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green new deal
How Democrats Can Win on Climate and Energy Affordability
The party can lead by clearly explaining why electricity prices are rising and who bears responsibility, or they can surrender the narrative to corporate pundits and technocrats increasingly aligned with Big Tech.
Mar 20, 2026
The climate change conversation is shifting globally, especially in the United States, and Democrats need to get ahead of it. This is happening against the backdrop of US emissions rising by 2.4% in 2025, reversing a previous downward trend. President Donald Trump has reshaped the debate by waging an irrational crusade against wind and solar energy while maintaining deep financial ties to the fossil fuel industry. But Democrats face a political reality they can no longer sidestep: Electricity bills are rising, and working and middle-class Americans are feeling the squeeze.
Democrats have a choice, and they need to make it now. They can lead by clearly explaining why electricity prices are rising and who bears responsibility, or they can surrender the narrative to corporate pundits and technocrats increasingly aligned with Big Tech. That industry, with a long history of extraction and exploitation, is now racing to power massive AI data centers as quickly as possible, even if doing so locks in new fossil fuel infrastructure for decades.
The Truth About Rising Electricity Bills
The truth is more nuanced than fossil fuel lobby talking points suggest, and Democrats should convey it to voters clearly. Over the past three years, utility bills have risen largely because utilities have poured money into grid infrastructure, replacing aging poles and wires and repairing damage from increasingly frequent climate disasters. Generation costs, by contrast, have fallen. Roughly 90-94% of new electricity generation added in recent years has been fossil free, coming from wind, solar, and battery storage. The capital costs of all three technologies have declined exponentially.
Bills have also increased because regulatory barriers, permitting, and interconnection delays slow clean energy deployment, particularly in blue states. But this is not simply a matter of "bureaucracy." Corrupt politicians and captured regulators, often far too close to monopoly utilities like Duke Energy and AES, also share the blame. And in 2025, the problem is intensifying: Explosive demand from AI data centers is straining regional grids like PJM and pushing prices higher. Big Tech can absorb premium electricity rates. Working Americans cannot.
A modern Green New Deal framework can address affordability and climate simultaneously, and this is the platform Democrats should run on.
Geopolitics compound the problem. Electricity prices remain tethered to globally traded fossil fuels like oil and gas, leaving Americans exposed to price volatility beyond their control, such as recently as the war in Iran.
How Trump Is Making It Worse
Trump is not solving these problems. He is making them worse, and Democrats should make sure voters know it.
His vendetta against wind energy has already raised electricity prices in New England while eliminating thousands of well-paying union jobs. His efforts to gut clean energy tax credits have slowed deployment just as electricity demand surges, increasing pollution and locking the country into a feedback loop of climate disasters and rising costs. Coal, one of the most expensive sources of electricity, remains on life support in states like Michigan for purely political reasons. Meanwhile, the systematic undermining of climate science by fossil fuel propagandists at the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and NASA will only accelerate climate-driven inflation, affecting not just electricity prices but also food costs and insurance premiums.
Trump's closeness to fossil fuel executives makes his "drill, baby, drill" rhetoric politically convenient but economically hollow, and Democrats should call it out as such. Expanding domestic drilling or seizing Venezuelan oil will not lower electricity bills, because Big Oil has no incentive to sacrifice profits. Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission found that American oil companies colluded with OPEC to inflate gas prices, costing families roughly $3,000 more per year. At the same time, Trump has signaled deregulation of AI-driven electricity demand, as the same Big Tech oligarchs who funded his campaign are now calling the shots. If policymakers want real affordability, they must confront corporate consolidation and enforce regulations that protect consumers.
The Platform Democrats Should Run On
Despite earlier missteps, particularly President Joe Biden's dismissal of inflation concerns in 2024, Democrats now hold favorable polling ratings on both climate and affordability. Voters want leadership. If Democrats fail to provide it, they risk ceding the narrative to technocrats, Silicon Valley “abundance” ideologues, and fossil fuel interests offering false solutions: more drilling and the same broken status quo.
Warning signs are already visible. Pipeline revivals in New York and climate backsliding in North Carolina and California now masquerade as "affordability" measures. Democrats must reject this framing. Abandoning climate goals will not make energy cheaper. It will make it more volatile, more polluted, and more unjust.
