Welcome to your first day on the job, Mayor Lori Lightfoot. I have an idea.
Create a Green New Deal for Chicago.
The Green New Deal, a resolution aimed at combating climate change, urges the federal government to adopt policies that create renewable energy jobs, provide clean air and water, work toward net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and, in the process, reduce systematic racial, social and economic injustice.
Congress may or may not pass the plan, introduced in February by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York in the House and Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts in the Senate. Illinois Democrats Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, Danny Davis, Mike Quigley and Jan Schakowsky have signed on as co-sponsors in the House. As of last week, Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth had not yet signed on in the Senate.
But Chicago could adopt its own Green New Deal, modeled on Ocasio-Cortez’s and Markey’s resolution, regardless of what Congress does.
Chicago needs clean water. Ours has brain-damaging lead, as I’m sure you’re aware. Lake Michigan water becomes contaminated after it leaves the city’s treatment plants and passes through lead service lines and internal plumbing. Individual property owners are responsible for maintaining service lines under the city’s plumbing code. Guess which residents can afford that?
Other cities — Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Denver, St. Paul — are footing the bill to replace the lead water pipes that connect homes to street water sources.
As my colleague Michael Hawthorne has reported, lead robs the brain of the gray matter that allows people to pay attention, regulate emotions and control impulses. Numerous studies have linked childhood exposure to violent crime.
Our sewer system is old and incapable of containing the amount of rain water we’ve gotten this spring. Thousands of homes in Chicago have been flooded, often with raw sewage. That’s going to get worse as climate change leads to more heavy precipitation and hurricanes.
Chicago is slowly sinking — 1 or 2 millimeters a year, according to scientists. Our lakefront will be about 4 inches higher in the next century, according to this report by my colleague Tony Briscoe, which will redefine flood plains and further strain sewer pipes.
Chicago needs jobs. Forty-seven percent of 20- to 24-year-old black men in Chicago were out of school and out of work in 2014, according to a 2016 report from the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute. The report showed the highest concentration of youth unemployment on the city’s South and West sides.
Our recycling program is a joke.
A Green New Deal could help all of the above.
From the resolution introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey:
“Climate change, pollution and environmental destruction have exacerbated systematic racial, regional, social, environmental and economic injustices by disproportionately affecting 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.”
Clean, affordable, accessible public transit, upgrading buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, upgrading infrastructure, building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, guaranteeing universal access to clean water, directing investments to spur economic development and create high-quality jobs that pay prevailing wages and offer training and advancement opportunities — it’s all in there.
Chicago is going to be a much easier sell than Congress. Our City Council has six socialists. Democrats occupy pretty much every elected office. Plus, you won every ward. You have the closest thing to a mandate Chicago offers a person.
A Green New Deal could also energize the youth vote, something you did not capture in April.
I know you’ve got a lot of priorities: Public safety. Schools. Neighborhood redevelopment. A pension crisis. It’s a daunting load.
A Green New Deal wouldn’t solve all of it, but it would provide a framework to address a good chunk. And it would do so with an eye toward the city’s and its residents’ futures, not just your political fortunes. Your predecessors, particularly the previous two, have not been great at that.
This could change Chicago’s narrative. It could change Chicago’s future. It could change Chicago’s livability for all residents, not just those with enough money to buffer themselves from this city’s harshest realities. It could lead the way for other cities to follow.
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May 20, 2019 at 08:51AM
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