Green New Deal (GND)

By Sydney Azari - Medium, October 14, 2018

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an ominous report this week driving home an urgent and serious reality:without immediate action to transform society, climate catastrophe will not only be our children’s future, but our own.

The key takeaway from the IPCC report is this: if we do not radically transform every aspect of society starting NOW, we are facing ecological collapse and mass death in the short term. The report does not deeply analyse the geopolitical implications of such widespread environmental upheaval. Since human societies are inseparable from the environment, we know that the precarity resulting from collapsed ecological systems could lead to catastrophic and violent political outcomes as well.

The report has generated a shock through the consciousness of many people- mostly for what is unsaid. The foundation upon which we have built our lives is quickly crumbling. The American Dream, the white picket fence, and retirement will never be ours. It will never be our children’s. It will never be our children’s children’s. We are entering a time of uncertainty and pain that the hustle-and-bustle of everyday life hasn’t left much room to consider. This is a critical turning point, a challenge we must meet head on if we are to survive.

We cannot pretend that climate change does not mean that EVERYTHING we are accustomed to must change in response. Change is inevitable. Pain is inevitable. Uncertainty is inevitable. The outcome is unknown. The only variable that can be manipulated to change outright planetary collapse is our own agency in the situation.

Whether the shock of the report leads us to retreat inward or rise to the challenge will be determined by our capacity to locate meaning in the future and perceive a way toward it. Determining a direction forward is the difference between shock exhausting us or serving as fuel for the long journey ahead.

I hope these tactics can offer a light to draw us from the darkness.

By Varshini Prakash and Sarah Meyerhoff - In These Times, May 24, 2018

With global temperatures rising and midterm elections approaching, 2018 is the year the climate movement must take bold action towards a fossil-free future.

Across the country, young people face daily reminders that our society doesn’t serve our futures. We suffer from unemployment and underemployment that is well beyond the national average, with young people of color struggling disproportionately to find work and economic opportunity. We are straddled with historic student loan debts. And in a moment when we should be working quickly to avert climate catastrophe and transition to an inclusive, fossil-free economy, many of our elected officials remain passive as the Trump administration attacks our air, water and land. 

As youth leaders in the climate justice movement, we believe now is the time to embrace a bold political vision that addresses climate change while working to end racialized economic inequality.

A centerpiece of that vision is a federal jobs guarantee, a policy through which the government directly employs anyone who wants a job but doesn’t have one. The jobs guarantee has deep roots in the U.S. progressive tradition and is seeing growing support from scholars and movement leaders who tout its potential to put Americans to work while helping to rebuild our infrastructure, schools and healthcare system. With Sen. Bernie Sanders developing a jobs guarantee proposal, as well as a score of down-ballot candidates and Democratic presidential hopefuls also voicing support, the policy is sure to feature prominently in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

Climate scientists say that the next few years may be the only ones we have left to avert catastrophic global warming. A jobs guarantee program with a strong focus on stopping and preparing for climate change—a climate jobs guarantee—might be the last, best hope to quickly marshal public support and resources behind climate action. Simply put, this is a can’t-miss opportunity for the climate movement—and for our generation.

Raj Patel and Jim Goodman - Jacobin, April 4, 2019

The food system is breaking the planet. Nearly a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gases are driven by how we eat, and it’s impossible to tackle climate change without transforming agriculture. So the Green New Deal is wise to call for “a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food.” Better yet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s proposal includes a call to work “collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector.”

This has the makings of a bonanza for rural America. Healthy food costs more and is harder to access than processed food. Under a Green New Deal that helped Americans eat better, more cash might flow back to the land. And if the federal government were paying more for better food, and understood that well-managed soil can sequester carbon, sustainable farming might be a way to end America’s rural poverty.

