At a rally on June 14, New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani echoed political inspiration and recent endorser Sen. Bernie Sanders to a crowd of thousands of supporters: “The government must deliver an agenda of abundance that puts the 99 percent over the 1 percent.” While it might not be obvious at first glance, Mamdani’s insurgent campaign for “A City We Can Afford” is not just one of left economic populism; it’s also a winning vision for green economic populism. He has offered a vision for winning meaningful climate action that this country desperately needs.

Temperatures will rise to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit ahead of Election Day in New York City on Tuesday, with heat index values approaching 110 degrees. Polling sites are scrambling to keep voters and poll site workers safe through the heat despite inadequate cooling systems. Thirty percent of New Yorkers who are currently energy insecure, or unable to afford their utility bills, will be forced to choose between staying cool and financial hardship. But the climate crisis itself — experienced as a series of shattered heat records, intensifying flash floods and storms, and troubling environmental irregularities like this spring’s allergy season — has rarely made headlines.

Climate change is making the cost-of-living crisis worse and deepening the wealth gap between the richest and poorest. As the climate crisis destabilizes the planet, the prices of basic necessities like housing, food, childcare, and transit increase, throwing working-class households further into economic precarity. New national polling from Data for Progress shows that two in five voters rank kitchen-table costs like utilities and housing as the most important reasons to address energy and environmental issues. And the scale of transformation required to maintain a livable planet requires building a united working-class base that sees its demands reflected in visions for a greener world.

The Mamdani campaign’s focus on lowering the cost of living should serve as a blueprint for progressives across the country seeking to embed climate action in real improvements for working peoples’ lives. With over 40,000 volunteers, Mamdani’s campaign for “A City We Can Afford” has done what the climate movement has long struggled to achieve: activated one in two hundred New Yorkers to convince their friends, families, and neighbors that taking on the corporate interests that dominate the city’s politics is possible.

Mamdani has pledged to prevent rent increases for the city’s two million rent-stabilized tenants. The campaign has focused on the economic relief provided by a rent freeze, but the plan has knock-on climate benefits, too. A rent freeze would stop displacement when landlords try to pass the cost of necessary green retrofits or push working-class tenants out to attract wealthier residents when improvements to transit access, parks, and schools make neighborhoods more attractive.

His focus on empowering the public sector to build housing and fully staffing the city’s housing agencies will enable the city to do repairs, enforce habitability laws, and build the new deeply affordable green housing that New Yorkers need to thrive as disasters and environmental stress increase. And his housing proposals speak directly to the concerns of the 800,000 minimum-wage workers who would need to work 106 hours to afford renting at 30 percent of their income in Manhattan; other boroughs are only slightly more affordable.

At a time when one-third of households leaving the city are moving to find more affordable housing — a rate that has nearly doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic began and disproportionately affected black and Hispanic New Yorkers — ensuring permanently affordable green housing in areas with access to public transit and systems like parks, libraries, and schools is a recipe for ensuring working-class New Yorkers can enjoy low-carbon lives.

Establishing free, universal childcare — a top expense for families with young children — also allows working-class families to stay in high-density, lower-emission areas and maintains the social fabric of the city, lowering the number of people forced to flee urban areas for more resource- and energy-intensive suburbs. The extreme unaffordability of childcare and housing in New York City has made families with children aged six or younger — 14 percent of the city’s population — more than twice as likely to pack up and leave, according to a study from the Fiscal Policy Institute.

Cuts to the city’s popular 3-K and pre-K programs will worsen the city’s childcare crisis and drive more middle-class New Yorkers to leave as housing and food prices also skyrocket. Mamdani’s plan would go further than simply maintaining the status quo by establishing free, universal childcare for children five years old and under — it would offer the economic and social stability required to avoid turning the city into a haven for the wealthiest only.

