📣📣📣 Today, we’re releasing “Stop Greed, Build Green,” a strategic framework and agenda to confront the affordability crisis and the climate crisis together by putting working people in charge of the economy and the climate transition. Most voters want their elected officials to address both crises together—and they believe it is possible. Tap the link in our bio to see how we can get there.
Our new report uncovers how the country’s insurance crisis:
— Hampers the development & viability of affordable housing supply
— Gives insurance companies de facto permitting authority
— Leads to deferred building upgrades & green retrofits, making life worse for tenants
The report maps out the many points at which property and liability insurance shape how affordable housing can be built and maintained. There are overlapping types and timelines of insurance coverage affordable housing operators must have, and price hikes or coverage cuts in each one produces a new financial strain.
Squeezed by insurance, affordable housing providers may have little choice but to raise rents (when legally allowed) or increase fees, or make cuts in maintenance budgets.
This then makes buildings less resilient to damage—including from climate-related disasters— as repairs go undone and conditions worsen.
Tenants and tenant organizers may not think much about the insurance difficulties faced by their landlords—but when the result is increased rents and fees, or deferred maintenance and green upgrades, affordability and quality of life deteriorates for tenants.
Affordable housing operators are turning to alternatives, like captive insurers. Such alternatives provide important release valves. But their piecemeal nature inevitably falls short in tackling the magnitude of the crisis, especially when it comes to disaster coverage.
When the current system or piecemeal tools fail, the public sector is left picking up the tab, whether through additional subsidies to housing operators, tenants turning to safety net programs, or post-disaster recovery aid. Meanwhile, insurance companies continue to prioritize profits rather than housing protection.
Instead, we large-scale interventions that put the public sector in the driver’s seat even before a crisis hits, like:
— CCI’s Housing Resilience Agency
— Green Social Housing
— Creative public programs for pooling liability risk like Mayor Mamdani is pursuing
Read the report at climateandcommunity.org (🔗 in bio).
As @thea.nadja discussed in a recent episode of @macrodosepod , the cost-of-living crisis and the climate crisis are both fueled by the same forces: war, extractivism, and fossil capital. Getting out of both requires a muscular, democratic state pushing through a new energy system and a new political system. Contrary to the “everyone wins” framing, there has to be a major loser: the fossil fuel industry.
Visit stopgreedbuildgreen.org (link in bio) to see our framework for building the public sector while reining in the drivers of economic and climate catastrophe.
Come work for us! We’re looking for a Policy Director to join our team. Visit climateandcommunity.org/careers for the full job description and link to apply 📋
Affordability and decarbonization aren’t at odds—they go hand in hand. Conservatives have long pitted them against each other, but that’s not the real fight. It’s about who pays. A well-managed renewable energy buildout shifts hoarded wealth away from rich companies and individuals to productive programs that lower household expenses today.
Even before the US-Israel war on Iran, we knew that renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels. In 2024, onshore wind cost 53% less than the cheapest fossil fuel, and utility-scale solar was 41% less. It’s the transition that’s expensive. But for who? Not the working class, if it’s done right.
To pay for the buildout—new energy generation, transmission, grid capacity, and critical minerals—while managing the wind-down of fossil fuels, we can tax windfall profits on oil and gas, repeal fossil fuel subsidies, raise taxes on corporations and the rich, and tax stock buybacks.
Through high food prices, high energy bills, and high home insurance premiums, working people are suffering the cost of fossil fuels and their impact on the climate. They need decarbonization now. If done right, decarbonization works on both the supply and demand side to push down prices. On supply, public investment builds new generation, transmission, and grid capacity. And on demand, it curbs high-energy consumption driving up costs for everyone else: AI data centers most of all, plus wealthy households.
The next climate bill should defang the firms keeping us stuck in a high-cost, high-emission reality. Read the full analysis on stopgreedbuildgreen.org (link in bio!)
