It’s been an odd few weeks for climate politics. First, the good news: following the U.S. midterm elections, Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed forming a congressional Select Committee on a Green New Deal. This committee would be in charge of writing a plan and draft legislation for “a detailed national, industrial, economic mobilization plan… for the transition of the United States economy to become greenhouse gas emissions neutral” within 10 years (read the full proposal here). Although you might not imagine that a temporary congressional committee would generate much enthusiasm outside of Washington, activists have recognized the critical importance of this proposal in the larger fight for climate action: it’s a last-ditch attempt to get something big in motion before the clock runs out. To push a recalcitrant Democratic Party to support the committee, young activists have held sit-ins at the offices of leading Democrats like Nancy Pelosi. The wait is still on as to whether the proposal has enough support, at least in the House of Representatives where Democrats will have a majority in the next session.

The chasm between the climate policy of progressive Democrats and the Trump administration was highlighted this month at the Conference of Parties (COP) 24 climate talks in Poland. The U.S. delegation, along with Kuwait, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, opposed language that would “welcome” the October IPCC report emphasizing the importance of stopping global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius (instead, those states wanted to simply “note” the report). Meanwhile, as most of the world tried to figure out how the “rulebook” for drawing back carbon emissions should be written, the Trump administration proposed a “rollback of an Obama-era rule that effectively blocked new construction of coal-fired power plants” and the opening of “some nine million acres of public lands in Western states to oil and gas drilling,” according to the New Yorker‘s Elizabeth Kolbert. And that wasn’t the only bad news to break during the summit—a Global Carbon Project report projected that global carbon dioxide emissions will rise by approximately 2.7% in 2018, “the largest increase in seven years.”

In the end, the COP24 summit did agree to a “rulebook” for carrying out the 2015 Paris Agreement. But climate advocacy groups say the outcome of the summit was not nearly sufficient. In a press release by the group 350.org, Executive Director May Boeve says, “[b]y refusing to acknowledge what needs to be done before it’s too late and making the tiniest of tiny baby-steps of progress, politicians have pushed this climate COP toward irrelevance.” Boeve points instead to the fossil fuel divestment movement as a sign of hope. Ahead of the summit, the movement reached its 1,000th institutional commitment to divest from fossil fuels. Among those 1,000 institutions include the cities of New York and Berlin, the insurance company Axa, the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the country of Ireland (combined, the 1,000 institutions have almost $8 trillion in total investments). 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben writes that the divestment movement has imposed real social and economic costs on fossil fuel companies, and while “[d]ivestment by itself is not going to win the climate fight… by weakening – reputationally and financially – those players that are determined to stick to business as usual, it’s one crucial part of a broader strategy.”

A not-so-popular approach to fighting climate change was the fuel tax proposed by French President Emmanuel Macron and then scrapped following the massive Yellow Vests protest movement. Although the movement was sparked by the proposed tax, it has developed into a broader uprising against France’s political and economic structure, with demands that “include a redistribution of wealth as well as the increase of salaries, pensions, social security payments and the minimum wage,” according to journalist Rokhaya Diallo. Diallo argues that the Yellow Vests movement should not be viewed as anti-climate, but instead as anti-neoliberal. As Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo writes, “[p]rotecting people’s livelihoods, enabling them to live their life in dignity, and stopping climate change are in fact part of one and the same struggle.”

So, how to move forward for both people and planet in the short amount of time we have left? Well, the Green New Deal is a good place to start.