Build To Win, Win To Build: Public Renewables, & the GNDCC
By Daniel G. | NYC-DSA
I was one of the lead organizers on the campaign to pass the Build Public Renewables Act, a bill written by DSA that would transform our energy system by building publicly owned, union made renewable energy. I am not exaggerating when I say that its passage on May Day 2023 was one of the most important days in my life. The feeling I had that day after four years of organizing culminated in a historic win is one every DSA member deserves to experience.
But exhilaration soon gave way to trepidation. For socialists who want to seize state power, implementation of laws is incredibly important. The executive branch has huge powers to interpret and execute laws. And unlike laws governing things like wages, implementing this one would require physically building a huge amount of physical energy infrastructure across the state.
Given that New York Governor Kathy Hochul is functionally a moderate Republican, we made the strategic determination that we simply couldn’t trust her to implement BPRA in a satisfactory way. After all, we had just spent the last 5 months fighting against her attempt to pass a totally gutted version of BPRA that removed its AFL-CIO authored “gold standard” union labor provisions and its environmental justice provisions to shut down highly polluting plants in Black and brown neighborhoods.
So, passing BPRA was not the final chapter of our campaign, but the start of an even larger fight. Our way of getting there, and the battles we have won since, are a key example of a principle we call “Build To Win, Win To Build.” That “our victories today are only as good as the battlefields they open tomorrow.”
Essentially, DSA organizers can do many things that improve people’s lives. But instead of just doing any of them, we need to strategically organize for the kinds of improvements that will build more power to win even bigger things next, as well as use them to grow our reach further than existing DSA audiences. For example, when choosing between a campaign that would reach environmentalists but has no path to reaching climate-skeptical labor unions (such as a tax on infrastructure projects that could reduce union wages), or a campaign that could potentially bring environmentalists and unions together (such as a public power bill that will mandate renewable energy be union built), we should choose the latter.
This is why we fought so hard to stop Hochul from removing the labor and environmental justice parts of the bill. Not just because those things are good, but because they are essential to building the wider constituency needed to make such a major project succeed. Think of how the Zohran campaign enabled us to build support for democratic socialist policies with new blocs of voters and bring in new blocs of volunteers. We put a similar premium on using BPRA to build support for a democratic socialist politics of public ownership with groups like unions – including the most formerly skeptical – who were crucial to have onboard.
This was essential in both keeping capital on its toes and quickly building up a series of material wins. One of the first things BPRA did was spend $25 million in state funding in creating an Office of Justice Transition, which provides workforce training for those interested in entering the renewable energy sector. For decades, one of the biggest sources of opposition towards the energy transition was fossil fuel workers, who understandably did not want to lose their jobs. Years of broken neoliberal promises to unions of job retraining have made them extremely skeptical – one union leader said BPRA’s labor language was so good, he didn’t believe it could ever pass.
In response to these completely legitimate concerns was the idea of a just transition, a build up of renewable energy that did not leave workers behind. BPRA took that idea and made it a reality.
In 2022, the BPRA campaign drafted Socialist in Office Zohran Mamdani for a “man on street” video on making energy bills more affordable.
You won’t believe what happened next.
This led into the next major chapter: how much public renewable energy to build. We determined New York needed to build 15 Gigawatts of public renewables by 2030 to meet our state’s nation-leading climate targets. Because we had both designed the bill for maximum union labor power, built cred by fighting like hell to ensure it stayed that way, and already delivered, we built an unprecedented coalition. The AFL-CIO cosponsored our maximum 15 GW demand and called on the state to do it, and the state Building Trades Council, which represents industrial unions initially opposed to BPRA, declared official support of public renewables.
On the topic of labor allies, I have to mention the contribution of the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York who became one of our most steadfast allies, holding town halls at over a dozen CUNY campuses across the city, taking our message directly to working class students. In the fight to pass it, SEIU 1199 also endorsed the bill not due to its labor provisions, but because of how many of its Black and brown members lived in neighborhoods being poisoned by the gas plants that the bill’s environmental justice provisions would prioritize shutting down first.
By moving opponents to support and building supporters in ways you might not expect, fighting for and passing BPRA allowed us to realign labor around climate issues and therefore set the stage for future ecosocialist victories. This is just one piece of “Build To Win, Win To Build” in action, and an essential piece of any ecosocialist organizing philosophy that contends with the sheer scale of power it will take to win: we must achieve victories that set up future, bigger victories.
The state’s response to our call for 15 GW was about as bad as we expected: a draft plan to build a paltry 3 GW. We’d been here before, and we knew that just meant it was time to fight harder. BPRA created a public input process on this draft plan, so we organized the same kind of massive public input that passed the original bill. We packed town halls across the state, filling not just massive venues in NYC but small state buildings outside Buffalo where no one even expected residents to show up. By the end of the 60 day comment period, we’d organized over 5000 public comments from New Yorkers calling for 15 GW, the biggest formal outcry to build something the state had ever experienced.
The pressure worked: NYPA has since more than doubled their plan, and created additional 6 month plan revision periods where they can add even more. If this pace of additions continues, we can reach 15 GW by 2030. Not even this year’s otherwise flaming pile of garbage of a state budget could blunt the momentum, with an additional $200 million for public renewable development breaking through the wall of climate denial.