@guardian_us has a new piece out today on our working class climate agenda, Stop Greed, Build Green (stopgreedbuildgreen.org). As the story makes clear, we believe that climate politics must directly address the cost-of-living crisis in order to win policies that are desperately needed in the US.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Green New Deal showed us that climate policy needs to be grounded in the everyday experience of people’s lives as they are now, or it won’t hold. It needs to be seen and felt. Stop Greed, Build Green can deliver that by lowering bills, capping prices, and making lives easier. We’re already seeing wins that advance a working class climate agenda, from mayoral campaigns in New York City and Seattle to organizations like the Chicago Teachers Union linking investment in schools to climate resilience. Stop Greed, Build Green is how the left can go even further.
NEW BRIEFING: Labor of the US Military-Industrial Complex: From Mid-Century Strengths to a Dead-End Future
Politicians and arms industry executives often justify increasing military spending — which in the United States has surpassed $1 trillion per year — as an economic stimulus that creates good jobs.
But despite government spending surpassing Cold War-era peaks, workers at private defense contracting firms find themselves in a declining industry when it comes to job creation and economic mobility.
Key Findings:
— Despite an ever-expanding Pentagon budget, employment at military contractors has plummeted over the past three decades.
— Average salaries have fallen despite jobs in the sector becoming increasingly white-collar, indicating a particularly sharp fall in wages for the blue-collar workforce.
— Union rates have declined sharply since the Cold War. For example, at least 69 percent of the Lockheed Corporation was unionized in 1971, while the manufacturing sector was approximately 50 percent unionized mid-century. The unionization rate today is 19 percent at Lockheed Martin and as low as 4 percent at Northrop Grumman.
— Labor unions have historically been, and continue to be an important entry point for dialogue around industry reform and alternatives.
Read our new briefing by Taylor Barnes at our website — link in bio.
@mayorofseattle joined our briefing to discuss how her policies align with our Green Economic Populism framework. Voters elected Katie Wilson in November 2025 after she made green social housing and environmental justice organizing a centerpiece of her campaign. Movements on the ground—from teachers to auto workers—are leading the fight to advance popular policies that address climate and affordability together. Visit the link in our bio to learn more.
It’s Tax Day 2026 — and the Trump administration is doling out a trillion dollar military budget, and trillions in tax breaks for the rich, while slashing public goods and social services for millions of Americans. 🤑
We know that Workers Deserve More — and we have to organize to win everything for everyone!🌹
Join DSA’s mass call with special guests, to learn what your tax dollars could be funding instead — and what we can do about it, together!
💸🌹💸
RSVP link in bio!
California has a grid problem—and a new initiative led by @uawregion6 and @asmcottie would help solve it while delivering:
💰$200B cumulative savings to CA ratepayers by 2050
⚙️12,000 jobs, including up to 4,600 direct jobs in grid equipment manufacturing
⚡Accelerated progress towards CA’s climate goals
On the demand side: the CGMI would undertake procurement of critical grid equipment with instruction from relevant CA agencies and stakeholders. With this information, it would run a centralized procurement process to lower/stabilize runaway prices and maximize purchasing power.
On the supply side: If the market is unable to meet demand in a timely and cost-effective way, CGMI would incentivize and/or enter joint venture agreements with manufacturers to grow high-road in-state production of critical grid components to meet the state's needs.
California needs this bold, innovative policy and planning to deliver on affordable energy bills, faster decarbonization, and union manufacturing jobs in a sector that’s vital to a livable future: the electric grid industry.
Read the report, "A New Era of Manufacturing for Public Good: The Case for the California Grid Manufacturing Initiative" on our website–🔗 in bio.
We’re sending a message on May Day: it’s time to put working people’s needs over the whims of billionaire psychopaths.
Mark May 1st now:
NO WORK
NO SCHOOL
NO SHOPPING
We need you to recruit with us and make May Day BIG. Working people have the power to shut down the status quo, but we need your help to prove it.
Learn how you can plug in at the link in our bio (or ask for the link in the comments and we’ll DM you!)
“We’ve had heavy bombers, US strategic bombers, being launched from British soil to strike Iran. It’s a key part of the US strategy and it means that we are unfortunately involved in this illegal and destabilising war.”
🎙️ Khem Rogaly on @LBC