Yet almost as soon as the Green New Deal was released, members of the American Farm Bureau criticized the proposal as misguided and uninformed. Early in March, the National Farmers Union, one of the more left-leaning of the large farm organizations, snubbed the Green New Deal for not recognizing “the essential contribution of rural America.” And the recent Senate vote united fifty-seven members of the chamber in opposition. So, why the haters in farm country?

Of course, not all farmers are conservative. Nor is everyone living in rural America a farmer. Farmers carried Jimmy Carter to the White House in 1976. Farmers and others active in America’s rural social movements have written enthusiastically about the Green New Deal and its possibilities for family farms, about how it might spur things like rural repopulation, new farm pricing models, and climate-friendly agriculture. But those ideas are written against what the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony.”

A key idea in Gramsci’s work on hegemony is that of a historic bloc, a coalition that licenses and polices a dominant social order. The power within that bloc extends beyond brute force — it tries to establish dominance at the level of “common sense,” styling ideas of what’s socially acceptable and what’s unthinkable. The dominant historic bloc in the United States today is an assembly of property owners, fossil fuel corporations, war-makers, tech giants, media outlets, health care management firms, industrialists, monopolists, and financiers, but involves cultural leadership from some workers and farmers. The reflexive criticism of the Green New Deal, before its details have even been hashed out, is an indicator of the bloc’s hegemony.

The Green New Deal’s success depends on refashioning this common sense. To rewrite common sense is to unpick the alliances that the current bloc works to maintain, to find the fault lines that can pry that bloc apart, and to develop the organizational links that can build a counter-hegemonic bloc. To do that, it’s worth understanding the source of some of the most important alliances in the current configuration of forces in America’s food system: the first New Deal.

The original New Deal today appears as a miracle, an incredible moment in which the nation stood united behind Keynesian policy to accomplish big things. Yet they were achieved not because the nation united behind them, but because the nation was profoundly divided. The New Deal was a project precipitated by class struggle, and is best understood as a series of victories and defeats in the management of that struggle by an anxious bourgeoisie, across rural and urban America.

By Robert Pollin, Heidi Garrett-Peltier, and Jeannette Wicks-Lim - Political Economy Research Institute, December 4, 2017

This study examines the prospects for a transformative Green New Deal project for Washington State.  The centerpiece of the Green New Deal will be clean energy investments—i.e. both investments in the areas of renewable energy and energy efficiency.  The first aim of this Green New Deal project is to achieve a 40 percent reduction in all human-caused carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in Washington State relative to the state's 2014 emissions level.  The second aim is to achieve this 2035 CO₂ emission reduction standard while also supporting existing employment levels, expanding job opportunities and raising average living standards throughout Washington State.   

We estimate that clean energy investments in Washington State that would be sufficient to put the state on a true climate stabilization trajectory will generate about 40,000 jobs per year within the state.   We consider a series of policies to support this state-level Green New Deal program.  These include a carbon tax, which we estimate can raise an average of about $900 million per year even with a low-end tax rate of $15 per ton of carbon.   We also consider a series of regulatory policies, direct public spending measures, and private investment incentives.

Read the text (PDF).

By Wenonah Hauter and Jean Ross - Common Dreams, October 27, 2017

NOTE: The IWW takes no position on legislative acts, except opposing those that increase wage slavery. While this act does not reduce wage slavery, it neither increases it, and the primary reason for posting this article here is the intersectional framing that Food and Water Watch and National Nurses United offer.

More than a month after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, many of the island’s residents still struggle without electricity or clean water. A major humanitarian and health care crisis is rapidly unfolding there, on American soil, with disgracefully inadequate help from our federal government. Meanwhile, unprecedented wildfires have burned in Northern California, where dozens were killed and tens of thousands were rendered homeless. In Texas and Florida, the recovery from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma has only just begun. These are tumultuous, catastrophic times, made much worse by human-induced climate chaos.

Science has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that decades of burning of fossil fuels has already caused significant climate disruption, and that this has led to an increase in the frequency and severity of major natural disasters. If we don’t take aggressive, forward-thinking action now, the storms and floods and fires will get worse and worse. This will mean more homelessness, more water contamination, more food shortages, more refugee diasporas and many more lives lost.

