”  Things went down, they went up.  But if you look at the timeline only from the 20th Century, it looked like gay marriage would never happen.

In 2005, New York made the ban on marriage illegal (doesn’t mean that marriage was LEGAL; its ban was just illegal). California passed a law through the legislature that the Governor vetoed — BOO!

By 2015, the Supreme Court of our country, aided by the many places where same sex marriage was already the state law, supported the right of same sex couples to marry and it became the national law. Ten years. Not without hard work, not without intense focus and unrelenting effort. But ten years from the beginnings of getting traction on the idea to full federal recognition.

But, Angie, you say, we don’t have that kind of time for climate change. Agreed. But I don’t think it would take ten years. The trajectory of gay marriage is what happens when, moving state by state, an idea takes hold when there is no real consequence for the dominant culture to make the shift from assholery to legal recognition.  But what happens when there is?

For taking on the climate crisis, right now, the federal government is one of our biggest antagonists. We can secure a federal Green New Deal by supporting the local iterations of it and transforming the country, state by state. Two things happen in this scenario: One, the organizations that resist the shift will begin to find the money to be made in making the shift and will begin to support it themselves. Two, the individuals who fear it, like the folks who parked their trucks at charging stations to prevent others from charging their electric vehicles, will begin to see themselves in the future because jobs will open up, and people they know will start working in those jobs.

Am I suggesting we stop fighting for the Federal Green New Deal? No. I am suggesting there are many paths up the mountain, and sometimes, the fastest way up the mountain, is around it.