Last week we talked about the opening of the the U.N. climate conference in Katowice, Poland; yesterday the Washington Post published a piece by David Nakamura about the Trumpist regime resisting global climate efforts at home and overseas. "The United States," he wrote, "joined a controversial proposal by Saudi Arabia and Russia this weekend to weaken a reference to a key report on the severity of global warming, sharpening battle lines at the global climate summit in Poland aimed at gaining consensus over how to combat rising temperatures... The attempt by Trump administration delegates to look past the world’s most important climate reports comes two weeks after the administration downplayed a landmark federal report about the impacts of global warming on the United States, which is the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide."
Over the weekend, the president reaffirmed his decision to remove the United States from the global Paris agreement to reduce carbon emissions from coal, natural gas and petroleum. Referring to continued unrest in France, where thousands of demonstrators have protested a proposed fuel-tax increase, Trump tweeted: “Very sad day & night in Paris. Maybe it’s time to end the ridiculous and expensive Paris Agreement and return money back to the people in the form of lower taxes?”Trump touted American progress on the issue. “The U.S. was way ahead of the curve on that and the only major country where emissions went down last year!”It is true that U.S. emissions dropped in 2017, but in 2018 they are projected to grow 2.5 percent.According to the federal Energy Information Administration, emissions had fallen in seven of the last 10 years before this year’s rise.Ignoring the climate assessment of experts within their own administration, released the day after Thanksgiving, U.S. officials in recent days cleared a path to build more highly polluting coal-fired power plants, authorized seismic studies in the Atlantic Ocean that could harm marine animals, and opened millions of acres of land in the West to mining and fracking, stripping protections for a near-threatened species of bird.White House officials said that the rollback of Obama-era regulations had been in the works for months and that the timing of the announcements just days after the Nov. 23 release of the National Climate Assessment was coincidental. But experts said the Trump administration has clearly accelerated its energy agenda this year as the president seeks to lock in the rule changes, which can take months to finalize, before the end of his first term.Republican administrations have traditionally been more lenient than Democrats on environmental regulations, but Trump has overseen a shift that is “much, much bigger,” said Bruce Buckheit, who served in the Environmental Protection Agency’s enforcement division.“They want to get stuff done that can’t be undone by the next administration,” Buckheit said. “This is their moment to keep on truckin’.”For Trump, the moves reinforce his belief that climate warnings-- delivered with increasing urgency by scientists who say policymakers are running out of time to avoid calamities caused by rising temperatures-- are fanning false hysteria about the planet’s future.Rather than moderate his views, the president has made clear that he and his advisers are “not necessarily such believers,” as he put it in a recent interview with the Washington Post.The National Climate Assessment, mandated by Congress, warned that temperatures could rise by as much as 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the continental United States by 2050, unleashing destructive and costly heat waves and extreme weather events.“I don’t see it,” Trump told The Post.That message has been delivered beyond America’s shores. At the Group of 20 summit in Argentina in late November, all nations except the United States endorsed a joint statement that reaffirmed their commitment to the Paris climate accord. Trump officials signed the document only after securing the insertion of language highlighting the administration’s decision to exit the Paris compact and America’s right to use all forms of energy.In Poland on Monday, the administration has arranged to put on a show promoting coal and other fossil fuels. When a panel of climate skeptics at talks in Germany last year defended the administration’s policies and Trump’s assertion that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, a large group of activists sang, jeered and walked out.White House aides rejected the notion that the regulatory changes are in conflict with the climate report, which they dismissed as focusing on the most extreme scenarios. Press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters that such modeling contradicts “long-established trends” and called the process “an extremely complicated science that is never exact.”Jeffrey Holmstead, who served as an EPA assistant administrator in the George W. Bush administration, said the Trump White House has been clear that the report “overstates or exaggerates the risk of climate change.”The administration is moving to reverse Obama administration actions that Trump and his aides believe overstepped the government’s authority, Holmstead said. For example, Trump is replacing Obama’s Clean Power Plan with an alternative proposal to grant states more autonomy to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.