Following a trip to tour the flooding in Baton Rouge, La., Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is pushing for a “green New Deal” to help solve climate change and energize the economy.
Stein said she would look to create 20 million jobs in the clean-energy sector in a “wartime-scale mobilization” to prevent climate change, which she tied to the flooding. She said the United States should aim to produce 100 percent renewable energy by 2030.
{mosads}Stein toured Baton Rouge this week to see the effects of massive flooding there. She said the flooding shows “unequal recovery” for areas with large minority populations, calling it an “instant replay of what we saw in [Hurricane] Katrina,” which devastated minority communities in New Orleans in 2005.
Climate change, she said during a National Press Club event on Tuesday, is an “emergency expounded by racial disparities. … We call for a joint solution that solves these two problems.”
Stein also link the effort to another major policy platform: ending “wars for oil” around the world.
Her plan “not only restarts the economy; it turns the tide on climate, and it also makes the wars for oil obsolete,” she said. “So therein is how it pays for itself.”
Stein’s climate platform is more aggressive — and would be much more expensive — than that of any presidential nominee to date.
But she said it’s important for her voters to hear her plans alongside those of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“At a time where we are facing really critical issues, in an election where we are deciding not just what kind of a world we will have but whether we will have a world or not going forward, we think it’s really critical now more than ever that we have an open debate,” she said.