Rethinking Capitalism (ReCap) Webinar Series

Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal

by Robert Pollin (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Event Summary

Humanity has to stop burning fossil fuels within the next thirty years and do so in a way to improve
living standards and opportunities for working people. This is the goal of the Global Green New Deal,
a feasible objective for humanity. The costs of inaction will be extreme weather, drought, rising sea,
crop failures, and new mass extinction for vertebrates, fish, insects, turning into an extinction risk for
humanity itself. In the first half of the twentieth century, humanity has experienced two world wars
and the emergence of the most genocidal regime ever. Over the second half of the twentieth century,
we have lived with the threat of nuclear annihilation. Since 2020 we have been facing the COVID
pandemic and recently the threat of a new worldwide war. There is no time to be lost. Humanity has
to join and fight its true global enemy: climatic change.