White House hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will unveil his climate plan Thursday during a trip to California.
Sanders’s campaign said the Vermont Independent will release his “groundbreaking and comprehensive Green New Deal” that would combat climate change and “create 20 million jobs in the process” before touring the damage of the 2018 Camp Fire wildfire and hosting a town hall.
{mosads}Sanders has been a staunch advocate for the version of the Green New Deal that was introduced in Congress, a sweeping plan that seeks to reverse the impact of climate change by working to boost America’s reliance on clean energy sources and investing in eco-friendly jobs, among other things.
Climate change has become a flashpoint among the nearly two dozen Democratic presidential contenders, with all agreeing on the overall goal of pivoting toward clean energy sources but arguing that the nuances of their own plan makes them best situated to tackle climate change.
Sanders went after former Vice President Joe Biden, the primary field’s front-runner, earlier this year after reports emerged that he would seek a “middle ground” on the climate.
“There is no ‘middle ground’ when it comes to climate policy. If we don’t commit to fully transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels, we will doom future generations. Fighting climate change must be our priority, whether fossil fuel billionaires like it or not,” he tweeted in May.
Climate change has emerged as one of the top animating issues for the Democratic base, with an April CNN poll finding that 96 percent of Democrats believed it was “very” or “somewhat” important to take “aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change.”