2022 was a turbulent year. In the spring, I attended the Milken Conference, a glitzy confab of financiers and philanthropists hosted in Beverly Hills by junk bond king Mike Milken. Panelists didn’t dwell much on the physical stuff of the global economy—industrial supply chains, oil, lithium—and instead emphasized the inevitable institutionalization of crypto, the unstoppable rise of private capital (contrasted with the diminishing role of banks and public companies), and the lucrative future of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investing.
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Even then, it seemed clear that those predictions would age poorly. Rising interest rates and a declining stock market have undercut the business model for financial service firms like private equity. Yet, amid a looming downturn in economic conditions and over the outdoor chants of United Steelworkers protesting labor conditions at Chevron, panelists at the Beverly Hilton insisted on the optimistic outlook for returns. A pamphlet for attendees suggested that the world could be entering “a new paradigm in which the value of assets relative to income remains historically high.”
With the Federal Reserve now wringing fake industries like crypto out of the economy, that prospect has been thrown into question. I wrote in March about the stranglehold of high debt and a soaring dollar on middle-income economies like Sri Lanka, which defaulted a month later. Financial conditions have continued to tighten for the developing world. That debt crisis is a geopolitical opportunity for the United States to remake multilateral institutions like the World Bank and IMF. Yet while the Biden administration has revived domestic industrial policy and speaks in high-flown terms about the importance of democratic allies, it has maintained the neoliberal orthodoxy in its relationships with developing countries.
Over the summer, the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the CHIPS Act kicked off a new era of green industrial policy. The U.S. emphatically did not pass a Green New Deal, rejecting that vision for direct investment in a new political coalition of green workers. Still, it passed an ambitious agenda structured around partnerships with green capital. As manufacturing shudders back to life in a tight labor market, the U.S. is already seeing an uptick in factory openings and labor militancy. But it remains to be seen whether, given depleted know-how and state capacity, the U.S. can reshore critical supply chains such as machine and weapons parts, pharmaceuticals, and shipbuilding. I went to Missouri to cover the ambitious campaign of an economic populist running for Senate trying to do just that, with a “Marshall Plan for the Midwest.”
Like any economic bonanza, this burst of climate spending is sure to produce its share of grifters, failed starts, and bogus technologies. Some of that is inevitable—and is in fact a good sign that the green boom is happening at the necessary scale. But it demands oversight. Trump cronies are among the investors already lining up to lay carbon pipelines through Iowa, as the growing ethanol industry attracts subsidies to pursue dubious carbon capture schemes.
Perhaps the biggest fight coming out of President Biden’s ambitious legislation will be whether the new green jobs being created by IRA investments are good union jobs. Money is scarcely out the door, but so far, the shift to green technologies has been an excuse to rely on exploitative temp staffing agencies and for the handful of remaining unionized companies to wriggle out of neutrality agreements with their workers. That’s no surprise—technological change is always an opportunity for a corporation to say that production doesn’t fall under an old union contract. But it is an alarming trend that—coupled with the threat of building new factories in the anti-union South—threatens the promise to create green jobs for union workers.
