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GREEN NEW DEAL FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 4, 2021, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Bowman) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
General Leave
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject of my Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the gentleman from New York?
There was no objection.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, this afternoon, we are focused on the Green New Deal. And I want to be very clear about why we need a Green New Deal. Our fossil fuel-driven economy is making us sick and literally killing us. But with historic investments in green infrastructure and the care economy, we can do the opposite. We can repair the damage done and give every person what they need to flourish.
In the Pacific Northwest, we just saw a brutal heat wave that took the lives of 116 people in Oregon, 112 people in Washington, and hundreds more in British Columbia.
We saw catastrophic floods across Europe that killed nearly 200 people, and record-shattering rains that caused deaths in India and China. We are living with wildfires that destroy communities and suffocate us with smoke. Africa is being battered by drought, and Siberia is in flames. We literally saw the ocean on fire.
We now live in a world in which extreme weather driven by climate change is killing 5 million people per year. And in parts of my district, you are three times more likely to die from asthma than anywhere else in the country. We need to be crystal clear about the fact that our economic system created this emergency, while our political system subsidizes and protects the fossil fuel industry. That has to change now.
The Green New Deal provides the framework we need to rebuild our economy, society, and democracy from the ground up. The Green New Deal recognizes that climate change, public health, systemic racism, and economic inequality are all deeply connected. And as you will hear tonight, it gives us a road map for tackling these crises together in a holistic manner.
As a lifelong educator, I see the perfect place to kickstart this process, our K-12 public schools.
Think about it, there is no single institution that touches the lives of more people. We are talking about 50 million young people, plus parents, teachers, staff, workers, and neighbors. Our schools are the heartbeat of our communities, and they must become the epicenter of transformative climate change.
For decades, we have allowed these precious places to be neglected, particularly in redlined parts of the country. We are leaving Black and Brown students and low-income students behind. We over-test the academic ability of our children, but we do not support and engage them as human beings.
And on a physical level, our schools have fallen into a state of disrepair. In my 20 years as a teacher and principal, I saw this every single day. We have schools with no running hot water or drinking fountains that do not work. Schools where the drinking fountains that do work are poisoning our children with lead.
We have schools that are infested with asbestos, mold, and rodents, and that lack proper ventilation. So every day our children face a whole spectrum of urgent health harms. And even as young people march and organize relentlessly for climate action, schools are failing to protect them from climate impacts, like extreme heat. Outdated, inefficient HVAC systems are contributing to carbon pollution and burdening schools with $8 billion in annual energy costs.
Last week, I introduced a bill called the Green New Deal for Public Schools. This is a $1.43 trillion investment over 10 years designed to fundamentally transform our public education system for the 21st century. It will create and support more than 1 million green jobs every year, and it centers the most precious resource in any healthy democracy, our children.
With this legislation, we are going to upgrade and retrofit every single public school in the country, beginning in the poorest and most vulnerable districts. Every school will become a safe, healthy, accessible, and zero-carbon center of the community.
We will remove toxic materials, electrify school facilities, and make them energy-efficient, comfortable, and disaster-proof. We will install solar panels and batteries so that every school generates and controls its own renewable energy. We will create community gardens and green spaces, and offer healthy food options to nourish our children, and so much more.
These investments will be game-changing for schools in a variety of ways. They could see their energy bills roughly cut in half and reinvest the money that they save in the mental and behavioral health resources that our children and families need.
In fact, this bill provides comprehensive funding for healing the trauma of our communities. It will allow schools to hire hundreds of thousands more educators, mental health professionals, school counselors, and other support staff, especially from the local community. It also provides significant resources for school districts to form strong community partnerships and develop curricula that are responsive to unique local needs.
The legislation tackles school inequality at the regional level by quadrupling Title I funding. And it greatly increases IDEA funding for students with disabilities. This is about care; caring for ourselves, each other, our families, our communities, and the planet. That is what the Green New Deal is all about.
Madam Speaker, I yield to my other colleagues who will highlight the many other ways the Green New Deal framework addresses our Nation's urgent needs.
Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Carolyn B. Maloney), the chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform.
Mrs. CAROLYN B. MALONEY of New York. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend and colleague, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus for bringing us together today to highlight the importance of the Green New Deal.
Madam Speaker, climate change is one of the single most pressing threats facing this country and the global community, and our most vulnerable communities are bearing the brunt of the consequences. That is why today, as chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, I held a hearing on President Biden's Justice40 Initiative.
During this hearing, we heard from experts about the need to swiftly and effectively implement this initiative to ensure that the communities hardest hit by pollution, poverty, and public health risks receive a fair share of our Nation's climate and infrastructure investments.
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As chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, I am committed to ensuring that the administration and all Federal agencies have the tools they need to implement the Justice40 Initiative. This is crucial to ensuring that our climate investments advance racial and economic justice.
Beyond the Justice40 Initiative, we need to prioritize policy solutions here in Congress that really focus on climate justice. For New York City, that means investing in a green future for public housing and for our public schools.
This past Earth Day, I reintroduced the Public Housing Solar Equity Act, which would guarantee that any solar energy generated on public housing land benefits the residents of those developments first.
Looking beyond solar energy, all public housing repairs and modernization projects should be green, which is exactly what the Green New Deal for Public Housing does. This bill will provide funding to electrify all buildings, add solar panels, and secure renewable energy sources for all public housing energy needs. In short, it will make Federal housing cleaner, safer, and greener.
Housing is a human right that no New Yorker, no American, should go without. As we work to make sure everyone has access to the clean affordable housing they need and deserve, let's expand our goals to make these communities green, too.
For the health of our residents and for our environment, we cannot afford to do anything less.
For the health of our students, we need a Green New Deal for Public Schools, a transformative and unprecedented investment that will not only make our schools greener but also expand services for our students. My colleague, Jamaal Bowman, is a former educator and has authored this important bill, of which I am a cosponsor.
We are in a state of emergency. The West is burning; cities are flooding; and extreme weather events are becoming all too common. We need to act now, and we need to act boldly.
For the health and safety of all Americans, for environmental and social justice, let's make a Green New Deal. We can't afford to do anything less.
Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague from New York (Mr. Bowman) for focusing on education and our environment and putting both of them together creatively with the Green New Deal for Public Schools.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York
(Ms. Ocasio-Cortez), who is the original Green New Deal champion in Congress and who has done so much in collaboration with social movements to inject this vision into the consciousness of America. Her Green New Deal for Public Housing was a major inspiration for my schools legislation.
Ms. OCASIO-CORTEZ. Madam Speaker, it is such an honor to be here just over 2 years after we introduced the original Green New Deal resolution, which has now inspired a great deal of similar resolutions and Green New Deal resolutions adopted and introduced into municipalities and States across the country.
Not only have similar resolutions been introduced, but we also have seen inspiration for other forms of Green New Deal legislation, like the Green New Deal for Public Housing, the Green New Deal for Public Schools, and beyond.
But I think one thing that is very important for us to discuss is a very urgent matter, which is the infrastructure package that is right here before Congress that is being negotiated by both the House and the Senate.
While I certainly wish sometimes that our legislation was informed primarily by the legislators that are here writing this legislation, by communities that are impacted by this legislation, it goes without saying that there is a great deal of dark money involved in the fight on climate change, and that dark money is intended for us to not act in this situation.
We have lobbyists from companies like ExxonMobil bragging about their role in shaping our Federal legislation and curtailing our ambitions and in fighting against key provisions to draw down our carbon emissions.
Whenever I see something like this, whenever I see how dark money and lobbyists act as a wedge and a cudgel between elected officials and public servants and the people that we are supposed to represent, not only do I think it is heartbreaking, but it is very much tragic.
There is a key issue that we have here in acting on climate, and the big part of that issue is something that we call kind of a principal-
agent problem where the people in charge of making decisions are simply not aligned and not incentivized to make the right ones because they are not feeling the impact of it.
I get concerned when we have conversations that the politics of the day get involved and intercede, and they complicate the policy for a generation. It is so critically important because I can't help but imagine that so many of the people that are in charge of blocking action on climate will not see the world that they are leaving to generations to come.
