I've taken this release straight off Caroline Lucas's new website. There could not be a more important or contemporary topic:
http://www.carolinelucas.org.uk/green-new-deal.php
As the economy hits the buffers, Green leadership candidate Caroline Lucas called for the party to back a 'Green New Deal', to tackle the credit crunch, soaring oil prices and the costs of climate change.
Caroline Lucas said:
"These overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm, of a severity which hasn't been seen since the Great Depression, with potentially devastating consequences.
"As one of the people who helped launch the 'Green New Deal', I'll be asking the party to back the aim of implementing a 'Green New Deal' at the top of our policy-agenda for the Party.
"The 'triple crunch' of financial meltdown, climate change and 'peak oil' has its origins firmly rooted in the current model of globalisation. Financial deregulation has facilitated the creation of almost limitless credit.
"With this credit boom has come irresponsible patterns of lending, creating inflated bubbles in assets such as property, and powering environmentally unsustainable economic growth and consumption.
"Only the Green Party has the policies to respond to this unprecedented situation. A Green New Deal is the key to solving the deeply-worrying crisis we face; there is no business-as-usual solution.
"If elected as leader of the Green Party, I would want to make the case directly against the policies of Brown, Cameron and Clegg and for a Green New Deal: for a structural transformation of the regulation of national and international financial systems, and for a sustained programme to invest in and deploy energy conservation and renewable energies, coupled with effective demand management.
"We can beat – and turn back – the rising price of heating your home, the cost of living and the threat to our livelihoods.
"I believe that over the next two years the Green Party can change the political agenda and – through growing our representation in the Westminster and Brussels Parliaments – can start to affect policy radically and rapidly."
Dr. Lucas was one of the 9 members of the 'Green New Deal group' that has designed the 'Green New Deal' plan.
Other members include Larry Elliott, Economics Editor of the Guardian, Tony Juniper, former Director of Friends of the Earth, Jeremy Leggett, founder and Chairman of Solarcentury and SolarAid, & Ann Pettifor, former head of the Jubilee 2000 debt relief campaign.
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