This doesn’t mean we’re guaranteed to build the full 15 GW by 2030. It means we have to keep organizing even harder to win it. Ecosocialists in DSA identified early on that in order to facilitate a transition from fossil to renewable energy, we would have to utilize and ultimately seize state power, since the state is the only institution capable of directing and funding an energy transition large and fast enough to prevent the worst of global heating. As the Trump Regime destroys every last shred of “green capitalism,” public power becomes even more important as the only way forward in protecting our planet, and the only way to build the renewable energy needed to replace fossil fuels, and transform our energy system and economy from one of extraction and exploitation to one by for the people and planet we live on.
BPRA’s passage was one of the most important days in my life. I joined the Green New Deal Commission (GNDCC) to help organize ways for more DSA members to experience days like it. The kind that comes from years of building to win, winning to build, and learning to organize in ways only a multifaceted, strategic campaign can.
The GNDCC played a key role in passing BPRA, with its Green New Deal Slate program providing support that helped elect candidates like Sarahana Shrestha, the first socialist elected in the Hudson Valley and former co-chair of both MHV-DSA, and an early version of the GNDCC itself. But its “Building For Power” program is taking the principles that both informed and were honed through the BPRA campaign, and working with chapters across the country to apply them in ecosocialist campaigns that fit their own local conditions. Campaigns to build to win, and win to build what BPRA inspiration and supporter Naomi Klein calls “ecopopulist” policies like expanded mass transit, green social housing, and more public power.
Through this campaign development and support process, the GNDCC is applying these organizing strategies and tactics nationwide. Louisville DSA’s “Get On The Bus” campaign is building a similar left-labor coalition to get expanded public transit funding on the ballot, hand in hand with ATU local 1447, and earning the endorsements of the Louisville Central Labor Council and Kentucky State AFL-CIO, who’s directlor publicly recognized DSA as “the real deal” in building working-class power. Milwaukee DSA’s “Power To The People” campaign helped develop and elect a public power leader, Alex Brower, to its Common Council, and in addition to fighting its utility in the halls of power is engaging Spanish speakers on the south side who are too often left out of such organizing. Metro DC DSA’s “We Power DC” campaign has long been a standard bearer in the longer-term fight to take over private utilities entirely, and is now using the latest energy bill hike to build popular support for its next stage.
Louisville DSA is building a growing left-labor coalition to win through its “Get On The Bus” public transit campaign—a Building For Power campaign developed with support from the Green New Deal Campaign Commission.
At the 2025 DSA National Convention, we’ll vote on whether to reauthorize the GNDCC so we can continue to grow and evolve this work. Reauthorizing campaign committees is normally an uncontroversial vote. But there is an elephant in the room: an amendment to the resolution that would disband the GNDCC, and replace it with a much more vague national working group. This would dismantle the national network of campaign support, chapter coaching, knowledge sharing, logistical coordination, fundraising, and other party-like structures that are building the power to change climate politics for so many chapters.
This would be an unprecedented dismantling of a highly active national body in any circumstance, but the stated reason would be even less precedented: a claim in its whereas clause that the proposal comes “in the wake of the failed implementation of the Build Public Renewables Act in New York through its sabotage by the Hochul administration."
A campaign that now has 1/7th of New York’s energy on track to be owned by the public rather than corporations, that built an unprecedented coalition of labor unions, environmental justice communities, and even groups like the American Lung Association for a mass, public buildout of decommodified public goods, that will fuel a program that lowers New Yorkers’ increasingly unaffordable energy bills, and one that developed a huge portion of DSA’s leaders along the way can be judged in many ways, but this one is materially false.
Members are certainly welcome to criticize BPRA or the GNDCC. Our own ruthless self criticism of our weakness and failures over the years is exactly how we’ve been able to keep evolving, adapting, and overcoming efforts to block the bill, sabotage the bill, and now, to obstruct its implementation. But delegates should base decisions that could shut down comrades’ organizing on the material realities of that organizing, not on materially false statements that erase comrades’ work. Especially when this campaign is so well documented, and the GNDCC’s robust website also features extensive documentation on its theories, structures, and work, including a comprehensive report to the 2025 convention.
That's not to say that our organizing has been without flaw or contradiction. When we made the strategic decision to attempt to use state power to drive the energy transition, we knew that we would embark upon a difficult and contradictory organizing journey. State intervention by definition requires navigating contradictions, making compromises, and settling for reforms that are transformative, but are nevertheless less ambitious than your original goal.
These facts do not mean that contesting state power is not worth it. It’s essential. As another Groundwork principle goes, “We Are Fighting The Clock: All decisions and analysis must start from our fundamental reality: the existential threat of the climate crisis, and the rise of fascist power. Urgency is not optional.”
So, we must organize with unclouded eyes and approach our organizing from a place of intellectual curiosity and pragmatic strategy. To do anything else means that we surrender our only tool to address the climate crisis. The first publicly owned renewable energy project built and owned by NYPA will break ground this fall: a solar farm in upstate New York. Let’s make sure we can grow our ecosocialist organizing across the country until it is joined by as many as it takes to protect the only planet the working class has.
Vote YES on CR03: 2025 GNDCC Convention Resolution to reauthorize the GNDCC
Vote NO on CR03-A01: R14, which would dismantle it
Note: The GNDCC Consensus resolution is one of several major organizing resolutions that is currently not likely to be heard at convention, despite major support from delegates.
If you want to make sure we can discuss, vote on, and approve this work (as well as major organizing like our Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign, another popular resolution that won’t be heard), please sign on in support of our proposed updates, which will ensure delegates can debate and vote on an Organizing Agenda.
