In this excerpt from "The Carbon Wave" (MIT Press, 2026), author Leah Stokes, an associate professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, looks at a hopeful moment in U.S. politics when climate change took center stage: when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey ramped up calls for a "Green New Deal."
In September 2017, a still-unknown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez watched as Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Electricity went down for months. Like thousands of Puerto Ricans, her grandfather died in the storm's aftermath. She could see how climate change was hitting her community harder than others.
And it wasn't just Ocasio-Cortez's community: the year before, she'd traveled to Standing Rock, North Dakota, to see firsthand how the fossil fuel industry was harming Indigenous people. It was mere weeks after the 2016 election, and the resistance to Trump had found its center in a makeshift camp along the M...
English (US)