In just a few centuries, the human footprint on the Earth has devastated other species of plant and animal life, and is on the verge of making the planet uninhabitable for people. The cumulative interaction of assaults on several natural systems has already brought about consequences far more dire than the most pessimistic scenarios of just a decade ago. These include ice caps shrinking, oceans rising,
melting permafrost releasing more CO2 and methane, heat producing still more heat, and climate extremes creating ever more devastating storms and fires. Despite the Paris commitments, greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing rather than diminishing. Unless a drastic reversal happens, we will soon pass the point of no return. Pessimists believe we are already there. Even if we succeed, daily life will have to be very different, though in many respects it can be better.
In order to avert even worse catastrophes, a number of improbable events will have to break just right. The United States, where Donald Trump revels in removing restraints on carbon production, will need to elect a radically progressive president and a working majority in Congress. That alone will take a miracle of popular organizing, leadership, and common purpose. The president and Congress will then need to undertake the largest economic mobilization of national resources since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
A number of people and groups have used the metaphor of a Green New Deal to describe the scale of the needed effort and the large-scale national (now global) solidarity that the New Deal evokes. Our purpose in this special issue of The American Prospect is not to add one more volume to the existing libraries of manifestos and reports, but to demonstrate that an initiative on the scale required is not only urgent but practical. That has to mean practical as policy, as technology, and above all as politics. As we demonstrate in this special report, the needed technologies and strategies exist. The challenge is rallying a national commitment to pursue them. Leadership has to begin in the U.S., because we are both the worst climate offender as well as the one nation capable of spearheading a global reversal.
For a Green New Deal, or something like it, to end reliance on carbon-based energy, drastically revise how we practice agriculture, end the pillaging of several natural systems and the plundering of natural resources, commit to green infrastructure, broaden and redefine the meaning of prosperity and the good life, as well as pursue a just transition, we will need to square several circles.
There are aspects of a Green New Deal that command majority support: infrastructure, jobs, and aid to help localities get to zero carbon—incremental reforms whose cumulative dynamics can turn out to be transformative.
FIRST, CONVERSION TO A SUSTAINABLE economy will require a drastic reduction in the human material toll on the planet. Yet in a democracy, we are asking citizens to approve such a plan at a time when most American families have already suffered declining living standards over four decades. People of color have endured not only continuing discrimination in access to their share of the economy’s stunted opportunities, but have often borne the worst of the carbon economy’s toxic effects right in their own neighborhoods.
So while some environmentalists would plead for an economy of voluntary simplicity and radical “de-growth,” a strategy of urging citizens to accept what will be widely perceived as a decline in living standards would be an impossibly hard sell. Happily, a shift to a renewable and sustainable economy could actually enhance living standards, properly understood. Green energy would be cheaper and more reliable. Good public transit can improve convenience and relieve people of the need to use cars on ever more congested streets. A shift to energy-efficient and less-sprawled housing could be packaged with an increase in the supply of affordable housing. Greener and better public infrastructure would replace current decaying public systems that citizens experience as inconvenient and forever broken. The scale of needed outlay, even under the most expansive scenarios, is far less than that of World War II, when the military spent almost half of GDP. And the more we can make green changes at the level of the entire economy, the less the cost of change falls on individuals.
The very process of getting all of this done can create millions of good jobs and remind citizens that the good life includes reliable public systems and amenities as well as increasingly unreliable and often perverse private-market systems. In the same way that the original New Deal required significant restraints on capitalism and enlargement of public spheres and spaces, a Green New Deal necessarily constrains corporate capitalism. Virtually all of the predatory assaults on the natural environment have been driven by corporate power, complemented by neoliberal ideology holding that markets are efficient. As Nicholas Stern once remarked, global climate change is history’s greatest case of market failure. A Green New Deal necessarily means narrowing corporate power, recovering civic and community life, and reclaiming space for our commons.
The term pork barrel has generally been used as a pejorative, meaning wasteful public projects where the politics entails mutual “logrolling”—you support an outlay for my district and I will support one for yours—and the result is often bridges to nowhere. When Congress swore off earmarking specific projects for congressional districts, it was generally taken as a virtuous reform. But think again.