Democrats have never excelled at confronting oligarchs, utilities, and monopolies. But if the party wants to win on affordability and build a durable governing coalition, this is the only path forward.
A modern Green New Deal framework can address affordability and climate simultaneously, and this is the platform Democrats should run on. We know what works. Leaders like Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York and Gov. Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey have shown that linking climate action to cost of living is a winning strategy. Democrats can tax the wealthy and corporate polluters to fund clean energy at scale. They can invoke the Defense Production Act to manufacture heat pumps, grid components, and other critical infrastructure domestically. They can streamline permitting for clean energy and transmission lines without dismantling environmental protections.
Polluters like Exxon and Chevron must also pay their fair share. "Make polluters pay" is not merely a campaign slogan. It is a practical funding mechanism for grid resilience, climate adaptation, and public health, and a message that resonates.
The Courage to Confront Corporate Power
Just as importantly, Democrats must confront corporate power directly and truly build on recent wins in New York to expand building power capacity. Regulators who prioritize shareholder returns over the public interest must face accountability. Policymakers must regulate Big Tech's AI build-out and require companies to pay for the grid upgrades their data centers demand. Innovative clean energy procurement, such as Google's early efforts to match data center demand with carbon-free power and flexible load management, should set the baseline, not serve as the exception. Early collaboration among utilities, the DOE, and regulatory bodies like the Federa Energy Regulatory Commission can also create incentives to use AI to modernize the grid, streamline clean energy interconnection and permitting, discover new battery materials, and predict climate disasters.
None of this happens without political courage. Democrats have never excelled at confronting oligarchs, utilities, and monopolies. But if the party wants to win on affordability and build a durable governing coalition, this is the only path forward. The 2026 midterm elections are already shaping up to be a crucial test, with some candidates taking the lead by addressing voters' real concerns about data center build-outs and rising electricity prices in their communities. Democrats have a golden opportunity to win on this. The playbook is right here. Will they use it?
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What My Jewish Family’s Holocaust Experience Teaches Me About an Appalachian Mamdani
Sam Rasoul, a Palestinian-American State Legislator in Virginia, campaigns on affordability amid false charges of anti-Semitism.
Oct 31, 2025
In 2019, I visited my ancestral home in a small town in northwestern Germany named Prussian Oldendorf. Through genealogical research, I had learned that my Jewish ancestors—I am 100% Ashkenazi Jew genetically, as well as a proud Jew by upbringing and choice—had lived there for centuries, until my great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Cahen, a single mother with six children, fled persecution by the German authorities and immigrated to America in 1859.
I had read that there was a Jewish cemetery just outside of town that had been made intentionally hard to find because neo-Nazis had desecrated it in the 1980s. I found the cemetery and saw that many of the gravestones were my direct ancestors with the last name of Cahen, my mother’s maiden name. I also found the gravesite for Philipp Cahen, Rosalie’s husband and my great-great-grandfather.
Additionally, with the help of an old college friend from Germany who lives close to Prussian Oldendorf and who did much of the research necessary to make my visit possible, I found the retired pastor of the town’s 500-year-old Lutheran church who had restored the Jewish cemetery after its desecration. The pastor, who had protected and maintained the cemetery for decades, had come to Prussian Oldendorf at the end of World War II, having fled the Red Army as it rolled west as part of the destruction of the Third Reich. The pastor told me he had spoken out—to the great dismay of many of his parishioners—about how the townsfolk had remained silent during the Holocaust as their Jewish neighbors were disappeared.
According to the pastor, every single Jew in that town—save for one—was sent to the extermination camps and murdered by the Nazis.
As I was getting ready to leave Prussian Oldendorf, I walked past the Lutheran church, and something caught my eye on the ground.
There were small square stones, which I later learned were known across Europe as Stolpersteine or stumbling stones, embedded in the cobblestone courtyard surrounding the church. Inscribed upon the stumbling stones were the names of the townsfolk who were sent to the camps, when they had died, and the names of the camps.
Treblinka
Terezin
Sobibor
Auschwitz
Many of those stumbling stones bore our family name, Cahen.
Seeing these stones, I crumbled to the ground and cried, right there outside the church. When I was finally able to compose myself, I did two things. First, I quietly cursed the monsters who committed these atrocities: “You bastards.”
And then I thanked my great-great-grandmother Rosalie for having had the courage to leave some 80 years before the Holocaust because, if she had stayed, her descendants surely would have been exterminated. Suddenly, the old saying, “There but for the grace of God go I,” had a special and very tangible resonance.
