 Hello everyone, thank you for attending the Green New Deal Public Assembly, special thanks to our partner hosts at the Queens Museum right here in New York's 14th Congressional District and Columbia University. I'm so excited that we're here talking today about the Green New Deal. And I think as we go through our conversations today, it's important to remember that ultimately the Green New Deal is centered on three core principles. The first is the full decarbonization of the U.S. economy. We are the precipice of the climate crisis and in order for us to do that we need to mobilize our entire economy. So that's the core principle. The second core principle is a just transition for all frontline communities and that just transition allows us to center the most impacted communities in the climate crisis and address issues of environmental injustice. And the third, of course, is to create millions of jobs in the process. Historically, people, frankly, lots of folks from the fossil fuel industry have tried to make environmental legislation anti-economic stimulus and anti-jobs legislation. We're here to reject that paradigm outright and to show that in order to decarbonize our community we can infuse and center justice for the most impacted while creating millions of jobs in the United States of America. So from housing to energy policy, all of this is possible, we just need to create the policy to do it. How can the Green New Deal justly eliminate the use of fossil fuels? So one of the core principles of the Green New Deal, as I had mentioned, is the just transition. What a just transition does is that it brings in and centers the folks that would be impacted economically or otherwise by a given policy. And so what that means for us is that when we first proposed the Green New Deal, some of the first meetings that we took were with coal miners in order to figure out how we were going to transition these communities and make sure that the jobs that are created are not just created in cities, but that they're also created in rural communities that really stand to lose in industry if we transitioned away from coal. And some of the conclusions that we got from that, for example, was to include in the Green New Deal the fully funded pensions of coal miners, for which frankly big coal was actually trying to fight against. So it is entirely possible for us to create a just transition for those that would be economically impacted. How can the Green New Deal meaningfully avoid green gentrification? This is a really important question because historically, and this aligns with how economic injustice has been stratified where the dirtiest and most polluted communities have been the poorest and the greenest, most energy and efficient communities have been the richest. And what the Green New Deal seeks to do is to say that decarbonized buildings are not a luxury, but they are frankly part of our view of health and health care as being right. Nobody should be able to, no one should be subjecting their child to higher asthma rates or even being exposed to lead exposure or cancer just because they are lower income. So what we do here is that we center, going back to our principles of centering frontline communities, we bring in folks from these communities to design solutions for themselves. And this is evident especially in our most recent proposal this week with the Green New Deal for public housing, where public housing residents along with experts and scientists were able to come together and develop a transformational policy that centers public housing residents without displacing public housing residents. How can the Green New Deal equitably include frontline communities, workers and non-U.S. citizens? You know, this is another great question. One of the reasons that we're so excited about the Green New Deal is because this is exactly who the Green New Deal is creating economic opportunities for. It's for the working class of the United States and because we're rooted in principles of universality, which means no ifs, ands or buts in terms of who is included in our policy. We include absolutely everyone and quite recently in September, October, we introduced our Just Society legislation, which is also rooted in principles of universality, which means the systems that we're going to create and the systems that we advocate for, whether it's a federal jobs guarantee or whether it's Medicare for all, we are not adding any asterisks. If you are in the United States, you will be part of the prosperity that we're creating together. Can you give us a few concluding thoughts? You know, I think one of the things that's so important that we remember about the Green New Deal is that this is movement based public policy. And what movement based public policy means is that no one person has all the answers, myself included. And so what that means is that when we talk about the full decarbonization of the United States economy, every single person has a seat at the table and is capable of pushing and leading transformational change in any given sector of the economy. So I would just say, don't be afraid to step up and to step in, whether you're passionate about regenerative agriculture, as some of our colleagues from Maine and other agricultural communities are passionate about, whether you're passionate about energy policy, housing, healthcare policy and low carbon work like childcare, which our economy is starting to transition largely to, please feel free to step up and play a role. We will build a Green New Deal together and it's not just about any one person, but all of us contributing to public policy.