On the front lines of the most recent disasters, for more than a decade, including in Puerto Rico and Texas, hundreds of nurses backed by National Nurses United joined first responders to provide urgent medical care in the face of disasters intensified by climate change and help save lives and assist recovery.

The urgency of our fight is critical. As the planet steadily warms, science indicates we will trigger various climate ‘tipping points,’ causing irreversible new impacts on the planet. Many of these changes will be triggered at global temperature increases below 2°C; we have exceeded 1°C of warming already. In 2010, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated a two-thirds chance of avoiding a 1.5°C rise in temperature if carbon dioxide emissions are kept below 400 gigatons. At the current rate of emission, the planet will blow past that critical threshold in the next five years. There is no time to lose.

By various - CUPW, Leap Manifesto, et. al., March 2016

Many think of Canada Post as a place to mail a care package, buy stamps or pick up the latest commemorative coin.

Some consider the post office past its prime: the last decade has seen efforts to cut, devalue and undermine this quintessentially public service. These moves have been fiercely resisted by people across the country.

What if our cherished national institution, with its vast physical infrastructure and millions of daily human interactions, could offer us something completely different? What if the post office could play a central role in building our next economy — an economy that is more stable, more equal, and less polluting?

Just Imagine...

• Charging stations for electric vehicles at post offices
• a renewable-powered postal fleet that connects farms to dinner tables
• Door-to-door mail carriers checking in on seniors and people with mobility issues as well as delivering locally-produced food and other services
• Post offices as community hubs for social innovation, connecting climate-friendly businesses to customers
• Postal banking services that provide small towns and Indigenous communities with inclusive financial services – like loans to families underserved by commercial banks
• Public-interest financial services that fuel the green energy transition in urban, rural and Indigenous communities We want a 100% renewable economy that addresses inequality, puts power in our hands and improves our lives.

Our post office can deliver it.

Read the report (PDF).

By Paul Street - Counter Punch, October 16, 2015

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’s.

Some Darkness Behind the “Sun-Washed Days”

There is a tendency among senior and middle-aged liberal and progressive United States intellectuals to sentimentalize the post-World War II “golden age” of American and Western capitalism between 1945 and the early to middle 1970s.   The inclination is understandable. During those “sun-washed days” (liberal author and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert), economic inequality declined, significant Civil Rights victories were achieved, jobs were plentiful, the endlessly invoked middle class swelled, wages and consumption rose, the welfare state expanded, college was open and affordable for an unprecedented number of working class young adults, a new youth counterculture flourished, popular music reached new creative heights, the sexual revolution took off, and U.S. astronauts walked on the moon. American society was riding high, it seemed, underpinned by a relatively “high-functioning” and “reasonably egalitarian” (Herbert) capitalism operating at its regulated, “Fordist,” and Keynesian best, prior to the neoliberal “globalized capitalism” that has brought us over four decades to a savagely unequal and arch-plutocratic New Gilded Age – a time when the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90% of the U.S. populace along with a wildly disproportionate share of the nation’s not-so “democratically elected” officials.