Which brings me to Sam Rasoul, a proud Palestinian-American state legislator who has represented southwestern Virginia and Roanoke City in the Virginia General Assembly since 2014. Like Zohran Mamdani, a fellow Muslim state legislator who is campaigning on a platform of affordability for working people and who is poised to become the next Mayor of New York City, Rasoul leans into speaking out against injustices, including in Palestine. However, he does so not because he is Muslim nor because of his Palestinian heritage—he speaks out because he believes in intersectional justice for all, as evidenced by his work for the communities he represents.
As Rasoul puts it:
In my 11 years in the General Assembly, I have worked to lower healthcare costs, pushed for intersectional justice through a Green New Deal, advanced the socioemotional health of our children, fought to raise teacher pay to the national average, and advocated for good government in limiting the influence of special interests in our government.
I have worked closely with Delegate Rasoul for almost 10 years in environmental justice fights in Virginia that he has helped to foster and lead, most particularly the fight to save the historic African American community of Union Hill in Buckingham County. Union Hill was under assault by Dominion Energy, the state’s monopoly utility company, which wanted to build a massive pipeline compressor station there as part of the now-cancelled Atlantic Coast Pipeline. That fight was won through a relentless coalition-building campaign that brought together diverse communities from across the Commonwealth, and with the help of national civil rights organizations.
Delegate Rasoul was at the forefront of what would become the winning fight to save Union Hill, and he helped bring along most of his Democratic colleagues to join that fight. During that campaign, I watched as, at first, Rasoul worked quietly behind the scenes to garner support from his colleagues in the House for Union Hill, and then as he galvanized national support for the fight, travelling out of state to meet with Karenna Gore, a prominent environmental justice advocate and the daughter of former Vice President Al Gore, also an environmental champion. Rasoul’s work complemented the work of many others, particularly those who lived in the frontline community of Union Hill, and their efforts culminated in a large rally in Buckingham County featuring former Vice President Gore and civil rights leader Rev. William Barber II.
I came to know Delegate Sam Rasoul—his given name, Salam Rasoul, means “peace messenger”—as a kind and decent family man and a relentlessly positive and inclusive politician.
Rasoul is now running for reelection, and he has been attacked by his Republican-turned-“independent” opponent as “consumed with hate,” a laughably false smear, as anyone who has actually met or knows Rasoul can attest. Some in his own party have even chimed in, citing his outspoken denunciation of what Israel has done to Gaza for the past three years.
So let me say this as directly as I can—as a proud Jew who was not only brought up in a Zionist household, but whose relatives were exterminated in one of the greatest genocides in human history.
Let me say this as someone who understands the lessons of my own family heritage, that “never again” means never again—for anyone.
Israel has committed, and continues to commit, unspeakable war crimes against innocent civilians, mostly women and children—in Gaza.
Israel has committed, and continues to commit, genocide in Gaza, and is now moving to the West Bank.
As with the Holocaust, the years that follow will show who was on the right side of history, who spoke out, and who remained silent. I believe I am on the right side of history, and many proud Jews like me are not only on the right side of history but are helping to lead the worldwide movement to stop the genocide.
Delegate Rasoul is also on the right side of history.
But Rasoul is not running for reelection in Appalachia because Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Rasoul is running so he can continue to do what he has always done: fight injustice, and deliver for the people he represents in Roanoke—on pocketbook issues, affordability, healthcare, education, utility bills, environmental justice, and more.
If Rasoul prevails on November 4, it will represent a defeat for the politics of cynicism and demonization and a victory for the politics of inclusivity and lifting up communities.
It will send a message from Appalachia and beautiful Southwest Virginia all the way to New York and Washington, DC and around the world, that denouncing a genocide is a moral imperative, born of generations of tragedy, for all communities.
Most importantly, if Rasoul wins, it will prove that “never again” truly means never again for anyone, and that we should not only tolerate, but encourage, politicians denouncing injustice while simultaneously fighting for the basic needs of the communities they represent.
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Progressive Activist Avi Lewis Launches Bid for NDP Leadership in Canada
Lewis said NDP must “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
Sep 25, 2025
The longtime progressive activist Avi Lewis officially launched his bid for leadership of Canada's New Democratic Party, which he aims to revitalize with a platform of economic populism.
