In 2008, in the depths of the Great Recession, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for “investment that fights climate change, creates millions of green jobs and spurs green growth.” He said what the world needs, in short, is a “Green New Deal.”

The project of a Green New Deal rapidly picked up momentum around the world. Green New Deals became official policy in many countries, endorsed by the UN, the international trade union movement, and even by the IMF. China, India, and the European Union began “implementing some of the policies envisioned by the Green New Deal.” But within a couple of years a global counterattack demanding austerity stymied much of the drive for massive investment to implement climate protection and economic justice. The Green New Deal appeared dead.

The Green New Deal was reborn a decade later when the youth Sunrise climate movement in the U.S. held a sit-in in the office of Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi demanding she support a resolution for a Green New Deal proposed by newly elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Drawing on the proposals a decade earlier for a Global Green New Deal, the resolution called for a “new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.” The Green New Deal amassed support among congressional representatives, progressive organizations, and young people across the country. A poll found that more than 80% of registered voters “strongly support” or “somewhat support” the general concepts behind a Green New Deal. A poll five years later found that “the Green New Deal is still incredibly popular.”

Notwithstanding its popularity with the public the Green New Deal met implacable opposition from the fossil fuel industry and hostile forces in both the Democratic and Republic parties. Upon his election as president, Donald Trump declared the Green New Deal dead and proceeded to devastate both climate protection and social justice.

Nonetheless, even in the Trump era the Green New Deal has continued as a force in American life – from below. It has continued to be implemented through little-noticed initiatives by community groups, unions, city and state governments, tribes, and other nonfederal actors pursuing the climate protection and social justice goals of the Green New Deal. I have described it as the “Green New Deal from Below.”

The Green New Deal has proved perennial because it addresses the basic problems faced by our people and planet. It is a project that in all its varied manifestations takes the necessity for climate protection as the basis for a broad program for social reconstruction — a visionary program designed to protect the earth’s climate while creating good jobs, reducing injustice, and eliminating poverty. It can be the basis for what many have called a “just transition” to a climate-safe world.

The Green New Deal 2.0 and the Polycrisis

The Green New Deal project is more necessary than ever. But many things have changed since the earlier Green New Deals. We need to redefine the Green New Deal for today, tomorrow, and the long-range future. Let’s call it the Green New Deal 2.0.

The Green New Deal 2.0 will not be defined by one or another thinker or leader, but by a broad social process of dialogue and experiment. This series is offered as a contribution to that social process.

In earlier Green New Deals, the elimination of fossil fuel extraction and burning was a costly though necessary duty. Today, “Greentech” — technology that reduces or repairs harm to the environment – is transforming the economics of energy and therefore of the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal 2.0 will be potentiated by a Greentech revolution that makes fossil free energy cheaper and more competitive than fossil fuel energy.

The emergence of the first Green New Deal coincided with the end of a long period of economic globalization combined with the geopolitical hegemony of the United States. That has been followed by what is often referred to as the “Polycrisis,” a period of global disorder that continues to intensify day by day. The Green New Deal 2.0 will have to survive and develop under the conditions created by the Polycrisis. And to succeed it will need — working with other forces — to quell the Polycrisis and establish a viable world order.

Here are some of the key dynamics of the Polycrisis that a Green New Deal 2.0 will have to contend with:

• Climate devastation: The extraction and burning of fossil fuels has continued to grow, leading to a rapid increase in fires, floods, storms, heatwaves, and other devastating manifestations of global warming.
• Inequality: The world’s 12 richest billionaires now have more wealth than the poorest half of humanity, or more than four billion people; meanwhile, one in four people globally face hunger.
• Democracy Deficit: Countries around the world face autocratic, plutocratic, and kleptocratic rule; repression of political opposition; degradation of electoral procedures; and monopolization of communications media.
• Rise of Fascist and Para-Fascist Movements: Parties and movements with fascist characteristics, such as authoritarianism, racism, hostility towards migrants, abuse of women, suppression of dissent, expanded policing powers, celebration of violence, and might-makes-right ideologies control many countries, exercise de-facto veto powers in many others, and impose terror and brutality on many peoples.
• Fragmented Globalization: While globalization as a regulated system has largely broken down, international trade has continued to grow, but it is increasingly shaped by geopolitical economic warfare focused on the struggle to control global economic networks, such as data flows, platform rules, AI systems, and the critical minerals and energy infrastructures that power them.
• Unleashed Warfare: There are at least 65 active conflicts across 35 countries, the highest number recorded since World War II – with a doubling of international conflicts from four to eight since 2024. The objectives of military power have expanded from defense and domination to outright plunder; as the International Crisis Group put it, Trump’s “lawlessness, revisionism and cavalier use of force” risk “normalizing the idea that war is an OK way for powerful states to get what they want.” According to an analysis of “Systemic Risk And Escalation Dynamics In Global Politics,”

“The 2026–2027 period marks a critical phase in the international system, best described as a systemic crisis of governability. Across multiple regions, crises—both active and latent—are increasingly interconnected, creating conditions in which local tensions can quickly escalate into broader instability. . . and trigger escalation beyond political control.”