The nostalgia of many for post-WWII America is less than surprising. I share it to no small degree, thanks to my many fond grade-school memories of growing up on the streets of 1960s Chicago. Still, there’s a host of reasons to temper one’s progressive nostalgia for the “golden” post-WWII era. The downwardly redistributive trend of American and Western capitalism during the period was remarkably contingent, temporary, qualified, and – in retrospect – short lived The “reasonably egalitarian” direction of the “thirty glorious years” (the French phrase for “the golden age”) reflected an anomalous moment in the history of a rapacious profits system that was never removed from its position atop U.S. society and reverted to its default long-term inegalitarian and authoritarian tendencies once the moment passed. Between 1930s and the 1970s, it is true, a significant reduction in overall economic inequality (though not of racial inequality) and an increase in the living standards of millions of working-class Americans occurred in the U.S. This “Great Compression” occurred thanks to the rise and expansion of the industrial workers’ movement (sparked to no small extent by communists and other leftist militants); the spread of collective bargaining; the rise of a corporate-liberal New Deal (later “Fair Deal” and “Great Society”) welfare state; and the democratic domestic pressures imposed by World War II and subsequent U.S. social movements. Still, core capitalist prerogatives and assets were never dislodged, consistent with New Deal champion Franklin Roosevelt’s boast that he had “saved the profits system” from radical change. U.S. capital never lost its way or its dominant role in American society. U.S. politics remained “the shadow cast on society by big business,” as Dewey prophesized it would so long as power rested with “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda” (Dewey, “The Need for a New Party,” New Republic, March 18, 1931).

The gains enjoyed by ordinary working Americans were made possible to no small extent by the uniquely favored and powerful position of the U.S. economy (and empire) and the historically extraordinary profit rates enjoyed by U.S. corporations after the war, when the U.S. was briefly home to more than half the world’s industrial production. When that remarkable position and those profits were inevitably challenged and rolled back by resurgent Western European and Japanese economic competition in the 1970s and 1980s, egalitarian “golden” time trends were naturally reversed by capitalist elites who had never lost their critical command of the nation’s core economic and political institutions. They undertook a Great U-Turn (Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone) from the top down – a change of direction that was really U.S. capitalism returning to its historical wealth- and power-concentrating norm. Middle and working class Americans have paid the price ever since and Democratic presidential candidates now try to outdo each other in claiming to feel, and present progressive solutions to, their pain (though overwhelmingly preferring the phrase “middle class” to “working class”).

By Erik D. Kojola - Sage Publications, August 20, 2015

Environmental protection is presumed to damper economic growth and media accounts of resource extraction often portray trade-offs between jobs and the environment. However, there is limited evidence that environmental protection universally costs jobs and heavily polluting industries provide few jobs in comparison to environmental impacts.

Therefore, how has media discourse contributed to the taken-for-granted division between the economy and the environment? This paper uses the Keystone XL pipeline controversy as a case of the symbolical conflict between supporters of growth and conservation to explore the role of ideology and power in media discourse.

I use frame analysis of newspaper articles to explore the representations of labor and the environment and how hegemonic ideology legitimizes resource extraction. My analysis reveals binary framing that constructed the pipeline as a political controversy over the trade-off between the environment and the economy, which made conflict between workers and environmentalists sensible, and silenced alternatives.

Read the text (link).

By Béla Galgóczi - European Trade Union Institute, 2015

Our planetary limits demand a radical transition from the energy-intensive economic model based on the extraction of finite resources, which has been dominant since the first industrial revolution, to a model that is both sustainable and equitable.

Unfortunately however, energy transformation in Europe has, after a promising start, fallen hostage to austerity and to the main philosophy underpinning the crisis management policies in which overall competitiveness is reduced to the much narrower concept of cost-competitiveness. Regulatory uncertainty, design failures built into incentive systems, and unjust distribution of the costs, have also contributed to the reversal of progress in energy transformation currently observable across Europe.

In this book three country case studies highlight the different facets of these conflicts, while additional light is thrown on the situation by an account of the lack of progress in achieving energy efficiency.

By way of conclusion, a mapping of the main conflicts and obstacles to progress will be of help in formulating policy recommendations. Ambitious climate and energy policy targets should be regarded not as a burden on the economy but rather as investment targets able to pave the way to higher employment and sustainable growth. It is high time for this perception to be recognised and implemented in the context of Europe’s new Investment Plan, thereby enabling clean energy investment to come to form its central pillar. A shift in this direction will require an overhaul of the regulatory and incentive systems to ensure that the need for just burden-sharing is adequately taken into account.

Read the report (Link).