It's the Green New Deal or Else
The Capitol seen at sunset in Washington, D.C., in January. (J. Scott
Applewhite / AP)
I suppose we all owe UCLA economist and Hoover Institution senior fellow Lee
Ohanian a debt of gratitude for telling us how it is. The "free market"
propagandist recently took to the pages of The Hill, a Washington, D.C.,
journal for political insiders, to explain that the holy laws of economics
dictate that humanity must consent to its own extermination. In a piece
titled "The Green New Deal is a Pipe Dream," Ohanian drowned climate
activists' overheated dreams of ecological salvation in the icy waters of
bourgeois reality, arguing that the proposed legislation's advocates are, in
fact, nefarious, big-government "command-and-control"
zealots-eco-Stalinists-who want "to impose their social and economic
preferences on others at an extravagantly high economic cost."
Ohanian described the Green New Deal's goal of net-zero U.S. carbon
emissions in 10 years as an "infeasible" aim that demonstrates a failure "to
understand basic cost-benefit analysis." If that weren't enough, the Hoover
fellow noted that "the GND would be extremely expensive" and that America
lacks "the technological know-how" to reach zero carbon emissions. Ohanian
further pleased the Hoover Institution's big-business sponsors by adding his
judgment that the Green New Deal's promise of a living wage will make
workers lazy and unproductive. No such promise can be fulfilled today, "when
jobs can be easily offshored, outsourced, and automated," he pronounced.
Now that we understand these economic realities, we can prepare-without
rebellion, with calm acceptance and within the limits of our stagnant
incomes-for our coming extinction. Onward with the coming macroeconomic
ecocide.
Except, wait. Hold on. Maybe Ohanian is full of petroligarchic crap. Maybe
there's still hope for the species after all.
He is, and there is.
It's simply not true that we lack the technological expertise to achieve
zero carbon emissions. Writing for Scientific American, Stanford engineering
professor Mark Jacobson and University of California at Davis research
scientist Mark Delucchi have shown repeatedly over the last decade that
humanity could convert to a completely renewable energy-based system by 2030
if nations employ technologies vetted by scientists rather than those
championed by private industry.
In their state-level analysis, which focuses on New York and California,
Jacobson and Delucchi conclude that wind turbines, water machines, solar
installations and other green technologies are affordable and available for
rapid utilization. "The main obstacles are political and social-getting
politicians onboard," Jacobson told a leading science reporter six years
ago. "There are always naysayers who think it's pie in the sky, that we'll
never get there. And there are people who are tied into a certain industry
who push back the most."
The Green New Deal would cost a lot of money, Ohanian insists. What, like
the giant tax breaks that Donald Trump and Congress gave the richest 10th of
the 1 percent and their corporate allies, adding $2.2 trillion to the
national debt (equal to $17,500 per household)? Like our subsidies for the
military-industrial complex, which costs taxpayers $700 billion today and is
projected to cost $972 billion by 2024, despite having the largest carbon
footprint of any single institution on earth? Like the $204 billion spent on
advertising in the U.S. last year to push a maddening surfeit of consumer
products, many, if not most, designed in accord with the ecocidal principle
of built-in obsolescence?
From 2014 through 2018, the global capitalist system spent $2.72 trillion on
advertising alone. Imagine where we'd be on the path to slowing climate
change if all that money had been spent on wind turbines, water machines,
solar installations, sustainable agriculture, reforestation and green
retrofitting, infrastructure and regional planning. There's more than enough
money to fund training to close the skilled heating, ventilation and
air-conditioning-worker gap.
Meanwhile, Ohanian's classist notion that workers will become indolent and
inefficient if they are guaranteed a living wage is a Dickensian old wives'
tale. Productivity positively-not negatively-correlates with a living wage.
And how does Ohanian think workers are supposed to lead dignified lives
without one? Are millions of young adults supposed to live with their
parents indefinitely or rely on food pantries and homeless shelters to get
by while working full-time jobs?
Outsourcing, offshoring and automation are not without solutions, such as
government and union restrictions; capital controls; green government jobs
programs to absorb technically displaced workers; international efforts to
raise wages and labor standards abroad; and guaranteed national incomes.
Much of this is addressed in economist Robert Pollin's important book,
"Greening the Global Economy," which advances "just transition" polices that
include "solid pension protections, re-employment guarantees, as well as
retraining and relocation support for individual workers, and
community-support initiatives" for communities negatively affected by the
suspension of fossil fuel extraction and burning.