“They think that the people who issued that report may be scientists but that maybe they have their own agenda,” said Holmstead, a lawyer and lobbyist at Bracewell who represents energy companies.That view does not square with public opinion. A Politico/Morning Consult poll released Friday showed that two-thirds of voters are very or somewhat concerned about the report’s findings, with 58 percent saying they agree with the conclusion that human activity is accelerating climate change.During a tour last month of the devastation caused by deadly wildfires in Paradise, Calif., Trump was asked by reporters whether his skepticism of climate change had changed.“No, I have a strong opinion,” the president replied. “I want great climate; we’re going to have that.”The climate assessment also contradicts the president’s core assertion that regulations aimed at lowering greenhouse gas pollution harm the economy.On the contrary, the report says, respiratory illnesses from pollution that lead to sick days for workers and heat-related deaths could stunt economic growth. And the flooding of roads, which block transportation routes and close businesses, could cost the economy billions of dollars per year.Ignoring such warnings, the administration moved this week to lift restrictions to protect sage grouse habitat on 9 million acres on Western land to promote oil exploration and natural gas drilling, widely called fracking, as well as other mineral mining. Drilling for natural gas has created a boom in energy that powers and heats homes, but burning it creates more greenhouse gases.According to the Energy Information Administration, petroleum use accounts for the largest amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States-- 46 percent. Natural gas consumption, at 29 percent, edged out coal, at 26 percent, the Energy Information Administration said.On Thursday, the Trump administration announced its plan to reverse an Obama administration rule requiring coal-fired power plants to install technology that captures and lowers their carbon emissions.Acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler, who lobbied for a major coal company and other energy interests before joining the administration this year, said the technology’s cost made new coal plants infeasible. In fact, coal plants are in steep decline, with the amount of coal used in energy generation falling by 53 percent since 2006 as natural gas use increased by 33 percent, according to information from the administration.Republicans in regions that are producers or heavy users of coal applauded Trump.“For eight years, President Obama landed blow after blow in his war on coal,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Thursday. “Now President Trump’s EPA is also targeting another regulation that would have made it nearly impossible to build any new plants in the future. This is a crucial step toward undoing the damage and putting coal back on a level playing field.”Buckheit, the former EPA official, said its unlikely that any new coal plants will open. Rather, he said, the administration’s action was “in many ways symbolic. This is playing to the base.”That political messaging has put Trump aides in the awkward position of trying to explain the apparent dichotomy of his regulatory agenda with the conclusions of the climate assessment. In an interview with a Canadian television network, U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft drew public ridicule when she said she respects “both sides of the science” on climate change.“I believe there are scientists on both sides that are accurate,” she said.
Twenty-two members of the House and 4 senators have signed onto the GreenNewDeal. Needless to say, none of them are Republicans. The GOP seems to have abrogated its repsonsibilities in regard to the most profound threat the country has faced since... perhaps ever. This shouldn't be a partisan issue. This has got to be a "Hey we're all in the same boat; let's do what we have to do" issue. I don't expect Trump-- who famously told his aides that he doesn't care about running up enormous deficits because he won't be around when they explode-- to understand or deal with something like Climate Change but what about Republicans in Congress? Are they really all that far gone? All of them? I suspect not many Republican members of Congress read Kate Aronoff except piece in The Intercept last week, With A Green New Deal, Here's What The World Could Look Like For The Next Generation. Some of them, unlike Trump, may actually care about children, grandchildren, mankind, planet... that kind of stuff, so if you have a Republican rep. or senator, let them know about this and remind them it's not a partisan issue and they can be a hero.
