Book Review: “Winning the Green New Deal” (Part 2 of 3)
Writer and climate activist Bill McKibben opens the “Visions and Policies” section of “Winning…” with his chapter, “How We Got to the Green New Deal,” tracing the emergence and current standoff of the U.S. climate movement. McKibben begins with the summer of 1988 when NASA climate scientist James Hansen famously warned the Senate about the catastrophic consequences of global warming. Within a year, McKibben sounded his own alarm, his best-selling book, “The End of Nature.” Looking back, McKibben laments that “fairly modest” steps such as a pollution tax on CO2 and methane, if taken thirty years ago, would now be “scrubbing fossil fuel out of our economy,” putting the world “well the way” to tackling global warming.
McKibben admits that he and other climate activists were naïve to take at face value President Bush’s 1989 vow that the “greenhouse effect would be met by the White House effect” and to place so much stock in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. systematically evaded and undermined. As revealed since then, even when Dr. Hansen testified in 1988, Exxon’s own scientists already had accurately estimated how fast the global climate was warming; the company even factored sea-level rise into design of its offshore drilling rigs. Meanwhile, the public face of the fossil fuel industry followed the “tobacco war” strategy: stirring up spurious uncertainty and denying the existence and seriousness of global warming. McKibben’s history culminates with the U.N.’s 2009 Copenhagen climate summit which deadlocked, accomplishing “essentially nothing.” And yet, even after the Senate subsequently abandoned the House-passed cap-and-trade legislation, the climate movement garnered victories in fighting the Keystone XL pipeline, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez credits her radicalization on climate to participation in the Dakota Access pipeline fight.
McKibben traces both climate science denial and rising income inequality to the Reagan revolution. These “two great disasters of our time” he writes, were abetted by the fossil fuel industry, especially the billionaire Koch brothers, whose largesse funds countless front groups to “block renewable energy, defund mass transit, trash environmentalists and enact tax cuts for the rich, while depressing social spending.” After pointing out how escalating economic insecurity has fostered public resistance to any kind of economic restructuring, including effective climate policy, McKibben concludes that only by simultaneously tackling both climate injustice and economic injustice can we break the gridlock that the Koch brothers orchestrated.
Continuing the book’s second section, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Green New Deal architect, former Rhodes Scholar and policy director of the Roosevelt Institute, outlines the “Policies and Principles of a Green New Deal.” She expects a rapid shift away from fossil fuels, which power virtually everything (because the U.S. derives only 11% of its energy from renewables), will be hugely disruptive, especially to marginalized people who are already struggling. Therefore, she argues, “the Green New Deal can only succeed if it is just and equitable,” increasing everyone’s economic security in a full-scale economic mobilization that protects front-line communities and rapidly boosts employment.
Making “The Economic Case for a Green New Deal,” Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz critiques conventional economic analysis which he concludes has downplayed the “fat tail” (catastrophic) risk of unmitigated climate change by excessively discounting future climate damage and other accounting tricks. Standard economic models “fail to recognize the complex feedback mechanisms, non-linear effects, and tipping points in our climate system,” he says. Sweeping aside the notion that we can’t “afford” a Green New Deal, Stiglitz recalls that our leaders didn’t dither over questions about whether we could afford to fight the Second World War; FDR and Churchill knew the cost of losing would be staggering.
Stiglitz points out that high unemployment and a surfeit of un-invested savings offer ideal conditions for the massive public investment needed to transition to a green economy, concluding with the hope that “deficit fetishism seems finally to be over.” Sticking to conventional Keynesian analysis, Stiglitz sidesteps the controversy over “Modern Monetary Theory.” He is confident that it would be “easy” to raise revenue to finance public investment in fighting climate change while increasing economic efficiency by “taxing dirty industries, imposing a broad range of taxes on pollution and on destabilizing short-term financial transactions and by closing tax loopholes that allow highly profitable corporations to get away with paying almost no taxes…”
In “A Green New Deal for the Gulf South,” Collette Pincon-Battle, Director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, envisions what a Green New Deal would mean for her region, which prospers from fossil fuel extraction (the Gulf South includes 45% of US petroleum refining capacity) while also suffering its environmental and health consequences and now faces massive climate damage from increasingly severe hurricanes, flooding and displacement due to sea-level rise. Battle suggests that by revitalizing the region’s economy, the Green New Deal can be understood as a form of reparations for black southerners. She acknowledges the “centrality of the military in Gulf South communities,” urging a transition “away from the military and toward job creation in regenerative local economies.”
In “Green New Bingo Hall,” Julian Brave Noisecat, Vice President of Policy and Strategy at Data For Progress, reminds us that we’re gambling on a global scale: Since 1988, when Dr. Hansen testified to the Senate, we have spewed more carbon into the atmosphere than during all of prior human history. And we’re not slowing down. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. is now the world’s largest oil producer, a “petro-state” or as NoiseCat more aptly puts it, a “necro-state –a uniquely destructive force in global history.” Noisecat recounts indigenous-led struggles against the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines and mentions that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributes her climate radicalization to that experience. He urges a Green New Deal built with instead of for indigenous peoples, “honoring the treaties, the tribes, the rivers from which we drink, the air we breathe, and land where we plant and gather our food and to which we return when our time is up.”
The final chapter of the “Visions and Policies” section of “Winning the Green New Deal” is “A Workers’ Green New Deal” by Service Employees International Union president Mary Kay Henry. With the Wagner Act of 1935, the New Deal Congress established the right to collective bargaining. But since the Reagan administration, federal policies have weakened labor unions and workers’ right to collective bargaining. In 1953, 35% of U.S. workers were represented by labor unions, now that figure has dropped to just 11%. And now almost half of the U.S. workforce earns a paycheck doing service and care work. Ms. Henry points out that the same forces that have crippled labor rights also fund climate science denial and fan the flames of racism. The results: More people working for lower wages, many in places increasingly vulnerable to climate disasters that disproportionately affect low-wage workers and communities of color. She is proud that SEIU stood with the Sioux and climate activists at Standing Rock and also cites SEIU’s successful 2013 strike by New York restaurant workers to enact a $15 wage. She praises the German model of sector-wide labor unions as a means to negotiate job standards with employers in order to transition both workers and employers away from dirty energy sources.
Next: Part III: “How Neo-Liberals Hijacked the Democratic Party…”
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