Green New Deal

[mspohr]

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response

Climate change is our World War III. It needs a bold response | Joseph Stiglitz

Critics ask, “Can we afford it?” and complain that Green New Deal proponents confound the fight to preserve the planet, to which all right-minded individuals should agree, with a more controversial agenda for societal transformation. On both accounts the critics are wrong.

Yes, we can afford it, with the right fiscal policies and collective will. But more importantly, we must afford it. Climate change is our World War III. Our lives and civilization as we know it is at stake, just as they were in World War II.

The war on climate change, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy – just as the second world war set the stage for America’s golden economic era , with the fastest rate of growth in its history amidst shared prosperity. The Green New Deal would stimulate demand, ensuring that all available resources were used; and the transition to the green economy would likely usher in a new boom. Trump’s focus on the industries of the past, like coal, is strangling the much more sensible move to wind and solar power. More jobs by far will be created in renewable energy than will be lost in coal.

Some changes will be easy, for instance, eliminating the tens of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies and moving resources from producing dirty energy to producing clean energy. You could say, though, that America is lucky: we have such a poorly designed tax system that’s regressive and rife with loopholes that it would be easy to raise more money at the same time that we increase economic efficiency. Taxing dirty industries, ensuring that capital pays at least as high a tax rate as those who work for a living, and closing tax loopholes would provide trillions of dollars to the government over the next 10 years, money that could be spent on fighting climate change. Moreover, the creation of a national Green Bank would provide funding to the private sector for climate change – to homeowners who want to make the high-return investments in insulation that enables them to wage their own battle against climate change, or businesses that want to retrofit their plants and headquarters for the green economy.

 

[⚡️ELECTROMAN⚡️]

I think we should just continue to trash the planet. How else will we able able to say "told you so" when Florida no longer exists?

 

[JRP3]

I think we should just continue to trash the planet. How else will we able able to say "told you so" when Florida no longer exists?

That might happen anyway even if we magically cleaned up all emissions in one day.

 

[mspohr]

The Green New Deal Has Already Won

It’s remarkable: A number of polls suggest that Democratic voters now consider climate change to be a top-tier issue, as important as health care. Perhaps even more remarkably, the party’s presidential candidates seem to be taking that interest seriously. Jay Inslee has staked his candidacy on the issue; Beto O’Rourke has used a climate proposal to revive his flagging campaign; and Elizabeth Warren has cited the warming planet across a wide set of her famous plans.

This week, Joe Biden joined their ranks, releasing a lengthy climate plan on his website. Though Reuters teased his policy last month as a “middle ground” approach more moderate than the Green New Deal, the proposal looks pretty aggressive and sounds almost Bernie Sanders–esque in its ambition. What the United States needs, Biden says, is a “clean energy revolution.”

Even if neither Biden nor Warren becomes president, their proposals demonstrate how the Green New Deal seems to be winning the battle of ideas among Democrats, at least for now. On his website, Biden even praises Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal by name, calling it “a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” And both his plan and the Warren plan—and the Inslee climate plan, and O’Rourke’s proposal—adopt its theory of change, emphasizing that gushing federal investment can help the U.S. economy solve the problem of climate change. All four proposals, to varying degrees, promise a new age of plenty, a dawning era of renewed American dauntlessness. And they show how the window of political possibility has already moved significantly, such that Biden’s $1.5 trillion in climate-focused federal spending can start to seem moderate to right-wing observers.

 

[mspohr]

Warren's New $2 Trillion Green Manufacturing Plan Welcomed as 'Win-Win' for Climate and Workers

In a Medium post published Tuesday, Warren detailed her green manufacturing plan, which she described as "part of how I'll implement my commitment to a Green New Deal" and just the first of several proposals under her new economic patriotism agenda.

Noting that "over the next decade, the expected market for clean energy technology in emerging economies alone is $23 trillion," Warren wrote that she hopes to enable the United States to dominate that market by developing, manufacturing, and exporting "the technology the world needs to confront the existential threat of climate change."

To achieve market dominance, she explained, the U.S. government would use revenue from her proposed Real Corporate Profits Tax to "invest $2 trillion over the next 10 years in green research, manufacturing, and exporting — linking American innovation directly to American jobs, and helping achieve the ambitious targets of the Green New Deal."