It's the spring of 2043, and Gina is graduating college with the rest of her class. She had a relatively stable childhood. Her parents availed themselves of some of the year of paid family leave they were entitled to, and after that she was dropped off at a free child care program.Pre-K and K-12 were also free, of course, but so was her time at college, which she began after a year of public service, during which she spent six months restoring wetlands and another six volunteering at a day care much like the one she had gone to.Now that she’s graduated, it’s time to think about what to do with her life. Without student debt, the options are broad. She also won’t have to worry about health insurance costs, since everyone is now eligible for Medicare. Like most people, she isn’t extraordinarily wealthy, so she can live in public, rent-controlled housing-- not in the underfunded, neglected units we’re accustomed to seeing in the United States, but in one of any number of buildings that the country’s top architects have competed for the privilege to design, featuring lush green spaces, child care centers, and even bars and restaurants. Utilities won’t be an issue, either. Broadband and clean water are both free and publicly provisioned, and the solar array that is spread atop the roofs of her housing complex generates all the power it needs and more.For work, she trained to become a high-level engineer at a solar panel manufacturer, though some of her friends are going into nursing and teaching. All are well-paid, unionized positions, and are considered an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels, updates about which are broadcast over the nightly news. In any case, she won’t have to spend long looking for a job. At any number of American Job Centers around the country, she can walk in and work with a counselor to find a well-paid position on projects that help make her city better able to deal with rising tides and more severe storms, or oral history projects, or switch careers altogether and receive training toward a union job in the booming clean energy sector.The AJCs are a small part of the Green New Deal Act of 2021, a compromise plan that was only strengthened in the years that followed. For a brief moment, it looked as if the Supreme Court might strike down large elements of it, but as a plan to expand the size of the court gained popularity with the public, the justices backed down.Gina might also open her own business. Without having to worry about the cost of day care or health insurance, she can invest everything into making her dream a reality. And the cost of labor for business owners, who no longer have to pick up the health care tab, is reasonable enough that she can afford to pay good wages for the staff that she needs to meet demand.Whichever she chooses, she’ll work no more than 40 hours a week, and likely far less, leaving ample time to travel via high speed, zero-carbon rail to visit friends elsewhere and go hiking or to the beach; enjoy long, leisurely meals of locally sourced food and drink; and attend concerts in the park, featuring musicians whose careers have been supported by generous public arts grants. As she gets older, paying for health care won’t be a concern, with everything from routine doctor’s visits and screenings, to prescription drugs, to home health aides covered under the public system, as social security continues to furnish her rent, expenses, and entertainment through the end of her life.That’s the world a “Green New Deal” could build, and what a number of representatives and activists are pushing Congress to help set into motion. Led by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), 17 23 representatives and counting have signed on to a measure that would create a select House committee tasked with crafting, over the course of a year, a comprehensive plan to move the U.S. away from fossil fuels by 2030 and accomplish seven goals related to decarbonizing the economy....What, exactly, would a Green New Deal entail?Like its 1930s counterpart, the “Green New Deal” isn’t a specific set of programs so much as an umbrella under which various policies might fit, ranging from technocratic to transformative. The sheer scale of change needed to deal effectively with climate change is massive, as the scientific consensus is making increasingly clear, requiring an economy-wide mobilization of the sort that the United States hasn’t really undertaken since World War II. While the Green New Deal imaginary evokes images of strapping young men pulling up their sleeves to hoist up wind turbines (in the mold of realist Civilian Conservation Corps ads), its actual scope is far broader than the narrow set of activities typically housed under the green jobs umbrella, or even in the original New Deal.