It’s no secret that we need to rapidly decarbonize the US economy to respond to the threat of catastrophic climate change. But the Green New Deal’s (GND) greatest promise isn’t the goal of 100 percent renewable energy and net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Its promise lies instead in the grassroots organizing that’s pushed a leftist pipe dream to the center of congressional politics in a matter of months. That activist energy will be key to implementing the underlying policies that will transform our inequitable, exploitative, carbon-intensive energy system.

Even seemingly technocratic policies to expand energy efficiency upgrades in buildings — which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s GND resolution goes all in on — require political struggle on the ground. Take the case of New York State. A decade ago, working with broad social justice coalitions, the state’s government tried to generate the same upgrades that the GND now proposes — and failed.

I was a member of the coalition that drove New York’s building upgrade experiment. I saw up close how technocratic policy divorced from on-the-ground organizing undermined the bold vision laid out in the legislation. An obsession with targets and timetables distracted from the imperative to continuously organize for a just and sustainable tomorrow. Instead of chasing silver bullet solutions, we’d be wise to follow the Black radical tradition: the recognition that justice is always elusive, that the fight never stops, and that our movements are, to a degree, ends in and of themselves.