 

[mspohr]

No, climate action can't be separated from social justice
No, climate action can't be separated from social justice | Julian Brave NoiseCat

If you set aside Republicans’ obsession with cow farts, perhaps the most prevalent criticism of the Green New Deal is its emphasis on social justice. Critics contend that the far-reaching climate agenda is far too concerned with extraneous issues such as jobs, infrastructure, housing, healthcare and civil and indigenous rights. Stick to greenhouse gases, they say; reforming the energy system is utopian enough. But here’s the thing: social justice concerns are always intertwined with public policy – and absolutely central to climate policy.
All of this should have major implications for how we write and implement policy. The Green New Deal, which envisions a society where people have universal access to energy, jobs, healthcare and housing, is a call for renewed commitment to the equal distribution of opportunity and justice – fundamental tenets of the social contract that have languished for far too long. It’s about investing in the communities polluted and left behind by the fossil fuel economy because these are the places with the highest levels of toxicity to clean up, but also because this is the right thing to do.
Non-elites experience policy through their daily lives, their monthly energy bill, their paycheck and the quality of their neighborhood, not through the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere or share of renewables on the grid. Elites who divorce climate policy from social justice and the people it is meant to help are almost as out of touch as those who deny climate science altogether.

 

[Mader Levap]

I see leftwingers see it as opportunity to roll out their little revolution, riding on climate change as excuse.

Ha! Good luck with that. I will stay by what actually was proven to work - capitalism with boot on it's face.

 

[mspohr]

I see leftwingers see it as opportunity to roll out their little revolution, riding on climate change as excuse.

Ha! Good luck with that. I will stay by what actually was proven to work - capitalism with boot on it's face.

Nobody is talking about socialism or revolution.
The Green New Deal is capitalism with carrots and sticks ("boot on its face").

 

[S'toon]

Where'd this RWNJ fantasy about a "revolution" come from? Can you be more behind the times?

The only calls for revolution I hear about come from the RW Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.

 

[mspohr]

What’s actually in the Green New Deal, explained with a video

Good video explanation of GND.

We need to move away from fossil fuels immediately.
Zero emissions means zero.

This will be difficult. We need to change and take action.
GND mitigates the untoward effects of change.
Rebuild the economy to reduce inequality.

 

[SDRick]

What’s actually in the Green New Deal, explained with a video

We need to move away from fossil fuels immediately.
Zero emissions means zero.

Who is "we" and best case how long will it take to immediately move away from fossil fuels?

 

[nwdiver]

Who is "we" and best case how long will it take to immediately move away from fossil fuels?

 

[jerry33]

Who is "we" and best case how long will it take to immediately move away from fossil fuels?

I assume that "we" means U.S. The time frame depends on either politics (If the current people stay in power, then never) or consumer demand (somewhat more hopeful). It also depends on what use. Transportation is relatively easy. Housing not so easy, but doable. Petrochemicals will take a very long time to develop economical substitutes. Best case is twenty years for transportation and housing to be mostly (80%) fossil-fuel free. Maybe 100 years for petrochemical. (My WAGs). None of this is quick enough to prevent the next couple of generations from experiencing severe hardships.

 

[mspohr]

I assume that "we" means U.S. The time frame depends on either politics (If the current people stay in power, then never) or consumer demand (somewhat more hopeful). It also depends on what use. Transportation is relatively easy. Housing not so easy, but doable. Petrochemicals will take a very long time to develop economical substitutes. Best case is twenty years for transportation and housing to be mostly (80%) fossil-fuel free. Maybe 100 years for petrochemical. (My WAGs). None of this is quick enough to prevent the next couple of generations from experiencing severe hardships.