“People talk often about the infrastructure investment that has to happen, and new technology,” Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, told me. “But there’s also an industrial plan that needs to happen to build entirely new industries. It’s sort of like the moonshot. When JFK said America was going to go to the moon, none of the things we needed to get to the moon at that point existed. But we tried and we did it.” The Green New Deal, he added, “touches everything-- it’s basically a massive system upgrade for the economy.”In a broad sense, that’s what policymakers in other countries refer to as industrial policy, whereby the government plays a decisive role in shaping the direction of the economy to accomplish specific aims. That doesn’t mean that the state controls every industry, as in the Soviet system; instead, it would be closer to the kind of economic planning that the U.S. practiced during the economic mobilization around World War II, and that is practiced internally today by many of the world’s biggest corporations. Should Ocasio-Cortez’s resolution pass muster, the select committee will convene policymakers, academics, and representatives from the private sector and civil society to hash out next steps. How widely or narrowly that groups defines a Green New Deal-- and whether it’ll ever be given space to meet on Capitol Hill-- remains to be seen, as supportive lawmakers huddle in Washington this week to try and gain support for writing it into the rulebook for the next Congress. Ultimately, it will be that committee that fleshes out what a Green New Deal looks like. But the proposal itself, American history, and existing research give us a sense for what all it might look like in practice.The plan itself-- or rather, the plan to make the plan-- lays out seven goals, starting with generating 100 percent of power in the U.S. from renewable sources and updating the country’s power grid.As the first two points of the resolution suggest, one of the main goals of any Green New Deal that spurs a complete switch to renewables will be dialing up the amount of total energy demand represented by electricity, by switching combustion-based activities like heating systems, air conditioners, and automobiles over to electric power. The Energy Transitions Commission estimates that 60 percent of energy will need to be distributed via electricity by mid-century, up from just 20 percent today. Making that possible means developing new technology, and also overhauling today’s grid, making it easier for homes and businesses that generate their own power to feed it back into the system. A modern grid-- or “smart” grid, per Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal-- would also make way for microgrids, which are self-contained renewable energy generation systems that allow small neighborhoods and hospitals, for instance, to continue making their own power even if there are disruptions (say, hurricane-force winds or a wildfire) upstream. Assuming it won’t be entirely sustainable to import all of that capacity, scaling up renewables will also likely mean expanding the country’s renewables manufacturing sector to produce more solar and wind infrastructure, components for which are today sourced largely from abroad.“We build things here in Detroit, and across Michigan, and we’ve got a lot of people here with manufacturing skills who are being left behind by the corporate greed,” incoming Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D- Mich., among the first supporters of the resolution and who campaigned on a Green New Deal, said via email. “Just this week we heard about how GM, a company that has received billions and billions from taxpayers, is planning to cut thousands of jobs here. So it’s really exciting to be talking about rapidly building up our green, renewable energy infrastructure, because these are jobs that can and should go to our workers here in Michigan.“We were the Arsenal of Democracy and helped save the planet from real darkness decades ago, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t be one of the regions to build America’s green energy infrastructure and help save the planet again in the process.”Bringing more clean energy online could entail expanding the types of programs that already exist at the state level, too, though they seldom come with much teeth. Renewable portfolio standards require utilities to source a certain amount of their power from wind and solar. New York state, for instance, set a renewable portfolio standard of 29 percent by 2015. The deadline came and went quietly, without much talk of how it would pick up the slack to reach its next goal of 50 percent renewables by 2030.Those targets would have to be much stricter to get off fossil fuels by 2035. “You say, you hit the target and you reduce emissions 10 percent every year or you go to jail,” says Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute. “That would get their attention.”...While winding down fossil fuel production and scaling up renewables will of course be a considerable part of any Green New Deal, so too will investing in the research, development, and manufacturing capacities to get especially difficult-to-decarbonize sectors, like airlines and steel, off fossil fuels over the next several decades, as Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal notes. The latter requires a still largely experimental process called electrolysis, which targeted investments could subsidize research into. In Sanders’s town hall Monday night, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to reference economist Mariana Mazzucato’s work, which lays out the existing progress and potential of using public investment to finance early-stage research that venture capital funds are too risk-averse to support. (Ocasio-Cortez and other members of her team have met with Mazzacuto.)