Legal Analysis

State & Regional Climate Strategies

The States as Green New Deal Policy Labs


The Green New Deal resolution’s climate provisions illustrate the dramatic scope and scale of the change needed to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The resolution envisions a ten-year period of economic and societal change to begin making progress on its climate goals.

The first step toward building a scheme that involves all levels of government is to assess the policy structures that already exist. States and local governments have been working to achieve similar objectives for decades, serving as a proving ground for policy tools that could be used to reach the resolution’s targets.

In this paper, we focus on three major environmental and energy goals from the Green New Deal and review relevant state efforts to assess which policy tools are well-suited to the resolution’s goals.