NOW We Must Embrace a Green New Deal, GND Part 3

NOW We Must Embrace a Green New Deal, Part 3

From the Reviews of Eric Klinenberg, New York Review of Books, March 26, 2020

The Great Green Hope, Review of Books on the Green New Deal

A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal is a collective endeavor, written by four young intellectuals (a journalist, a sociologist, and two political scientists) who are part of the climate movement they’re studying, and the tone of this short book is urgent and pragmatic.

It’s also refreshingly optimistic and future-oriented, filled with specific ideas for how to decarbonize the energy system, build affordable housing and public transportation, expand parks and public recreation facilities, and renegotiate global trade regimes so that human rights and public health are properly valued.

“Fighting for a new world starts with imagining it viscerally,” the authors write. Their portrait of a planet transformed by a GND is designed to spark that effort.

Aronoff, Battistoni, Cohen, and Riofrancos are motivated by the troublesome fact that we have very little time — roughly the ten years spanning the 2020s — to decarbonize the economy, lest we pump so much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere that catastrophic warming becomes irreversible.

Following Bill McKibben, they note that the only way to do this is by burying fossil fuels, including those that are already primed for distribution. Taxing carbon to increase its price may help a little, but “a carbon price low enough to be politically viable won’t be high enough to transform global energy markets.”

What do we need in order to transform the energy system?

First, the authors say, we need to pressure market analysts to factor the runaway costs of climate collapse into their valuations of fossil fuel companies. (This is already beginning to happen, thanks to the warnings of climate scientists and the fossil fuel divestment movement.)

Second, we need the government to buy up majority shares of (devalued) energy company shares and quickly cut gas, oil, and coal production. (This seems far-fetched, given American political culture.)

Third, we need a managed transition to renewable energy, so that current workers in the industry, and the communities that depend on them, gain security instead of losing ground.

All of this, they concede, conflicts with the current direction of US energy policy. But they believe most Americans are eager for a radical break from our dirty sources of power, provided that the transition does not compromise reliable service or significantly increase prices.

“We need to directly take on the fossil fuel companies and private utilities whose business models rest on making the planet uninhabitable,” they write. “We can’t avoid a confrontation.”

Industrial policy, not energy policy, is the key to making a politically appealing GND, and the most exciting parts of A Planet to Win describe what we can build in the name of sustainability, not what we need to bury. The authors worry about the fate of those who labor in the coal, oil, and gas sectors, and about the potent Republican political strategy of pitting workers against environmentalists.

Their response is a rousing call for public works projects that would employ millions of people while also remaking more sustainable systems for electricity and transit. They propose building “10 million beautiful, public, no-carbon homes over the next 10 years, in cities, suburbs, reservations, and towns, in the most transit-rich and walkable areas.” Ambitious, yes. Realistic? Only if progressive states like California and New York change their retrograde zoning policies and eliminate the “Not in My Backyard” building restrictions that limit density in desirable areas.

During the New Deal, the authors recall, “workers hired under the Works Progress Administration constructed 651,000 miles of highway and 124,000 bridges…. They built 125,000 public buildings, including 41,300 schools, and 469 airports. They built 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields.” Most Americans still rely on these aging resources.

Like Klein and Purdy, the authors of A Planet to Win champion a guaranteed jobs program. They also advocate restoring workers’ right to unionize. They see enormous needs for work in construction, maintenance, education, recreation, health care, child care, and ecological care. “The economic question is whether this work can be done profitably,” they proclaim. “Much of it, we submit, cannot.” As they see it, though, the current mode of production, based on extraction, exclusion, and exploitation, is even more ruinous.

“For better and for worse,” they argue, “our choice now is between eco-socialism or eco-apartheid.” If we only have one decade to fix things, it’s time to chart a course. “We need to pose a simple question,” they conclude. “Which side are you on?”

These are expensive proposals, and it’s not clear how much support they will get in a post-pandemic political climate. But already, social policies in all domains are up for grabs, and big investments in long-term public health and ecological sustainability may soon become very popular.

Now, at least, we can more easily see the cost of inaction. We are fighting to survive one preventable emergency (COVID-19), and no matter what happens, the climate crisis awaits.

—March 26, 2020

Tagged as: climate change, crisis earth, GND, Green New Deal, Planet Earth, public health, worker rights