The American Prospect #310

SPECIAL REPORT: THE PRACTICAL PATH TO SAVING THE PLANET

I D E A S, P O L I T I C S & P O W E R

2019 BONUS ISSUE

GREEN NEW DEAL

The Urgent Realism of Radical Change ROBERT KUTTNER • JEFFREY SACHS • NELSON LICHTENSTEIN • KEVIN BAKER HAROLD MEYERSON • JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ • ROBERT E. PAASWELL • MARIANA MAZZUCATO ADAM S. HERSH • ROBERT POLLIN • JOAN FITZGERALD • JAY INSLEE • MARA PRENTISS ALEXANDER SAMMON • GABRIELLE GURLEY • JAMES K. BOYCE JEFF FAUX • JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT • DERRICK Z. JACKSON BRITTANY GIBSON • MARCIA BROWN • BILL MCKIBBEN

Progressives can’t afford to abandon the working class.

For decades, progressives led the way in fighting for policies to protect, strengthen and grow the working class.

From fighting against offshoring to rallying for better wages and working conditions, progressives stood up for America’s blue collar workers when nobody else would.

Progressives can’t quit the fight now. In 2020 and beyond, we must continue to fight for America’s workers.

americanmanufacturing.org

contents

SPECIAL REPORT

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 5 BONUS ISSUE 2019

GREEN NEW DEAL

4 THE URGENT REALISM OF RADICAL CHANGE BY ROBERT KUTTNER 8 GETTING TO A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY BY JEFFREY SACHS

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS 16 DREAMERS WITH SHOVELS BY NELSON LICHTENSTEIN 23 THE ROLE OF PUBLIC CAPITAL BY KEVIN BAKER 28 THE GREEN NEW DEAL AS ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT BY HAROLD MEYERSON 32 HEALING WATERS BY JUDITH D. SCHWARTZ 35 MAKING PUBLIC WORKS WORK BY ROBERT E. PAASWELL 38 INDUSTRIAL POLICY AND THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE BY MARIANA MAZZUCATO 42 SIDEBAR TURNING TRADE GREEN BY ADAM S. HERSH

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY 44 HOW DO WE PAY FOR A ZERO-EMISSIONS ECONOMY? BY ROBERT POLLIN 49 CITIES ON THE FRONT LINES BY JOAN FITZGERALD 52 SIDEBAR HOW STATES ARE LEADING ON CLIMATE ACTION BY GOVERNOR JAY INSLEE 54 THE TECHNICAL PATH TO ZERO CARBON BY MARA PRENTISS 57 THE TANTALIZING NUCLEAR MIRAGE BY ALEXANDER SAMMON 60 ACCELERATING EQUITY IN ELECTRIC CARS BY GABRIELLE GURLEY 62 SIDEBAR CARBON DIVIDENDS AND THE GREEN NEW DEAL BY JAMES K. BOYCE 65 OP-ART FOLLOW THE MONEY: HOW BANK SWITCHING MAKES GOOD SENSE BY STEVE BRODNER

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL 66 WILL AMERICANS SUPPORT A BIG GREEN GOVERNMENT? BY JEFF FAUX 69 A GREEN NEW DEAL FOR OAKLAND BY JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT 72 TOXIC INJUSTICES BY DERRICK Z. JACKSON 76 THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE OF DECARBONIZATION BY BRITTANY GIBSON 78 AN OUTCRY FOR ACTION BY MARCIA BROWN 80 SIDEBAR A Q&A WITH BILL MCKIBBEN BY ROBERT KUTTNER

CULTURE 81 RECKONING WITH WHITE SUPREMACY BY RICHARD R. JOHN 84 IS OUR ECONOMISTS LEARNING? BY RYAN COOPER 86 CAN WE FIX THE COLLEGE INEQUALITY PROBLEM? BY STEVEN BRINT Cover art by the Prospect / photograph by NASA

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GREEN NEW DEAL

THE URGENT REALISM OF RADICAL CHANGE A socially just Green New Deal is far more feasible than skeptics think, as policy and technology.

The challenge is the politics.