• Vicious Circles of Conflict: Conflicts aggravated by tit-for-tat escalation are creating dangers that are in nobody’s interest and that nobody can control. The war between Ukraine and Russia, with their European, Chinese, and other backers and their American manipulator seeking opportunities for plunder provides a prime example: the war has produced growing levels of devastating bombing of civilian areas on both sides; cycles of drone war escalation; and threats of nuclear escalation.

• Address by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy to the Parliament of Lithuania. Photo credit: The Presidential Office of Ukraine, Wikipedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

• Breakdown of International Cooperation: International cooperation for peacekeeping, arms limitation, climate protection, economic cooperation, water use, fighting pandemics and other public health threats, and action to address threats from new technologies, such as nanotechnology, drones, and Artificial Intelligence, have atrophied or worse. Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. entirely from 66 international organizations responsible for addressing such global needs.
• Rising and Resisting Powers: The Polycrisis is marked by the rivalry between China and the U.S. –an example of what is sometimes known as the “Thucydides trap” of conflict between rising and dominant powers.
• War Crime Wave: Israel, backed by the U.S., has conducted what the International Court of Justice has found may constitute genocide in violation of international law. Both Russia and Ukraine are conducting massive attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure that are clearly crimes against humanity. The US attack on Iran is nothing but a war of aggression – itself a war crime. International law, often flouted in practice, is now being openly scorned in principle. Donald Trump said in a recent interview with The New York Times, “I don’t need international law.” His aide Steven Miller explicitly spelled out the doctrine of might makes right: “We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
• Geopolitics Trumps All: The wellbeing of people, democratic governance, and even the survival of humanity have all been made subservient to the pursuit of superpower domination. This reality was recognized in Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s widely publicized Davos proclamation of “a rupture in the world order” where “geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no constraints. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.” Polycrisis geopolitics is now shifting, to borrow a term from Richard Falk, toward “nihilistic geopolitics” oblivious to meaning, morality, or knowledge. Rational, realistic pursuit of national self-interest is increasingly passing over into bullying and plunder, with little regard to their actual consequences.
• Incoherence: The Polycrisis is complex, contradictory, and chaotic. Apparent trends and tendencies conflict. Policymaking is increasingly erratic, incoherent, and self-contradictory, with results far different from those intended.
• Unpredictability: The world order has become even more unpredictable. As Margaret MacMillan put it in the New York Times, “We are living in a time of what’s been called radical uncertainty. We are in a transition in which the previous system is unraveling but we don’t yet know what comes next.”
• Decline of Social Learning: World actors increasingly plunge into self-destructive actions without recognition that past experience has proven their futility. Aggressive use of tariffs in the past has regularly led to trade wars and mutual impoverishment, yet it is burgeoning. Rearmament and other preparation for war predictably leads not only to mutual impoverishment, but to increased likelihood of military conflagration, yet it continues to escalate. Maniacal investment in bubbles like AI have repeatedly led to devastating crashes, yet the mania continues without either public or private restraint.
• The folly factor: As the Polycrisis deepens, the gap between rational self-interest and foolishness grows wider. As Monica Duffy Toft pointed out in the New York Times, the withering of cooperation to address common threats leads to “more flashpoints among nuclear-armed powers, more nuclear proliferation, less cooperation on global threats and a system structurally incapable of mitigating the risks it creates.”

While each of these dynamics is devastating in itself, their interaction makes the Polycrisis appear even more intractable.

Every aspect of a Green New Deal 2.0 will be affected by every aspect of the Polycrisis. Obviously, the Green New Deal 2.0 will not be able to quell the Polycrisis all by itself or all at one blow. But quelling it must be the horizon and provide the perspective from which it works. In particular, the Green New Deal 2.0 must

• Halt fossil fuel burning to halt global warming
• Implement the Greentech revolution to halt fossil fuel burning
• Use the Greentech revolution to reverse deteriorating social conditions for people in the U.S. and around the world
• Establish global cooperation sufficient to achieve these objectives