Lewis, a journalist and documentarian whose grandfather helped to found the NDP in 1961, says the way to bring the party back to relevance amid an electoral low point is to “fling the doors wide open, and build a party for the 99%.”
At a kickoff party in Toronto on Wednesday, the former parliamentary candidate from Vancouver railed against the “Liberal-Conservative alliance” that dominates Canadian politics. The two major parties' leaders, Lewis said, "compete fiercely in public, while behind the scenes, they collude to boost corporate profits."
"In the name of protecting the country, the government is rapidly passing and proposing legislation that will change the culture and character of Canada," Lewis said. "From sweeping aside Indigenous rights and environmental protections for so-called nation-building projects, to rolling back higher taxes on the uberwealthy and digital giants, to the generational austerity of 15% cuts to public spending, to the $9 billion that materialized in an instant for the military this year, ramping up to $150 billion a year a decade from now—the changes afoot are extreme."
Lewis pledged to “build a government that is an instrument for the people, not for corporate Canada.”
The NDP—once Canada's third-largest national political party—has been ailing of late after a dismal showing in the nation's most recent parliamentary elections. The party, which held over 100 seats 14 years ago, dropped to a new low of just seven seats in 2025, not enough to even be recognized for committee assignments or federal funding.
The humiliating showing resulted in the resignation of Jagmeet Singh, who'd led the party for eight years, but was widely criticized by those on the left for his coziness with the establishment of the dominant Liberal Party and his failure to keep the NDP competitive. It is in this state of "political wilderness" that Lewis has emerged with an ambitious change agenda.
(Video: Avi Lewis for NDP Leader)
"Life in Canada today feels on the edge," Lewis said in a video released last week announcing his leadership run. "Everyone seeking a little stability, everyone being told 'You're all on your own.'"
He identified several causes of that precarity. One was the "economic attack" from US President Donald Trump, whom Lewis described as sending "disruption grenades" in the form of steep tariffs and annexation threats. But Lewis said that Trump merely "magnifies... the everyday emergency of trying to get by in an impossible economy."
According to one survey conducted in July, 57% of Canadians said their current incomes did not allow them to afford basic necessities like housing, groceries, energy, and cell phone plans.
"Working hard doesn't earn you a living," Lewis said.
"These days, every politician claims to be shocked by the costs," he continued. "What they don't talk about is why: The billions in profits for the tiny group of corporations that control every part of our economy. Three phone providers, three grocery giants, five oil companies, and the five big banks that fund them."
Lewis' plan to confront corporate power is years in the making. Alongside his wife, the acclaimed journalist and author Naomi Klein, Lewis rolled out the Leap Manifesto in 2015 as an agenda for the NDP. Leap focused on confronting the climate crisis, but its contents formed the basis of what he now refers to as a "Green New Deal." The accelerating climate emergency remains at the center of his agenda in 2025.
"Oil and gas CEOs," he said in the video, are "not just hoarding extreme wealth," but "foreclosing on our shared future."
Lewis has never held a parliamentary office, though he has run for a federal Vancouver-area seat twice before and achieved two third-place finishes, receiving 26% of the vote in 2021 and 12.5% in 2025.
In his bid to lead NDP, he has so far leaned heavily into his family legacy and his reputation as a lifelong activist who has "butted heads with the powerful," over issues like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the privatization of healthcare and public transit.
"For four decades," he said, "I have stood with workers, telling stories of working-class heroes and organizing for dignity in factories and fields, classrooms and care homes, shop floors and fishing fleets."
Lewis, who also identified free trade deals as job killers, proposed a "Green New Deal" as a means to revive Canadian industry and create "millions of good-paying jobs."
He has also proposed a wealth tax, a national cap on rent increases, a public option for groceries, and expanded universal healthcare that covers "medication to mental health."
During his speech Wednesday night, Lewis described NDP as "the only party that can accurately diagnose the cause of our everyday emergency, and offer solutions as big as the crises we face."
"The federal government has the power, the resources, and the responsibility to ensure the fundamentals of a good life—healthy food, truly affordable housing, functioning public transit, and hey, maybe a proper vacation once in a while," he said. "But we won’t get it if we don’t fight for it. And that’s where the NDP comes in. After all, the NDP is the original party of workers’ struggle. And in this moment of epic change and uncertainty, the party is needed as never before."
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