Mamdani’s transit plan, too, has centered investment in fast, free buses, an infrastructural and public policy shift that would expand access to affordable low-carbon mobility for all. As the home of the most extensive metro system in the country, New York City’s transportation system still accounts for 20 percent of the city’s emissions. One of Mamdani’s major successes as an assemblymember was winning a fare-free bus pilot program that resulted in a 30-38 percent increase in the number of rides taken, with 11 percent of new riders selecting the free bus route over a car or taxi.

The plan also offers the climate movement a clear path for deeper alignment with labor by meeting transit workers’ demands for policy that increases safety on the job. The pilot program saw a 39.8 percent reduction in physical and verbal harassment against drivers. Transport Workers Union president John Samuelsen spoke in praise of Mamdani’s public transit platform at the June 14 rally, calling for his plan for fare-free buses to be adopted by “everyone in the race and everyone in the Democratic Party.”

“If you have a robust public transit system — affordable, preferably free — you have access to higher education, access to the doctors you need, and access to incredible blue-collar jobs with beautiful pensions and beautiful health benefits,” Samuelsen said.

Mamdani’s plan to expand bus priority lanes, update bus queue jump signals, and keep double-parked cars out of the way means buses will run faster and more reliably. Eliminating fares will allow more New Yorkers to simply hop on the bus and get where they need to go, on time, without worrying about regressive fare costs. Expanding car-free Open Streets near public schools by quintupling funding for the program and automatically enrolling schools will keep students safer, improve air quality, and return street space from cars.

In order to ensure a habitable planet, this entire system must be decarbonized, too. Climate advocates should push for a fully electrified bus system and improved safety for bikers and pedestrians. But ensuring ridership and investment in the existing bus system is a critical step toward speeding the transition to a fully decarbonized, equitable transit system. Keeping New Yorkers on buses, subways, bikes, and sidewalks (and out of individual cars) means we can decarbonize more quickly while limiting the amount of mining required to shift to a fully carbon-free system.

As New York City works to rapidly decrease its emissions, the public school system, which serves more than 900,000 students and makes up one-fourth of the city’s building stock, is primed to bring benefits to millions of New Yorkers’ everyday lives. From lead paint to asbestos and crumbling windows and roofs, New York public schools, like public schools across the country, bear the signs of decades of disinvestment and austerity. Only 119 of the city’s 1,800 public schools currently have rooftop solar panels. Mamdani’s proposal for “Green, Healthy Schools” would reverse New York City’s current snail’s-pace approach to decarbonizing school buildings and ramp up public investment to decarbonize five hundred public schools, invest in green curricula and workforce training, and tackle historic racial and environmental injustices.

By partnering with the New York Power Authority, the Mamdani administration has proposed pathways to transfer energy cost savings back to the education system to reinvest in high-standard working and learning conditions. And by equipping fifty schools to serve as community hubs during disasters, Mamdani’s plan offers an alternative to the hollowing out of disaster response and recovery, ensuring that New Yorkers can count on safe, comfortable sites of shelter.

As food supply chains are destabilized by climate-related disasters like drought and increasing foodborne illnesses, and 85 percent of New York City voters reporting an increased burden in food prices, Mamdani argues the public sector has a responsibility to intervene. Experimenting with public interventions to make food more affordable, like his proposal for a pilot program of municipally owned grocery stores, would lower grocery bills in food deserts.

The idea is popular, too: our research and polling at the Climate and Community Institute and Data for Progress found that two in three New Yorkers support the creation of municipally owned grocery stores to lower the cost of groceries. To amplify the environmental benefits, this proposal could be built upon to prioritize diverse, resilient, and high-quality food supply chains by setting high-road standards for public procurement.

The climate crisis demands a new, ambitious, and popular approach: drastically reducing emissions while delivering material relief and improvement.  The Mamdani campaign has put forth a transformative, green vision of a city that works for the 99 percent — one that takes on the existential threat of the climate crisis through kitchen-table proposals to improve working peoples’ daily lives and take back power from the richest 1 percent. As New Yorkers are crushed by increasing bills, exploited on the job, and forced to consider leaving the city they love for a chance at a dignified life, it is no surprise that these straightforward answers to world-historic problems are resonating.