“For far too long,” she said, “we gave money to Tesla-- to a lot of people-- and we got no return on the investment that the public made in new technologies. It’s the public that financed innovative new technologies.”Such a policy umbrella, though, could be just as much about decarbonization as about building out sectors of the economy which simply aren’t carbon-intensive, but are essential to a healthy economy, such as teaching and nursing. A federal job guarantee, which is cited in the draft resolution and a hot topic among 2020 presidential hopefuls, might put people to work remediating wetlands and tending community gardens while providing an alternative to low-paid work bound up in hugely carbon-intensive supply chains. Walmart, for instance, is the biggest employer in 22 states, paying an entry-level wage of $11 per hour. McDonald’s, another major employer, is estimated to have at some point employed 1 in 8 American workers and has consistently resisted calls to institute a $15 minimum wage. A federal jobs guarantee that paying that much, as outlined by several proposals, would effectively create a national wage floor, compelling retail and fast food chains to either raise their wages or risk having their employees enticed into better-paid jobs that improve their communities and make them more resilient against climate impacts.For extractive industry workers, whose wages are traditionally high thanks to decades of labor militancy, $15 an hour may not be too big of a draw, meaning other programs could be needed to finance what’s widely referred to as a just transition, making sure that workers in sectors that need to be phased out-- like coal, oil, and gas-- are well taken care of and that communities which have historically revolved around those industries can diversify their economies. Spain’s social democratic government recently sponsored a small-scale version of this, investing the relatively tiny sum of $282 million, with the support of trade unions, to help coal workers transition into other work while shuttering the last of the country’s coal mines.With the right investment, new jobs won’t be hard to come by. Research from the International Labour Organization finds that while a concerted transition to renewable energy could cost as many as 6 million jobs around the world in carbon-intensive sectors, it could create 24 million jobs, or a net gain of 18 million, and far more than the profound job loss that would stem from unchecked climate change.It's not hard to imagine cries from Republicans and Democrats alike about how much such a program might cost, and of the dangers of blowing up the deficit. Worth noting is the cost that 13 federal agencies have said are likely if we do nothing, according to the National Climate Assessment quietly released on Black Friday. By 2100, heat-related deaths could cost the U.S. $141 billion. Sea-level rise could rack up a $118 billion bill, and infrastructure damages could cost up to $32 billion. Along the same timeline, the report’s authors found, the financial damages of climate change to the U.S. could double those caused by the Great Recession.By comparison, the 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product that Pollin has said a Green New Deal would cost seems pretty cheap, never mind the fact that putting millions of people to work would bolster tax revenues and consumer spending. Pollin calls it “equitable green growth,” coupled with “degrowth down to zero of the fossil fuel industry.” Incumbent fuel sources, and coal in particular, aren’t exactly saving anyone money. A recent analysis from the group Carbon Tracker has found that 42 percent of coal capacity worldwide is already unprofitable, and that figure could spiked to 72 percent by 2030.“The question is, ‘What policy do you use to build up the public investment and incentivize private investment?’” Pollin said. “You can’t just have these private sector incentive programs. That’s just not going to get it.”As several proponents have pointed out, though, so-called pay-for questions are rarely asked of public spending programs designed to further national interests, be that getting out of a recession or fighting a war. “If we were threatened by an invader, we would mobilize all the resources we have at our disposal to deal with that security threat,” says U.K.-based economist Ann Pettifor. “As in those circumstances, you cannot rely entirely on the private sector.”Pettifor was among the first people to start thinking seriously about a Green New Deal just after the financial crisis. Then working at the New Economics Foundation, a progressive think tank, she helped convene a series of meetings in her living room that would eventually coalesce into the Green New Deal group. The group produced several reports on the subject. But with European sovereign debt crisis about to plunge the continent’s lawmakers into full-blown austerity hysteria, any public discussion of a big, expansionary spending package faded. Jeremy Corbyn’s election to Labour Party leadership helped change that. And this past March, Chakrabarti, working on Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign at the time, showed up on her doorstep wanting to hear more.For Pettifor, as for