Maine’s Green New Deal aims to ‘link economic justice with climate justice’

On the heels of new federal legislation that seeks to address the climate-change imperative, on Tuesday state lawmakers officially launched their effort to pass a Maine-focused Green New Deal. The effort has the backing of the state’s most prominent environmental and labor organizations.

Freshman state Rep. Chloe Maxmin (D-Nobleboro), the sponsor of LD 1282, “An Act To Establish a Green New Deal for Maine,” says the bill emanated from conversations she had with voters last fall.

“When I was door-knocking, the themes that I heard were the same, which is we want growing industries here, we want good jobs, especially in our rural communities. We care about our natural resources, we care about snowmobiles and ice fishing. This is how we talk about climate change in our rural communities,” she said. “When I got here, I knew that I wanted to do a climate bill that reflected that way I think about this issue, that was really based in economic justice.”

Maxmin’s Green New Deal legislation will have its first public hearing next week.

Much like the federal Green New Deal introduced by freshman U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and its companion legislation introduced in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Maxmin’s bill sets a deadline for the state to transition its energy grid to renewable energy while laying a path for creating the thousands of green jobs that it will take to meet that goal.

This all must be done, Maxmin asserts, while prioritizing the inclusion of stakeholders from diverse backgrounds — people whom she notes have often been excluded from decision-making processes.

“I have worked on climate policy for most of my life and was always very frustrated at the lack of diverse representation and voices included in the policymaking process,” said Maxmin, who as a student organizer at Harvard led students and faculty in pressuring their university to divest from fossil fuels. “I call the bill a ‘Green New Deal for Maine’ because I want to draw attention to a new way of talking about climate that is rooted in real working people here in a rural state.”

Target: 80 percent renewable energy by 2040

Bowdoin student and climate change organizer Haley Maurice speaking in support of Rep. Chloe Maxmin’s Great New Deal for Maine. | Dan Neumann

Maxmin’s bill would require the legislature to convene a Green New Deal task force, which would be responsible for making a detailed plan to reach 80-percent reliance on renewable resources for electricity supply by 2040 — a goal only slightly less ambitious than the federal Green New Deal, which aims for complete carbon neutrality by 2030.

The taskforce would also be responsible for creating job training programs and apprenticeships to prepare Maine workers for green jobs, as well as develop a plan to incentivize and make the transition affordable for all Maine households to decarbonize their own energy consumption with heat pumps and solar panels.

The bill would also requires the state’s Public Utilities Commission and Efficiency Maine to make a plan to equip Maine’s public schools with net metering and solar energy systems.

The task force would be required to draft an initial roadmap by January 2020.

To ensure these policies are inclusive for Mainers from diverse racial, gender and economic backgrounds, Maxmin’s legislation would also create a “Commission on a Just Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy” to provide recommendations to the task force on inclusive policy.

Backed by Maine AFL-CIO and environmental groups

Maxmin’s Green New Deal is co-sponsored by Labor Committee chair Sen. Shenna Bellows (D-Manchester) and six other Democrats and has the backing of the Maine AFL-CIO, which represents 40,000 Maine workers through affiliate unions.

The Maine AFL-CIO is the first state chapter of the national labor federation to endorse a state Green New Deal policy.

“We support it because we face as a state, as a country, as a world, two twin crises — the crisis of economic inequality and the crisis of a warming, burning planet,” Maine AFL-CIO executive director Matt Schlobohm said at a press conference alongside Maxmin on Tuesday. “The push to address the climate crisis has to be linked to rewriting the rules of the economy to build an economy that works for everyone. We support this legislation because it recognizes that economic justice and climate justice are intricately linked.”

Maine’s Sierra Club chapter also supports Maxmin’s bill. Last month, when the bill language was first released, their members began lobbying lawmakers in favor of the proposal. On Tuesday, student environmental advocacy groups including Bowdoin Climate Action, a local hub of the Sunrise Movement, a national campaign of young people organizing around the climate crisis, also endorsed the plan.

Next week, student activists, partnering with environmental advocates 350 Maine will travel to Augusta to urge state lawmakers to support Maxmin’s bill and other proposed legislation, according to Haley Maurice, a student leader of the Bowdoin Sunrise Hub.

For Maurice, a strong statewide climate policy would need to address low-income Mainers’ economic realities.

“As a young Mainer, who is thinking about my future here, I’m thinking about people who are working really hard to get by and who want to be able to run their homes off of renewable energy, but do not have the money to install solar panels, or people working in paper mills who might be affected by it,” she said. “We have to make sure we don’t continue to contribute to this crisis, but also don’t create another one. The Green New Deal is the first bill here that I’ve seen that does that.”

(Photo: State Rep. Chloe Maxmin, right, with supporters of her Green New Deal for Maine, left to right, Reps. Deane Rykerson, Lori Gramlich, Craig Hickman, Maine AFL-CIO’s Matt Schlobohm and Sen. Shenna Bellows. | Dan Neumann)