We have a moral responsibility to leave this world better than we found it. This is not about theory anymore. This is not about challenging the science anymore.
In New York City just yesterday, people woke up having a harder time breathing and having a harder time seeing the horizon because of the smoke from the Bootleg fires out in Oregon coming out to our city.
Wildfires will come and impact all of us. Floods and waters will come to impact all of us. But they will not impact all of us equally. The most vulnerable communities will be left behind, and we can stop it.
It doesn't have to be this way. Not only can we stop it, and not only can we draw down our emissions, but we can create millions of jobs doing so--millions of good union jobs.
We can create a civilian climate corps. We can transition to renewable energy. We can build infrastructure that all people can enjoy that is not just attuned to the wealthy. We can restore our land. We can live in harmony with an economy where we can care for one another instead of extracting off of each other.
We can build this world, and this world is close. It is so close. It is so close. That is why we see dark money mobilizing the way that it is right now, because they know that we can win.
Hopefully, in this package, we will continue to win. But this fight does not stop now. It does not stop with this infrastructure package. It will not stop, frankly, throughout the course of our lives because we have a responsibility to leave this world a better place for ourselves and our children.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California
(Mr. Takano), the chair of the Veterans' Affairs Committee.
Mr. TAKANO. Madam Speaker, I thank Representative Bowman for yielding, and I fully appreciate an opportunity to be in partnership with a fellow teacher for the cause of climate change.
Climate change is infrastructure. Our buildings, roads, and transportation are directly impacted by the impending climate crisis.
In this 1 year, we have seen our oceans on fire; a pipeline broke in the Gulf of Mexico; our bridges are crumbling; our buildings are collapsing; wildfires and heat waves have been paired with rolling blackouts in my district.
Unfortunately, my constituents and I have experienced this for decades without much progress, but we cannot continue to accept this as a reality, a continuing reality.
In addition to losing power in my district, some of the worst air quality in the country exists in my district. Despite California leading the Nation in investing in renewable energy, we still are not doing enough.
As co-chair of the Congressional Energy Storage Caucus, I know how critical it is for us to invest in renewable microgrids that are powered by solar and wind energy and backed by battery energy storage. Congress must provide municipalities, businesses, and residents with the ability to purchase and build their own energy grids that are resilient to our frequent natural disasters.
We have the technology to catch up to the modern industrial world. We cannot afford not to use this technology. We must invest.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from New Mexico
(Ms. Stansbury).
Ms. STANSBURY. Madam Speaker, I rise today with my colleagues to continue calling attention to the survival of our planet and our future generations, the well-being of our communities, and the critical importance of passing legislation across the board that reflects our values, which are embodied in the Green New Deal.
The science is clear. We must urgently address climate change now. We must address our greenhouse gas footprint and the causes of climate change now. We must mitigate the impacts of climate change now. And we must support and center and empower and invest in our communities now.
That is what the Green New Deal is all about, building a world that is more just, more equitable, and more climate-resilient for future generations, for our children, for our parents, and for everyone across our communities.
To do so, we have to invest in our communities, critical infrastructure, and all the things that will make it possible for our communities to thrive. The time is now to be decisive, to be brave in our policymaking, to be bold in our investments, and to lean into the science.
We must do so now in the budget reconciliation and infrastructure packages that this body is working to pass right now.
This is especially critical for my home State of New Mexico, where we are already experiencing the impacts of extreme drought, catastrophic fires, heat waves, and an uncertain future, and where our communities are already struggling daily to make a living. Our families are struggling to put food on the table and struggling to support people across our community.
It is absolutely critical that we support and center our communities in this conversation and that we invest in the resilient infrastructure that will make it possible for us to live resiliently: our electric grid, broadband infrastructure, drinking water, irrigation infrastructure, and green infrastructure, and to lean into our clean energy future.
We must also invest in the infrastructure of our communities, our care economy, because that is the infrastructure of our economy and the well-being of our people, our schools, and our families.
