The Art of the (Green New) Deal
Words by Bart Shteinman
This article is part of PULPCLIMATE week. CLICK HERE to join the facebook group. University of Sydney Students will be marching from Fischer Library at 10:00 AM on the 20th of September.
I do not purport to have any unique wisdom in how we should respond to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. The Climate Emergency, in all its cruel efficiency at forming obstacles to its resolution, has bedeviled the canniest of political operators and confounded the usual certainties of media punditry. Left or Right, it is becoming surreal to watch political parties attempt their usual spin and triangulation around a crisis that demands nothing less than societal transformation. Honesty, as argued for in a controversial new essay by Jonathan Franzen, seems to now require a kind of pessimistic nihilism that climate catastrophe is inevitable.
But there exists an even greater absurdity than our fruitless endeavours to date; that present generations would resign themselves to failure while a gracious window of opportunity remains open. One can even relish the thought of being alive in such a crucial juncture of human history, like the so-called ‘Greatest Generation’ that overcame the Depression with ‘New Deal’ Social Democracy and defeated Fascism with mass mobilisation during WWII. Better, perhaps, than being born into what awaits humanity if we fail.
So, in that spirit, I wish to do a bit of earnest spruiking for the most important innovation in the fight against Climate Change so far. It’s not plant-based beef. It’s the Green New Deal.
What is the GND?
The Green New Deal is an umbrella term for a flurry of ‘Green’ or ‘Climate oriented’ policy making and coalition-building focused on adequately reducing net emissions of Greenhouse Gases through interventions that simultaneously rectify social and economic inequities. While the term has a long and confused history, its most salient expression is a 14-page resolution in the US House of Representatives introduced by Democrat (and Democratic Socialist) Alexandra Ocasio Cortez. It calls for a 10-year mobilisation to achieve 100% zero carbon energy, a Job Guarantee, universal healthcare and a great deal more. More recently, the Bernie Sanders Presidential Campaign has released a $16.3 trillion ‘Green New Deal’ plan to create 20 million jobs through public investment and ownership. In the UK, Corbyn’s Labour Party already has a more British-sounding ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ plan for 60% Renewable Energy and a ‘GI Bill’ to educate fossil fuel workers. Grassroots activists have been campaigning for a GND that would take the UK to net zero emissions as early as 2030. And in Australia, in the aftermath of defeats in the hyper-partisan ‘Climate Wars’, even figures in Labor’s right have made encouraging noises to a ‘Green New Deal’ in the midst of a gruelling post-election autopsy.
What we are missing about the GND
Much commentary on GND proposals have focused on the scale of their ambition or the purity of their unapologetically left-wing prescriptions. Yet the real virtue of the GND is in its total inversion of the failed policy and political paradigms that have guided Climate Policy to date.
Neoliberal economists, starting from an aversion to government intervention in the mechanisms of the ‘market economy’, have long made the case that the most effective policy is to put a ‘price on carbon’, either through pollution taxes or marketised ‘emissions trading schemes’. The notion here is that, for the purpose of economic efficiency, governments should be responsible only for imposing the costs of pollution. All the benefits of innovation and efficiency are to be ‘left to the wisdom of the market’, in other words to be decided, managed and accrued by capitalists. If all that renewable energy gets captured by price-gouging energy companies, or if communities dependent on fossil fuel industries are torn asunder, that’s just the ways of the market. The dismal failure of such policies, be it on the floor of the US Senate or the streets of Paris, begins with the policies of the ‘dismal science’. Beyond its inequity, the senselessness of socialising the political pain (taxes and prices) while simultaneously privatising the upfront benefits should be obvious to most by now.
The logic, as I interpret it, of the GND is turning this approach on its head. The aim is to socialise the gains while any true losses are subsumed in the churnings of financial markets.
A GND brings forward the benefits (infrastructure, jobs, new industries, clean air and water etc.) and attaches these drawing cards to the programme being sold. The pain of transitioning away from fossil fuels will lie with those who continued to invest capital in companies criminally responsible for the present climate breakdown, and would find themselves outcompeted and obsolete. Moreover, the GND aims to shape the transition to the clean economy in a manner that will obtain maximum buy-in from those affected, be it through labour agreements, cooperative ownership models, job/income guarantees and community reinvestment. When mines and plants shutter, a prospering economy with an active public sector stand by with preordained plans to retrain, relocate or retire workers and preserve local communities. The smoothness and credibility of this transition, requires these new industries and opportunities to be well established before fossil fuels enter their terminal phase, something a carbon tax cannot accomplish.
Why aren’t we doing this already?
To a certain extent, our hither-to-now deference to neoliberal prescriptions reflect the fact that much of the science, and urgency, of Global Warming emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, right when privatisation and deregulation were triumphing globally. Yet politically, much of the logic of carbon tax proposals was that right-wing parties and business interests would consent more readily to a policy that minimally interfered in their private affairs. Thatcher shut down a fair few coal mines, after all. Given the seriousness of the Climate Crisis, it was hoped such policy minimalism would elicit bipartisanship and responsible compromise. For those new to this: it didn’t.
So instead of pinning hopes on a grand bargain, the Left has no choice but to pitch its own deal. We cannot leave this transition to be another wrenching ‘structural change’ in the hands of capitalists, or to be left paralysed in the name of neoliberal purity. Democracy must take its responsibility and grasp the opportunity of a sustainable, just and bountiful future. The only deal left on the table is the Green New Deal.