A Plan For A Green Economy

System Change and Climate Change

As the Green Party candidate for House District 75 in Ohio, I understand that green energy is our future. Green energy is an important stepping stone in the fight against the current capitalist system. Global warming is putting one of the biggest threats to our existence on this planet in full blast. We must actively fight for the environment like out lives depend on it because they do!

It is important to phase out all coal and nuclear power for our survival. I am the only candidate for House District 75 that is taking this real threat seriously. It is quite clear that production for profit is destroying our ecological communities. Fighting capitalism with more capitalism, or a "kinder" form of capitalism, cannot win because it is still built on the premise of environmental exploitation. Coal-based power does nothing but poison the world around us and nuclear power is nothing more than a ticking time bomb waiting for a natural disaster or human error. We must avocate for no more pipelines to poison our waterways and ruin Native lands.

Part of our Power to the People Plan includes enacting programs to build an alternative with green energy sources, solving the unemployment issue and the climate issue both at the same time. We must continue the fight after these alternative energy sources are built for municipal ownership and democratic control of energy in a non-profit and decentralized system. Today, so much carbon dioxide has already built up in our environment that it endangers islands, coastlines, and one-fifth to two-thirds of the world's species are due to extinction bu rising global temperatures. Yet, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans offer any real solutions to the crisis facing our planet. The only major party talking about the very real threat of climate catastrophe is the Green Party, with their flaws. We must, as socialists, realize climate change is real and a side-effect of capitalism. We must push against the destructive energy practices such as fracking, tar sands, offshore drilling, oil trains, mountaintop removal, natural gas pipelines, and uranium mines.

With a completely green energy sector, all imperialist wars for oil will be obsolete. You cannot have environmental justice without economic justice. We can reach a 100% green energy sector if we try. Nothing can stop the people when we band together and say "this has to go!"

Environmental justice is also anti-war, as the Pentagon has one of the highest carbon footprints of anyone anywhere. They routinely skirt environmental laws of countries they occupy and poison locals with dangerous chemicals. Plastic straw bans are nothing when it comes to the United States burying Agent Orange stashes (which are leaking into local rivers and poisoning farmers by the way) in Korea or having vehicles running on jet fuel. Environmentalism is anti-imperialism. The U.S. Empire must end & funds be diverted to serve the people.

-- Austin Bashore, September 27, 2018

What is ecosocialism?

Ecosocialism is a vision of a transformed society in harmony with nature, and the development of practices that can attain it. It is directed toward alternatives to all socially and ecologically destructive systems, such as patriarchy, racism, homophobia and the fossil-fuel based economy. It is based on a perspective that regards other species and natural ecosystems as valuable in themselves and as partners in a common destiny.