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We must do all of this through the lens of social, racial, and economic justice, investing in good paying jobs, lifting up the voices of and listening to the people in our communities and ensuring that their livelihoods and well- being are at the center of these conversations.
That is why we need bold action now in the budget, in reconciliation, and in the infrastructure package to ensure that we are investing in things that are not only shovel-ready but shovel worthy and worthy of our communities and their future.
The time for action is now. We need climate action now, and I am proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with my colleagues here in the House and in the Senate to ensure that we are making good on our commitment to our future.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California
(Mr. Cardenas).
Mr. CARDENAS. Madam Speaker, I thank Mr. Bowman for reserving the time on the floor of the House of Representatives so that we can speak the truth about what too many families and too many people--mostly poor people--have to endure, not only in America but around the world.
I was born and raised in the northeast San Fernando Valley, and I am very, very proud to say, in the Senate I have a colleague who grew up in Pacoima just like I did. His parents were immigrants of Mexico, and so were mine. We went to the same elementary school and the same high school, but yet at the same time we ended up being on the city council together for some years, he as a council president and I as a new member.
He said to me: Tony, what committee do you want to chair?
I said: I want to chair the committee that oversees the airport, the ports and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
At that time the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was the largest water and power district in America.
Why did I want to be on those committees?
Because those three entities are spewing more into our atmosphere than any other organizations in Los Angeles. It gave me the opportunity to live my values, to be able to grow up in a poor community, yes, in the hood, in the northeast San Fernando Valley, on that side of town where there are more dumpsites in that part of L.A. County--a county of 10 million people--but they have concentrated more dumpsites in my backyard than any other place in that county.
For Alex Padilla, our families, and me, we had to endure that for generations. But here Alex is, a city council member, the president of the council, choosing to put me as the chairman of that committee. And while I was on that committee, I forced the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to finally clean up their act.
Believe it or not, the progressive Los Angeles Department of Water and Power belongs to the city of Los Angeles, the people of Los Angeles. We were fooled into believing that we are a progressive community and that we would not be spewing out dirty fossil fuels to create the electricity that we depend on every day. But we did, Madam Speaker.
Approximately 60 percent of all of the energy that was being produced for our city and for our community was coming from fossil fuels. Under the presidency of President Alex Padilla,--who is now our United States Senator from California--he gave me the mantle of being the chairman of that committee, we forced the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to cut their emissions in half, to literally divest themselves of dirty coal plants, and to finally clean up our act.
I am very, very proud to say that as the first council member to represent that community to be born and raised in Pacoima, I was the first council member to tell a company that owned a private dumpsite when they wanted to expand it again and again and again, I was the first council member to say: No, you are not.
We denied them their expansion. That was the first time it had ever happened.
Again, Madam Speaker, for far too long we were being represented by people who didn't realize or understand what it is like to grow up in a community where environmental injustice prevails and proliferates. We suffer from asthma rates that other communities don't suffer. Our children do. Our families do. We suffer from groundwater that is more contaminated than any other place in America.
We finally brought the grants from Washington, from city hall, and from Sacramento, our State capital, to clean up our act and to clean up our groundwater.
Those are the kinds of things that we are doing in Congress. Those are the kinds of things that the Green New Deal has brought to light where before only certain people experienced it and only certain people cared.
Now, today, we are talking about something that I am very proud of. I am very proud to be one of the original cosponsors of the Green New Deal in this Congress, but equally proud, with my colleague Congressman Bowman, to be an original cosponsor of the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. These are the kinds of investments that we need to make as Congress.
Equally important, we need to make sure that we continue to remind every single person that we are in this together. As go our communities, as goes our country, and as goes the environment, so does the planet. Even though some billionaires are flying up into the sky and getting into outer space, this is our planet, Madam Speaker. We cannot escape it.
Why try to escape it?
Why not just look in the mirror and see what we all can do about it?
That is the responsible thing to do. That is something that we can and should be proud of.
So I stand here today to encourage every single one of us to help clean up our act and to, once again, thank my colleague, Congressman Bowman, for inviting me and the rest of us to speak the truth on this floor today about how important it is that we have a Green New Deal for all.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield to the gentlewoman from Missouri
(Ms. Bush), to whom I want to wish a very happy birthday today.