Here's a true pipe dream (maybe we should call it a "pipeline dream"): the
continuation of a decent human existence even for rich nations comparatively
sheltered from the worst consequences of climate change.
In 2008, James Hansen, then head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, and seven other leading climate scientists reported that we would
see "practically irreversible ice sheet and species loss" if the planet's
average temperature rose above 1 degree Celsius (1.8 F), thanks to carbon
dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere reaching 450 parts per million (ppm).
When the report was published, CO2 levels were at 385-"already in the
dangerous zone" according to Hansen and his team. They warned that deadly,
self-reinforcing "feedbacks" could be triggered at that level. The dire
prospects they warned of included "ice sheet disintegration, vegetation
migration, and [greenhouse gas] release from soils, tundra, or ocean
sediments."
The only way to assure a livable climate, Hansen and his colleagues warned,
was to cut CO2 to at least 350 ppm.
Here we are, 11 years later, having blown past Hansen's 1 degree Celsius red
line since 2015. We currently stand at 410 ppm, the highest level of CO2
saturation in 800,000 years. The latest climate report of the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reflects the consensus
opinion of the world's leading climate scientists. It tells us that we are
headed to a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) in the next
12 years. Failure to dramatically slash emissions between now and 2030 is
certain to set off catastrophic developments for hundreds of millions of
people, the report warns.
The IPCC finds that at our current pace, we are headed for a 3- to 4-degree
Celsius (5.4 F to 7.2 F) temperature increase by the end of century. That
will mean a planet that is mostly unlivable.
It gets worse. Numerous climate scientists have indicated that the IPCC's
findings are excessively conservative. That's because the institute deletes
and downplays research demonstrating the likelihood that irreversible
climatological tipping points could arrive sooner than expected. Among the
reports pointing to these conclusions is a recent NASA-funded study warning
that the unexpectedly abrupt thawing of permafrost could release massive
volumes of CO2 and methane within a few decades.
Earth, biological and social scientists are increasingly raising the specter
of climate-driven human extinction in the not-so-distant future. In vast
swaths of the world, across much of sub-Saharan Africa, India, the Middle
East, Latin America and Southeast Asia, climate catastrophe is already
underway.
Conservative though it may be, the U.N. report is no whitewash. It gives us
12 years to drastically slash greenhouse gas emissions or face catastrophic
consequences. It also calls for "unprecedented changes in all aspects of
society" to drop global CO2 emissions 45 percent below 2010 levels and 60
percent below 2015 levels by 2030. We need to hit zero by the midcentury
point, the IPCC says, and we cannot do that without radically and rapidly
reducing our energy consumption.
Cost-benefit analysis? The Green New Deal is, if anything, insufficiently
radical. It does not go to the full class-rule taproot of the many deadly
ecological rifts (the climate crisis is only the most urgent) opened by
capitalism's relentless, totalitarian drive to commodify everything on
earth. Progressive-Democrat Green New Deal advocates have yet to join
serious ecosocialists in calling for green investments to be garnered from
massive reductions in the U.S. military budget, which eats up more than half
of federal discretionary spending and sustains a global military empire that
is the world's single largest institutional carbon emitter. The Green New
Deal's sponsors have yet to call (as they will have to if they are serious
about environmental reconversion) for their program to be funded and
protected from capital flight by the nationalization of the United States'
leading financial institutions.
Still, at least Green New Dealers are talking seriously about the benefit of
a livable earth. It seems like society might want to be ready to absorb
significant costs to achieve the continuation of the species. Professor
Ohanian should write the environmentalists' maxim 500 times on a UCLA
chalkboard: "There are no jobs on a dead planet. There is no economy on a
dead planet."
Zero carbon emissions by 2030 (or even 2040) is a grandiose goal. But guess
what? Now is precisely the time to aim sky high on ecology and way low on
carbon release. How much are we willing to pay for human survival? Do
environmental calamity and the real risk of extinction count as
"extravagantly high costs"? When might we be willing to achieve the
not-so-fringe benefit of continued existence by confronting the totalitarian
"command and control" imposed on all of us by big carbon capital's social
and economic preference for short-term private accumulation and profit over
the longer-term common good-over any kind of decent future for human beings
and other living things?
Paul Street
Contributor
Paul Street holds a doctorate in U.S. history from Binghamton University. He
is former vice president for research and planning of the Chicago Urban
League.