many Green New Deal advocates on this side of the pond, the funding question is less about how to reconcile line items than about reconfiguring what goals the economy is working toward-- that is, to make it do something other than simply grow GDP by some fixed percentage each year.Economists’ and policymakers’ fixation on unlimited economic growth as the metric for measuring economic prosperity is a really recent invention, developed in large part by the exponential returns that were being brought in by a ballooning financial sector–and not to that point factored into economic accounts. “If I work hard every day and night I have a weekly wage. If i gamble and win a load of money, I get rich quick,” she explains. “And the finance sector has moved its focus into making money in that way and not in investing in productive activity.” That shift toward measuring growth above all else started to displace an earlier focus on full employment in the 1960s, making multiplying profits and consumption the goal rather than ensuring people’s basic needs were met. As a result, carbon emissions spiked.It’s why Pettifor largely rejects the premise of debates among environmentalists about growth and degrowth. For the green movement to talk about growth at all, she says, “is to adapt that OECD framing of what the economy should be about” and “to adopt the framing of a neoliberal idea of the economy. I would prefer to us to talk about full employment.”That’s not to suggest there aren’t nuts and bolts funding issues that can be easily worked out. In contrast to state governments, which rely in large part on tax revenues, the federal government has plenty of tools at its disposal for financing a Green New Deal-- tools it deployed to great effect during the financial crisis. It could also set up a National Investment Bank to furnish lines of credit for green investment. A polluter fee or carbon tax could provide some revenue, as well, but perhaps more importantly would punish bad behavior in the energy sector. Loan guarantees of the sort used in the stimulus package could help to build out clean energy as they did then, before getting scrapped when Republicans took control of the House in 2010. (While Solyndra, the most infamous of those loan recipients, failed, the program overall made a return on investment greater than those enjoyed by most venture capital funds.)In a piece co-authored by Greg Carlock, author of a Green New Deal prospectus for the upstart think tank Data for Progress; and Andres Bernal, an adviser to Ocasio-Cortez; and Stephanie Kelton, former chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee, the writers explain, “When Congress authorizes spending, it sets off a sequence of actions. Federal agencies … enter into contracts and begin spending. As the checks go out, the government’s bank-- the Federal Reserve-- clears the payments by crediting the seller’s bank account with digital dollars. In other words, Congress can pass any budget it chooses, and our government already pays for everything by creating new money.”A Green New Deal, moreover, “will actually help the economy by stimulating productivity, job growth and consumer spending, as government spending has often done,” Kelton, Bernal, and Carlock add. “In fact, a Green New Deal can create good-paying jobs while redressing economic and environmental inequities.”...Needless to say, the Green New Deal faces an uphill battle on the Hill. Aside from complaints about feasibility, the pushback from other Democrats so far has been largely procedural, Weber says, citing a fear voiced by some House members that should the select committee be empowered to draft legislation, it would undermine the authority of other established committees. As he points out, the resolution outlines only that the committee be allowed to draft legislation, and wouldn’t pre-empt that legislation first going through another body before moving to a floor vote. Moreover, Weber added, “We actually do need a committee that goes beyond the very narrow focus of the existing ones. What we’re talking about is something that effects every aspect of society. A select committee that can have the purview over the issues that all of these existing committees and more is exactly the type of vehicle that Congress-- if it want to take climate change seriously-- should be creating.”
Eventually, support for the GreenNewDeal is going to be a make-it-or-break-it line in the sand. People like Alexandria, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Ted Lieu, Ro Khanna and Joe Neguse are going to be remembered as some of the Members who got it started in the House, just as Bernie, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley and Brian Schatz did in the Senate. But, it's still early and we need all get our own members of Congress to understand how seriously we tale this and how seriously they'd better take it. Right now we're talking about heroes. How much longer before we're talking about enemies? Example: is anyone really supposed to believe Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, two senators who are being touted as "progressive" possible presidential candidates, are worthy of support when they're not on this thing yet? And where's Elizabeth Warren?
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