The problem is that once all that CO2 is in the environment, it will be impossible to remove and the climate emergency will continue... Forever

 

[mspohr]

Bernie Sanders just made a brilliant defense of democratic socialism

Bernie Sanders just made a brilliant defense of democratic socialism | Bhaskar Sunkara

With characteristic concision, he decried the rule of “a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires”, and argued that the future belongs to either rightwing nationalism or democratic socialism, which he defined as a bedrock set of economic and social rights.

the rich aren’t misguided; they have a vested interest in protecting their wealth and power and keeping millions of others at their mercy. We can’t just design better policy – to build a more just world, we need to take power from the control of the rich and democratize it.
At George Washington University, Sanders once again railed against the billionaire class and “the profit-taking gatekeepers of our healthcare, our technology, our finance system, our food supply and almost all of the other basic necessities of life”. But instead of citing his hero Debs, he drew on Franklin Delano Roosevelt – a president who saw himself as the liberal savior of the capitalist system. Yet in 1944, shortly before his death, Roosevelt put forth a sweeping manifesto he called the Second Bill of Rights. Existing political rights alone haven’t given us “equality in the pursuit of happiness”, Roosevelt argued; we need to complement those political rights by guaranteeing access to employment, housing, healthcare, education and more.

 

[S'toon]

Everything you need to know about the Green New Deal

5. Right-wingers hate the Green New Deal, because of course they do.

 

[mspohr]

It’s Younger and Cooler Than a Carbon Tax
Today, much of that support still exists. But the politics of a carbon tax have become scrambled from the old ideal. And even if a carbon tax has much to credit it ideologically, it may lack the political support of other climate proposals. A new poll, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, suggests that Americans may prefer a Green New Deal-style policy of climate-targeted investment and regulation to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. It’s one of several shifts, underscored by the events of the past month, that suggest a grim future for the once-optimistic plan.

And finally, a new poll finds that a massive investment plan may be more popular—and less controversial—than a carbon tax. About 59 percent of Americans support a Green New Deal-style package of climate investment and regulation, according to a June poll from YouGov and Data for Progress, a left-leaning think tank. About 22 percent of Americans oppose such a plan.

 

[mspohr]

The Green New Deal: A Capitalist Plot

Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong’s 2016 book Concrete Economics. According Cohen and DeLong, economists at Berkeley who are among the key sources of the economic development strategy underlying the Green New Deal, the Eisenhower years were perhaps the most economically consequential in modern American history. What’s more, Eisenhower presided over this far-reaching transformation without also creating the sort of extreme economic inequality that attended the great industrial growth spurt of the early twentieth century—or the financialized economic polarization of the present

More important, however, virtually all the core technologies that characterize the digital age we live in now—computers, semiconductors, software, fiber optics, artificial intelligence, transistors, satellite technology, packet-switching, and above all the internet—were developed in the postwar R&D laboratories of the federal government. For Cohen and DeLong, the adoption of such breakthroughs by the private sector epitomizes the way capitalist economic development actually operates, as opposed to the fairy-tale idea of the completely free, unregulated market as the sole progenitor of economic innovation.

This would not, she insists, be a step in the direction of dreaded socialism, but—since all successful capitalist countries have had activist states—“pure and plain capitalism.” In other words, the architecture of any viable Green New Deal will revive the sort of mixed economic development that Eisenhower minted into historic levels of mass prosperity.

 

[mspohr]

We do need the Green New Deal
‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive

‘Climate apartheid’: UN expert says human rights may not survive

The world is increasingly at risk of “climate apartheid”, where the rich pay to escape heat and hunger caused by the escalating climate crisis while the rest of the world suffers, a report from a UN human rights expert has said.

Alston is critical of the “patently inadequate” steps taken by the UN itself, countries, NGOs and businesses, saying they are “entirely disproportionate to the urgency and magnitude of the threat”. His report to the UN human rights council (HRC) concludes: “Human rights might not survive the coming upheaval.”

“Climate change threatens to undo the last 50 years of progress in development, global health, and poverty reduction,” Alston said. Developing countries will bear an estimated 75% of the costs of the climate crisis, the report said, despite the poorest half of the world’s population causing just 10% of carbon dioxide emissions.

 

[mspohr]

Climate crisis: Al Gore says global economy needs major upgrade, fast

Climate crisis: global economy needs major upgrade … fast

The environmentalist and sustainability investor said the world was in the early stages of a “sustainability revolution” that had “the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution and the speed of the digital revolution”.

The report says the environmental breakdown is taking place alongside a fraying of the “social and economic fabric”, creating a “disruptive” economy-wide sustainability crisis requiring a holistic sustainability agenda.

Le Duc said a sustainable economy would require even greater shifts from the global investment community. “There are plenty of investors that need to wake up to sustainability. Around $17tn is being invested with environment and social governance considerations – that’s a lot of money but it’s a very small proportion of global capital.