Simply from greening our energy system and eliminating fossil fuel pollution, we get so much healthier that the savings in health care alone are enough to pay the costs of the green energy transition and would repay those costs in approximately a decade and a half in savings.
This is sort of the epitome of the economic elite that is converging with a political elite. It's not only the banks and insurance companies. It's the war industry and private prisons. Certainly the fossil fuel agencies. It's not only that they're supporting this campaign, they're supporters of the Clinton Foundation. And where the Clinton Foundation ends and Hillary's [Clinton] political actions begin, that too is quite troubling.
With living wage jobs, basically 20 million of them to help jump-start a sustainable and healthy economy, with an insured, just transition, for example, for workers in both the fossil fuel and in the weapons industry, because they all need to transition to sustainable forms of production. This is also our answer to the departure of manufacturing jobs and good jobs by creating the manufacturing base here for clean renewable energy and the efficiency systems and public transportation to put these workers to work in jobs that are actually good for them.
When Cuba lost their fossil fuel pipeline when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. Overnight they had no choice, they had to transition to clean energy, they didn't have any fuel to burn, and they also had to transition to a healthy food system, an organic system - their economy is crashing, this was not a planned transition. This was a crisis, but a crisis nonetheless, in which pollution went away. And it's very instructive to see what happened to their health.
I have the unique liberty as part of the Green Party that operates on the same terms. We have the ability to actually speak for everyday Americans. We are not controlled by major donors, by the influence of big banks, by fossil fuel giants, by war profiteers or insurance companies.
This administration [of Barack Obama] has massively expanded fossil fuel extraction. So while they give lip service to it, they actually do not walk the walk that we need to walk if we are going to get out of here alive.
Let me say two things about the costs - one is that there are detailed studies that show this, this is what some of the Stanford studies show, in fact, that we get so healthier, so much more healthy, when we eliminate fossil fuel pollution - 200,000 [fewer] premature deaths a year for example. And that's just the death part of it. Not to mention the asthma part of it, the heart attacks and the strokes and the cancers. And we also call for a healthy food system that prioritizes sustainable healthy local food production.
Most progressive in the Democratic Party doesn't cut it, you know. If we still can't have a health care system that provides health care as a human right, if we still cannot, you know, ban fracking and fossil fuels and move like our lives depend on it - you know, we say in the next 15 years we need to phase out fossil fuels.
While we've doubled renewable energy, it was only a tiny portion of the energy portfolio to start with. But what we did was totally take the lid off fossil fuel extractions in every way imaginable. On the day following [Barack] Obama's trip to the Louisiana floods, you know, we had, I think, another 25 million acres that went on sale in the Gulf for further extraction.
To look at the climate crisis alone - and in my view this is an election where we're not just deciding what kind of a world we will be but whether we will have a world or not, going forward. And the climate crisis, for one thing, you know, Hillary [Clinton] has not repudiated fracking by any means, nor fossil fuels.
[Hillart Clinton] holds the illusion that we can make fossil fuel safe, and that they are safe, and she established an office for fracking. We know who she's taking the money from. We know who the Democratic Party is taking the money from.
The other piece of this is that we call for cutting our bloated and dangerous military budget. And this is something that is made possible by moving to 100% clean renewable energy, where we cannot justify wars for oil, and where we cannot justify having some 700, 800 bases gathered around the world in something like 100 countries in significant measure protecting either access to fossil fuels or protecting routes of transportation.
This is very dangerous for us, as a society, and I think people deserve a politics of integrity that is not bought and paid for by big banks, fossil fuel giants, war profiteers, insurance companies, the things that those two corporate parties both represent and which pull the strings inside the party.
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