B Y RO B E RT KU TTN ER I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y J A S O N S C H N E I D E R

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GREEN NEW DEAL

I

N JUST A FEW CENTURIES, the human footprint on the Earth has devastated other species of plant and animal life, and is on the verge of making the planet uninhabitable for people. The cumulative interaction of assaults on several natural systems has already brought about consequences far more dire than the most pessimistic scenarios of just a decade ago. These include ice caps shrinking, oceans rising, melting permafrost releasing more CO2 and methane, heat producing still more heat, and climate extremes creating ever more devastating storms and fires. Despite the Paris commitments, greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing rather than diminishing. Unless a drastic reversal happens, we will soon pass the point of no return. Pessimists believe we are already there. Even if we succeed, daily life will have to be very different, though in many respects it can be better.

In order to avert even worse catastrophes, a number of improbable events will have to break just right. The United States, where Donald Trump revels in removing restraints on carbon production, will need to elect a radically progressive president and a working majority in Congress. That alone will take a miracle of popular organizing, leadership, and common purpose. The president and Congress will then need to undertake the largest economic mobilization of national resources since Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.

A number of people and groups have used the metaphor of a Green New Deal to describe the scale of the needed effort and the large-scale national (now global) solidarity that the New Deal evokes. Our purpose in this special issue of The American Prospect is not to add one more volume to the existing libraries of manifestos and reports, but to demonstrate that an initiative on the scale required is not only urgent but practical. That has to mean practical as policy, as technology, and above all as politics. As we demonstrate in this special report, the needed technologies and strategies exist. The challenge is rallying a national commitment to pursue them. Leadership has to begin in the U.S., because we are both the worst climate offender as well as the one nation capable of spearheading a global reversal.

For a Green New Deal, or something like it, to end reliance on carbon-based energy, drastically revise how we practice agriculture, end the pillaging of several natural systems and the plundering of natural resources, commit to green infrastructure, broaden and redefine the meaning of prosperity and the good life, as well as pursue a just transition, we will need to square several circles.

FIRST, CONVERSION TO A SUSTAINABLE economy will require a dras-

tic reduction in the human material toll on the planet. Yet in a

democracy, we are asking citizens to approve such a plan at a time when most American families have already suffered declining living standards over four decades. People of color have endured not only continuing discrimination in access to their share of the economy’s stunted opportunities, but have often borne the worst of the carbon economy’s toxic effects right in their own neighborhoods.

So while some environmentalists would plead for an economy of voluntary simplicity and radical “de-growth,” a strategy of urging citizens to accept what will be widely perceived as a decline in living standards would be an impossibly hard sell. Happily, a shift to a renewable and sustainable economy could actually enhance living standards, properly understood. Green energy would be cheaper and more reliable. Good public transit can improve convenience and relieve people of the need to use cars on ever more congested streets. A shift to energy-efficient and less-sprawled housing could be packaged with an increase in the supply of affordable housing. Greener and better public infrastructure would replace current decaying public systems that citizens experience as inconvenient and forever broken. The scale of needed outlay, even under the most expansive scenarios, is far less than that of World War II, when the military spent almost half of GDP. And the more we can make green changes at the level of the entire economy, the less the cost of change falls on individuals.

The very process of getting all of this done can create millions of good jobs and remind citizens that the good life includes reliable public systems and amenities as well as increasingly unreliable and often perverse private-market systems. In the same way that the original New Deal required significant restraints on capitalism and enlargement of public spheres and spaces, a Green New Deal necessarily constrains corporate capitalism.

Virtually all of the predatory assaults on the natural environment have been driven by corporate power, complemented by neoliberal ideology holding that markets are efficient. As Nicholas Stern once remarked, global climate change is history’s greatest case of market failure. A Green New Deal necessarily means narrowing corporate power, recovering civic and community life, and reclaiming space for our commons.

The term pork barrel has generally been used as a pejorative,

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 5

meaning wasteful public projects where the politics entails mutual “logrolling”—you support an outlay for my district and I will support one for yours—and the result is often bridges to nowhere.

When Congress swore off earmarking specific projects for congressional districts, it was generally taken as a virtuous reform.

But think again.

