By Karen Rubin, News& Photo Features
Scientists say we have only 12 years to save the planet from catastrophic floods, drought, famine, and if you think refugees are a problem now, just wait when 200 million are forced away from homes because of rising sea levels. Think Noah and the ark and the flood that killed off all but two by two of animal life.
Now comes the Green New Deal – the name captures the sense of urgency, the scale of plight, and the fact that we’ve tried leaving it solely up to capitalists who have rigged the market in order to preserve their wealth and power, and now it’s break-the-glass time for something else.
Republicans have rejected, torpedoed, sabotaged the practical and productive solutions advanced by President Obama and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy (Clean Power Plan, Paris Climate Accord, higher fuel standards), and now are determined to reverse, not merely hold, course to address climate change. They are determined to re-create 1950s society and all that implies – when it was legal to discriminate against gender, race, religion; when McCarthy demagogued a Red Scare. They have left no choice but to go all New Deal. It’s physics: every action causes an equal reaction. It’s the swing of a pendulum.
We absolutely need a New Deal on the scale of FDR – public-private partnerships that conquered the Great Depression by building the Hoover Dam, Lincoln Tunnel, Triborough Bridge and LaGuardia Airport and creating the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring low-cost electricity to impoverished rural areas. At the same time, Roosevelt addressed the larger societal issues that produced income disparities exacerbating the hardship of the Great Depression on the unprivileged – banking reform, Social Security, minimum wage. Reminder: America didn’t sink into Communism, despite McCarthy’s malignant hysteria, but instead became a global Superpower with the highest standard of living in the world– until Trump.
The Green New Deal captures the essence of what is properly characterized as the existential threat of climate change – that this is a matter of social, economic and political justice, as much as environmental justice. Rich people don’t worry about rising sea levels because they can use their helicopter to escape to their mountain homes; don’t care if temperatures rise to 120 degrees because they have all the air conditioning and personal generators to create electricity they need, all the food and medicines they require. But the poor and vulnerable are the ones who succumb, who can’t afford a bus ticket to escape Hurricane Katrina, who die of heat stroke, who can’t afford to leave neighborhoods blighted by fouled water and air, like Flint.
The Green New Deal seeks to emulate FDR’s New Deal to address the existential climate crisis, which indeed, goes beyond how we power our society, but to who turns control over that power and profit to control political power. But it is as much about social, economic and political justice, as environmental justice. That’s why they have attached such “radical” measures as calling for minimum wage, universal health care, a guaranteed job or a guaranteed income.
They are summoning the urgency of the Great Depression and World War II, when Americans recognized their patriotic duty to conserve resources, ration food, shut off lights, and, oh yes, still believed in the American Dream.
And you can understand why they are going all out – because trying to be accommodating to conservatives – as with Obamacare, which was built upon the conservative Heritage Foundation model that actually was paid for, instead of immediately going to a Medicare-for-All system (that would have wiped out the for-profit insurance company middlemen), and the Clean Power Plan which gave enormous discretion to states to meet carbon-reduction standards – only brought the same charges: Socialism! Class Warfare! and lawsuits. So why not go whole hog?
But progressives, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democratic Socialist!) are self-defeating by insisting not on the very ambitious but on the ambiguous - things that would make Climate Action radioactive, rather than a well defined plan that spoke to financing and implementation (as the Affordable Care Act was). Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez seem committed to derailing any real path toward climate action, by confirming the worst fears, and unabashedly attaching actual socialism to the Deal. They are making their own litmus test for Democrats: either you are with us (the socialists), or you are in the pocket of greedy Capitalists (Big Oil). Sanders will once again succeed only in destroying the Democrats, as opposed to implementing real progressive change.
It doesn’t help that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the face of the Green New Deal and inexplicably, the Democratic Party, with screaming headlines like Marc Thiessen’s in the Washington Post, “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an economic illiterate — and that’s a danger to America. This is the vanguard of the Democratic Party.” (Forget the fact that Donald Trump is an economic illiterate and a wrecking ball, as even former Fed Chair Janet Yellin said recently.)
By mashing up everything under the sun– a guaranteed federal job, guaranteed income, universal health care – that should be addressed separately, they are making it easy for Republicans in the palm of Big Oil, to rattle voodoo dolls and inspire fear and loathing from the 50 percent of Americans under the spell of Fox propaganda. America would become Venezuela!
This is Obamacare with all the fallacies and fears (death panels!), on steroids. Instead of explaining and defending the Affordable Care Act in 2010, they retreated (and lost the House). Democrats are doing the same thing again: letting Trump and the Republicans define and caricature a Green New Deal.
Here’s a simpler explanation that Democrats should use:
First: the United States faces nearly $1 trillion in disaster relief from recent climate catastrophes including this year’s California wildfires ($400 billion), last year’s Hurricane Maria, Michael, Florence and other “1000-year superstorms” that are coming with astonishing ferocity and frequency; hundreds of lives have been lost; whole communities, like Paradise, California, destroyed, creating tens of thousands of climate refugees (Puerto Ricans coming to your neighborhood, where they can vote!). Add the cost of the public health impacts from extreme weather, air pollution, contaminated ground and drinking water, food-borne diseases, heat related illnesses – impacting productivity, medical costs, and premature death. Finally, add in the higher cost for food, water, and housing.
Second: the United States faces more than $6 trillion just to repair its obsolete infrastructure – roads, bridges, water systems, sewage treatment, electricity grid.
Meanwhile, every other country around the world is making technology advances to shift their economies to clean, renewable energy – even oil-rich countries like Saudi Arabia. The US will be stuck in the 19th century with dirty, aging, inefficient systems. American products – cars, machines – will be shunned on the global market (China, the biggest market in the world, moving to require electric vehicles).
Why not marry those things: as we make the necessary repairs, transition our communities, our society, our economy, to clean, renewable energy and a sustainable structure? As jobs in coal mining and oil delivery are replaced, retrain and if necessary relocate workers (as Americans have always done, since the first settlers arrived). There already are more jobs in renewable energy than carbon - 374,000 solar energy workers, compared to 187,000 for coal, gas and oil power generation combined. That is where future prosperity and quality of life lie. But just demanding “a guaranteed federal job” as a condition for a Green New Deal will only scare the beejeebies out of those who want nothing better than to shrink government to a size it can be flushed down a toilet.
Indeed, the annual expenditure for infrastructure development - $1.5 trillion – matches the amount of money the tax cut shifted into the pockets of the wealthiest individuals and corporations. That money should be clawed back and invested in America’s, the planet’s and humankind’s future sustainability.
Though states – like New York’s own Green New Deal – and localities have taken up much of the responsibility for climate action, the federal government must play a role: the electric grid crosses state boundaries; regulations are needed to level the playing field so that dirty-fuel polluters can’t operate more cheaply than others who do the right thing; the government should offer incentives and tax benefits for research, development, and business start-ups. As it is, Trump’s EPA has virtually shut down enforcement against polluters.
As I recall, Noah’s neighbors were equally skeptical and did not get on board; hence they drowned or starved. Think of the Green New Deal as a 21st Century ark.
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