The original New Deal, as historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Kevin Baker demonstrate in their articles, was a triumph of regional development policy—pork barrel in the very best sense of the term. It spread the wealth around. Indeed, if we had paid more attention to making sure that some prosperity reached regions and people left behind instead of being concentrated in a few tech and finance hubs, we might not have ended up with Donald Trump as president. When there is regional equity to public works projects, even conservative politicians who don’t like federal programs are more likely to put their qualms aside. In Tennessee, right-wing politicians rail against Washington, but nobody proposes privatizing TVA. Chattanooga today is a digital center because its public power company offers the nation’s cheapest and highest-speed internet. Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a hub for regional high-speed computing because its municipally owned utility offers cheap, green electricity. A Green New Deal is a chance to jump-start regional economic development that is also sustainable.
A second circle that needs to be squared has to do with speed. Ideally, we should have reached zero fossil fuel extraction and combustion years ago. Ideally, all fossil fuel operations should be shut down immediately. We can demand that, but we can’t will it into happening. As the lead article by Jeffrey Sachs and the discussion of emerging technologies by Mara Prentiss explain, we can in fact get to zero carbon a lot faster and with a lot less economic cost than the naysayers contend, and even faster if we get the politics right. Prentiss demonstrates that most of the needed technologies are available now. Our special issue taken as a whole shows that a Green New Deal can be achieved.
As Jeff Faux’s piece recounts, we are asking citizens to trust their government to launch an initiative at a massive scale at a moment when trust in government and in all large public systems is at an all-time low. Today, that mistrust is all too appropriate, given the Trump presidency. Yet, as Faux observes, the very process of having highly visible projects that improve people’s lives can cumulatively rebuild public trust. These projects, however, will need to be somewhat front-loaded, to demonstrate benefits in the new administration’s first two years. Otherwise, a new president with grand promises and scant results could suffer the fate of Bill Clinton, whose party lost a record 54 House seats for a Democrat in 1994—until that record was broken in 2010, when Barack Obama’s party lost 63 seats. Notably, the only Democratic president to avoid that midterm curse was Franklin Roosevelt, who managed to deliver a great deal in his first two years. The voters reciprocated by increasing his Democratic majority in 1934 by nine seats in the House and nine in the Senate.
The challenge is for government to get things done fast, but without running roughshod over the local citizenry. The original New Deal was a mix of big projects led from Washington and completed in record time, mixed with a lot of bottom-up planning. Citizens served on boards of local projects of the WPA, and rural electrification co-ops. Yet as any student of Robert Moses knows, this was also a decade when highways and bridges, as well as Western dams, wiped out entire communities with no community consent. A Green New Deal needs to engage in bottom-up planning, but without endless delays. As transportation planner and engineer Robert Paaswell writes in an original and authoritative piece on why infrastructure investments seem to take forever, the single most important factor causing endless delays in public construction projects is neither citizen involvement nor environmental-impact statements, but unreliable, stop-and-go funding. The great benefit of a Green New Deal is that it would commit the federal government to multiyear, multitrillion-dollar financing, so that serious long-term planning can take place.
Jason Schneider
A THIRD CIRCLE THAT HAS TO BE SQUARED is the connection between radical witness and agitation and the need for policies that can be embraced by the next president and enacted by Congress. The alliance between radicals and liberals is always a complex dance. It took militant organizing by radical industrial unions in the 1930s to build a strong labor movement, yet that movement required a rendezvous with President Roosevelt to legislate the Wagner Act of 1935, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and labor’s partnership with government during World War II. In similar fashion, we needed civil disobedience on the ground by the civil rights movement of the 1960s to generate the moral outrage that finally pushed President Lyndon Johnson to press Congress to enact the three great civil rights acts of that decade.
If anything, the relationship between the climate movement and the needed legislation is even trickier. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement appropriated the Green New Deal metaphor in 2018, literally dozens of reports and policy papers had already used that label. AOC put out a fairly short, schematic policy blueprint that was the most expansive of them all. The value of that initiative was to demonstrate the scale of commitment needed, as well as the intersecting multiple needs. The Sunrise Movement also generated new political energy led by the young demanding action. Yet by including under the Green New Deal banner the entire progressive policy agenda, the AOC version of a Green New Deal also presented a high-profile target.
AOC’s Green New Deal was attacked by both the right as preposterously grandiose, and by the center as utopian and too expensive. When more than 300 economists issued a statement attacking that version of a Green New Deal, it included many moderately liberal economists who had served with Barack Obama, including former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen. These attacks did damage. When our colleague Stanley Greenberg polled on the popularity of several large-scale progressive policy initiatives, including Medicare for All and free higher public education, most were net positive. The only issue scoring seriously net negative was a Green New Deal, with a net minus 23.