Ms. Bush is another powerful Green New Deal champion who has introduced a fantastic Green New Deal For Cities bill. I also had the pleasure of working with Ms. Bush on our public power resolution.
Ms. BUSH. Madam Speaker, St. Louis and I rise today because the Green New Deal cannot wait, and my brother, Representative Bowman, understands that. I thank him for pushing this, and I thank him for speaking up and speaking out. It is not an easy place to speak out from. Especially as Black Americans in this country, it is not usually one of the things that people think that the Black community will speak out about, but this is our work to speak out about it to make sure that our communities are made whole.
Yes, today is my 45th birthday. Birthdays are both a time of celebration and a time of reflection.
Today, there are 11 more 90-degree days per year in St. Louis than the year that I was born. I am thinking about that St. Louis heat, the heat under which Michael Brown Jr.'s body lay for more than 4\1/2\ hours on the hot asphalt in August of 2014.
I am wondering how many more 90-degree days we will have when I turn 50.
What about when I turn 55?
When I turn 60?
I am wondering how many more times Black bodies will lie dead in the summer heat on that asphalt from the environmental injustice of police murder. Yes, that is an environmental injustice.
I am thinking about how in the decade I was born the city of St. Louis pledged to prioritize elimination of lead pipes. But today Black children in the city of St. Louis are 2.4 times more likely than White children to test positive for lead in their blood. For my entire lifetime, we have been promised that this problem would be fixed. But today it still persists.
I am thinking about what the world will look like when my son and my daughter turn 45. I am thinking about the opportunity we have right now to deliver them a better world. I am thinking about how blessed I am to be in a position to do something about it.
Earlier this year, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and I introduced the Green New Deal for Cities Act to fund the environmental justice work of a Green New Deal in every community. Our bill would create good paying jobs in our communities to solve the environmental racism that we face each and every day. It will clean up our polluted creeks and our vacant lots. Many don't know that when you drive in some communities, Madam Speaker, where it looks like the community doesn't care, sometimes it is not that the community doesn't care, sometimes it is because the ground is contaminated in our Black and in our Brown communities that those lots sit there vacant. Those lots sit there like they are unattended to, but there is more to the story, and financially that is the issue.
When we look at cleaning up our polluted creeks and our vacant lots--
every move further we have to make sure that we replace fossil fuels with renewable energy.
Why are we still having that conversation?
I don't want my 46th birthday to come next year and our communities are still waiting for the people with the power of the pen and the people with the power of the purse to deliver the lifesaving changes that the people deserve. We need a Green New Deal.
For my birthday, please join me in fighting for one everywhere.
Mr. BOWMAN. Madam Speaker, it is amazing, whether we are talking about the Bronx, New York; St. Louis, Missouri; or New Mexico, it is obvious that a Green New Deal is needed now.
Madam Speaker, I would like to close by returning to one particular aspect of the Green New Deal for Public Schools because I think it highlights something about the framework as a whole. For me, one of the most exciting parts of the Green New Deal for Public Schools is how the learning environment in every school will be enriched, putting our young people at the center of the green energy revolution.
Students will delve into every aspect of the building retrofit process and immerse themselves in the broader sustainability and social challenges that we are tackling as a society. Each school will become a living lab for the Green New Deal. I cannot think of a better way to nurture the curiosity, ingenuity, and imaginations of our children. We will be kick-starting climate, STEM, and STEAM careers across the United States, and our country will reap the benefits of all that creativity.
The Green New Deal for Public Schools and the entire Green New Deal framework is built on the foundation of care and healing and allowing everyone in this country to unlock their full potential.
This is an idea that is expressed in Tupac Shakur's brilliant poem
``The Rose That Grew from Concrete.''
Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?Proving nature's law is wrong it learned to walk without having feet.Funny it seems, but by keeping its dreams, it learned to breathe fresh air.Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else ever cared.
Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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SOURCE: Congressional Record Vol. 167, No. 128
The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
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