One of the biggest challenges of climate politics is that the solutions sometimes seem scarier than the problem. We worry that to truly decarbonize, we’d need an authoritarian government or endless austerity. But a big and bold enough Green New Deal could finally make us truly free.

The principles that animated the New Deal are often associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) proposed (but never fully enacted) Economic Bill of Rights. These included rights to employment, medical care, housing, education, and social security. Those goals are tragically unrealized for many Americans, and any just version of the Green New Deal must start there. They’re familiar goals for the Left, ones we’ve been championing for decades. But we also need to rework another New Deal–era statement of principles — FDR’s Four Freedoms.

In the twilight hours of 1941, as New Deal progress stalled in the face of white Southern resistance to federal power, and the war against Hitler intensified in Europe, FDR sought to describe freedom in new terms. He was struggling to firm up support for his faltering domestic agenda and an anticipated foreign one; the Four Freedoms were eventually mythologized and sentimentalized in paintings by none other than Norman Rockwell.