WHAT IS THE GREEN NEW DEAL?

The Global Green New Deal forms a key part of the Green Economy Initiative launched by UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) with leading world economists in reaction to the global economic crisis that hit in late 2008.
With the aim of ‘triggering an employment boom in the 21st century’, the UNEP project aligns itself with President Obama’s promise to create 5 million new ‘green collar’ jobs as part of his administration’s $150 billion ‘Apollo Project’. In fact, the term itself is a reference to US President Roosevelt's New Deal programme launched during The Great Depression of the 1930s, and seeks to take the current economic crisis as an opportunity to build an entirely new economic future based on sustainable development, clean energy and environmental management.
So what does all this actually mean? An excellent distillation and evaluation of the key challenges ahead can be found in the nef (the new economics foundation) report A Green New Deal. It provides a policy framework for preventing a global economic ‘triple crunch’ - the combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and soaring energy prices underpinned by an encroaching peak in oil production.