Some would conclude from this result that the Green New Deal “brand” is hopelessly tarnished for the sin of dreaming big before it has even begun; that even relatively liberal politicians will avoid it. We emphatically disagree. The New Deal, as Nelson Lichtenstein explains in his article, is the only large-scale public initiative in American history with all of the right resonances. Most Americans also have a positive view of the need to move to green, renewable energy. The current attacks on a Green New Deal only demonstrate that we have public-education work to do. Hence this special report.
While liberals always need to be pressed and prodded by radicals, the practical challenge is getting a Green New Deal through Congress. AOC’s version of a Green New Deal, H. Res. 109, has 95 House co-sponsors. Long ago, when an enthusiast told 1952 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, “You have the vote of every thinking person,” Governor Stevenson replied, “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.” As realists, we need to recognize that a majority of the House and Senate have to legislate a Green New Deal, while even some Democrats are far too cozy with extractive industries. The grassroots pressure of a movement on the march can help, and yet some of the initial bills will necessarily be more incremental than we might like, focusing on aspects of a Green New Deal that can command majority support, such as infrastructure, jobs, and aid to help localities get to zero carbon. This also evokes the original New Deal, which was not a single grand plan, but a series of initiatives that built more support along the way. The French radical theorist André Gorz coined the term non-reformist reform, meaning reforms that seem incremental, but whose cumulative dynamics turn out to be transformational. We need to legislate in that spirit.
Economic and racial justice must be built into every aspect of a Green New Deal. Here again, as Harold Meyerson’s article explains, crisis presents opportunity. Justice is harder in a climate of struggle over a dwindling supply of good jobs and insufficient funds for resilience and remediation. A just transition means good jobs, not just for the mostly white and male workers in the extractive economy, but for people who never got to share in the environmentally ruinous good times. It means special attention and resources for the communities that have borne the brunt of the toxicity. A Green New Deal at adequate scale can provide these resources for all.
While we may believe that denial of climate change is limited to oil magnates and Trumpians, it is broader than we think. Mainstream economists keep issuing reports that are ignorant of the science and built on pitifully rosy assumptions. William Nordhaus, the liberal Yale economist who won a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change, uses a model that considers a 3.5 degree Celsius warming acceptable and projects global economic damages at just 2.1 percent of GDP. By contrast, the IPCC and most climate scientists view that degree of warming as catastrophic. Nordhaus thinks we can reach that goal purely with a carbon tax of just $44 per ton. The IPCC calculates that a tax required to cap warming at a barely tolerable 1.5 degrees would have to be at least $135 and as much as $5,500 per ton depending on what other complementary policies were used.
Complacency is also a form of denial. Though the ravages of climate change are upon us in California’s fires, ever more intense hurricanes, and in the daily flooding of streets in several Southeastern coastal cities, for most Americans daily life goes on. Amid something like normalcy, the projections of general catastrophe within a few decades create a form of cognitive dissonance that can also be disabling. Breaking through that denial also requires leadership and education, and a sense of a Green New Deal not as shared sacrifice but as hopeful, positive possibility. Our closing conversation with Bill McKibben offers something of that hope.
THE PROSPECT’S SPECIAL VALUE is to connect practical policy and social movement to politics. In the effort to literally save the planet, what seems utopian has to be understood as realism. Radical change is pure realism when it comes to survival. Yet it also needs to become realism as politics. If the Prospect is good at anything, it is in explaining how the radical can become real. In this special issue, we hope to demonstrate that drastic change is not only urgent, but possible.
The issue is divided into three parts. Part I discusses infrastructure investment as a key part of a Green New Deal. It reminds us what the original New Deal did, and then lays out what an infrastructure and jobs program needs to be today. Part II addresses the challenge of a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy. How fast can it be done? What are the gross and net costs, and the net benefits measured against the escalating costs of inaction? How do we pay for it? What are the relative roles of different levels of governments and citizens? Happily, the pieces by two of the nation’s leading economists who study climate, Jeffrey Sachs and Robert Pollin, agree that the total new cost of financing a green transition is an affordable 2 percent of GDP, factoring in costs and benefits.
Part III is all about the politics. How do we assemble the majority support to make the utopian thinkable, and then irresistible? And how does the national connect to the global? Our purpose is not to duck the hard questions by putting forth proposals that can be defended as “aspirational,” with the politics glossed over, but to look the hardest questions directly in the eye.
We cannot fail. Progressives sometimes say, half-joking, that if Trump is re-elected there is always Canada. But if we lose this planet as our home, there is no other.
The American Prospect is grateful to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Wallace Global Fund for underwriting this urgent special issue and for their other work on behalf of sustainability and climate justice.
