Sanders Explains His Plan for a Climate Revolution in a Wildfire-Devastated Town

Bernie Sanders wants the United States to combat climate change like a nation at war.  The Democratic presidential candidate detailed his new climate platform on Thursday in Paradise, California, while surrounded by devastation that wouldn’t look out of place on a battlefield.  Today, Paradise is a ghost of itself after last year’s deadly Camp Fire; thousands of homes and buildings were lost, triggering an exodus that took almost the entire town’s population.

Sanders chose Paradise to launch his climate agenda for the same reason he thinks the public has woken up to the threat.  Climate change is visceral, and in Paradise and elsewhere, voters are seeing its damage firsthand.  There’s a difference between telling voters climate change is an existential crisis at an indoor rally and describing it while surrounded by the hazardous ash, rubble, and charred trees that once made up the Holly Hills mobile home community.

“People learn with their own eyes,” Sanders said in an exclusive interview with the Weather Channel and Mother Jones, conducted as part of the Climate Desk partnership.  “So you come to a beautiful place like this, Paradise, California, and you see the horrible, horrible damage that’s done.  You turn on the television, in a community of 26,000 people, 86 dead, some 18,000 structures burned down to the ground, $16 billion in damage.  People are saying, ‘What is going on?’”

In announcing his $16.3 trillion proposal, Sanders joined a handful of candidates who have toured Paradise, as well as the pack of front runners who had already released their own climate change plans.  His robust plan would “launch a decade of the Green New Deal,” promising 10 years filled with an unfathomable and polarizing amount of change:  essentially eliminating unemployment with 20 million jobs, new job protections, and a social safety net to go with it.  The plan includes funding for displaced fossil fuel workers to find new livelihoods or take early retirement.  He envisions a fully clean transportation sector by 2030, by electrifying fleets and launching a $2 trillion car buyback program.  He promises a $40 billion climate justice fund, new infrastructure, and a more sustainable agriculture sector.  And he says he can do it all while modernizing the power grid, retiring nuclear plants, and halting fracking.  Altogether, the Sanders camp says the changes could cut U.S. pollution 71 percent over the next decade, putting the nation on a path to go completely carbon-free by 2050.

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