The IRA Is an Invitation to Organizers

By Kate Aronoff - Dissent, Spring 2023

The Inflation Reduction Act presupposes a private sector–led transition. But battles over its implementation could build the political constituencies and expertise needed to take on the fossil fuel industry.

The Inflation Reduction Act would not have happened without the movement for a Green New Deal, but it shouldn’t be confused for one. The climate left (broadly defined) now faces a novel problem: how to deal with having won something—and keep fighting for more.

It’s understandably hard for those who supported Green New Deal proposals for transformative investments in public goods to see the IRA—a bundle of tax credits whose benefits accrue largely to corporations—as a consolation prize. For the many climate hawks galvanized by Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic nomination in 2020, it’s also a far cry from what, for a moment, looked to be within striking distance: governing power.

In some ways the IRA’s passage—and Republicans taking back the House a few months later—marks a return to normal for the climate left. But Democratic Party politics have changed. Top Democratic policymakers openly discuss the need for industrial policy (what one International Monetary Fund paper dubs “the policy that shall not be named”), and hundreds of billions of dollars will soon go out the door to build up domestic supply chains for things like battery storage and critical minerals. In practice, however, that means letting the public sector shoulder the risks of an energy transition while the private sector reaps the rewards. By all accounts the White House seems to imagine climate policy as the project of turning clean energy technologies into a more attractive asset class for investors.

None of this obviates the need for a Green New Deal. Every path to staving off runaway climate catastrophe runs through enormous investments to scale up zero-carbon energy and a simultaneous, brutal confrontation with the fossil fuel industry. Even given unlimited resources, the former simply won’t overpower the latter fast enough. Trillions of dollars in future revenue—coal, oil, and gas that has yet to be dug up and burned—need to be made worthless, even when the market disagrees. Only the state can keep a company from doing what is profitable.

The Green New Deal’s basic political calculus for making the state do that still holds, too: getting to zero emissions requires giving people a reason to be excited about the awe-inspiring project of decarbonization and to come to its defense at the ballot box and beyond. Decarbonization should make the kinds of changes in people’s lives that inspire them to name children after the president they deem responsible. No one will name their kid Biden because they got a $7,500 rebate on a Chevy Bolt.

If winning a Green New Deal is still necessary (it is), then the path to it will be a strange one. A product of the left having shifted the debate on climate and economic policy is that it’s also created a new organizing challenge for itself: how do you build durable democratic majorities for climate action as political elites align around a fundamentally undemocratic vision for what decarbonization should look like?

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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author.