Since the fundamental requirement for solving our fossil-fuel addiction and moving to a clean energy future is a rising price on carbon emissions, I will send Carbon Tax legislation to Congress, because if we refuse to make fossil fuels pay for their damage to human health, the environment, and our children's future, fossil fuels will remain the cheapest energy and we will squeeze every last drop from tar sands, oil shale, deep ocean oil deposits, and pristine federal lands, exacerbating both environmental calamity and increased carbon in the atmosphere.
We will take immediate steps to develop a New Green Deal, "a new green industrial revolution" that supports the new technologies that can confront and overcome the challenge of climate change. This New Green Deal will include a revenue-neutral carbon tax, with all revenues returned to taxpayers as payroll tax cuts. It will also include a federal living wage indexed to inflation and a repeal of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act to help the less fortunate deal with climate change's economic setbacks. We will re-regulate the financial sector and enact a Tobin tax of 0.25 percent on all cross-border financial transactions. We will also redirect 50 percent of military spending to generate public-works projects to harden dams, coastal nuclear plants, airports, and other vital infrastructure against sea rise and flooding, improve food and water security against drought, give America a world-class public-transportation system, retrofit 10 million homes with energy-conserving insulation, and power America with 50 percent renewable energy by 2020, and 100 percent by 2030.
Our "New Green Deal" will also authorize the creation of the Climate-Change Corps (the CCC), an organization much like the Peace Corps that will offer climate-change mitigation and adaptation technology and techniques to developing nations who desperately need our help. We will also create an industrial council on climate change to develop a corporate and business road map for reducing fossil-fuel use, achieving sustainable energy goals, and achieving zero waste.
My administration will apply the climate-change test broadly, to decisions ranging from flood insurance to federal road projects, and all executive departments will from now on factor in climate impacts to a host of decisions, including how to construct or fund new federal and state projects and rebuild after disasters.
In the next 100 days, I will issue executive orders as well as sending legislation to Congress requiring electric utilities to face stricter carbon limits because when it comes to power plants being able to emit unlimited carbon for free: "That's not right, that's not safe, and it needs to stop."
My administration will also begin negotiations with the United Nations and the world's largest carbon emitters to secure international climate agreements by the end of my term as President. It's time for the U.S. to lead on climate, negotiating binding treaties and accords on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Religions across the spectrum -- Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and indigenous peoples -- stand united in seeing climate change as a moral and ethical challenge. Delaying real change is intolerable for anyone who sees the danger. Of course, I do not expect such dramatic and sudden change to come easily or without hardship. But failure is not an option. In the case of climate change, it is not even an alternative. We must have enough food to eat and water to drink. We must be able to live in a world where our infrastructure and government institutions are not threatened at every turn by catastrophic random climatic events. Again, as during the debate over slavery more than 150 years ago, we face an undeniable moral imperative to act quickly and decisively.
I close by asking by what name will future generations know our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the age of the Great Unraveling, when profligate consumption exceeded Earth's capacity to sustain, when greed and political corruption led to an accelerating wave of collapsing environmental systems, violent competition for what remained of the planet's resources, and a dramatic die back of the human population? Or will they look back in joyful celebration on the time of the Great Turning, when their forebears courageously embraced the better angels of their human nature, turned crisis into opportunity, and learned to live in creative partnership with one another and the Earth?
Good night, thank you, and God bless the United States of America.
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