The original New Deal, as historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Kevin Baker demonstrate in their articles, was a triumph of regional development policy—pork barrel in the very best sense of the term. It spread the wealth around. Indeed, if we had paid more attention to making sure that some prosperity reached regions and people left behind instead of being concentrated in a few tech and finance hubs, we might not have ended up with Donald Trump as president. When there is regional equity to public works projects, even conservative politicians who don’t like federal programs are more likely to put their qualms aside.

In Tennessee, right-wing politicians rail against Washington, but nobody proposes privatizing TVA . Chattanooga today is a digital center because its public power company offers the nation’s cheapest and highest-speed internet. Holyoke, Massachusetts, is a hub for regional high-speed computing because its municipally owned utility offers cheap, green electricity. A Green New Deal is a chance to jump-start regional economic development that is also sustainable.

A second circle that needs to be squared has to do with speed.

Ideally, we should have reached zero fossil fuel extraction and combustion years ago. Ideally, all fossil fuel operations should be shut down immediately. We can demand that, but we can’t will it into happening. As the lead article by Jeffrey Sachs and the discussion of emerging technologies by Mara Prentiss explain, we can in fact get to zero carbon a lot faster and with a lot less economic cost than the naysayers contend, and even faster if we get the politics right. Prentiss demonstrates that most of the needed technologies are available now. Our special issue taken as a whole shows that a Green New Deal can be achieved.

As Jeff Faux’s piece recounts, we are asking citizens to trust their government to launch an initiative at a massive scale at a moment when trust in government and in all large public systems is at an all-time low. Today, that mistrust is all too appropriate, given the Trump presidency. Yet, as Faux observes, the very process of having highly visible projects that improve people’s lives can cumulatively rebuild public trust. These projects, however, will need to be somewhat front-loaded, to demonstrate benefits in the new administration’s first two years. Otherwise, a new president with grand promises and scant results could suffer the fate of Bill Clinton, whose party lost a record 54 House seats for a Democrat in 1996—until that record was broken in 2010, when Barack Obama’s party lost 63 seats. Notably, the only Democratic president to avoid that midterm curse was Franklin Roosevelt, who managed to deliver a great deal in his first two years. The voters reciprocated by increasing his Democratic majority in 1934 by nine seats in the House and nine in the Senate.

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The challenge is for government to get things done fast, but without running roughshod over the local citizenry. The original New Deal was a mix of big projects led from Washington and completed in record time, mixed with a lot of bottom-up planning. Citizens served on boards of local projects of the WPA , and rural electrification co-ops. Yet as any student of Robert Moses knows, this was also a decade when highways and bridges, as well as Western dams, wiped out entire communities with no community consent. A Green New Deal needs to engage in bottom-up planning, but without endless delays. As transportation planner and engineer Robert Paaswell writes in an original and authoritative piece on why infrastructure investments seem to take forever, the single most important factor causing endless delays in public construction projects is neither citizen involvement nor environmental-impact statements, but unreliable, stop-and-go funding. The great benefit of a Green New Deal is that it would commit the federal government to multiyear, multitrillion-dollar financing, so that serious long-term planning can take place.

A THIRD CIRCLE THAT HAS TO BE SQUARED is the connection between

radical witness and agitation and the need for policies that can be embraced by the next president and enacted by Congress.

The alliance between radicals and liberals is always a complex dance. It took militant organizing by radical industrial unions in the 1930s to build a strong labor movement, yet that movement required a rendezvous with President Roosevelt to legislate the Wagner Act of 1935, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and labor’s partnership with government during World War II. In similar fashion, we needed civil disobedience on the ground by the civil rights movement of the 1960s to generate the moral outrage that finally pushed President Lyndon Johnson to press Congress to enact the three great civil rights acts of that decade.

If anything, the relationship between the climate movement and the needed legislation is even trickier. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise Movement appropriated the Green New Deal metaphor in 2018, literally dozens of reports and policy papers had already used that label. AOC put out a fairly short, schematic policy blueprint that was the most expansive of them all. The value of that initiative was to demonstrate the scale of commitment needed, as well as the intersecting multiple needs.

The Sunrise Movement also generated new political energy led by the young demanding action. Yet by including under the Green New Deal banner the entire progressive policy agenda, the AOC version of a Green New Deal also presented a high-profile target.

AOC ’s Green New Deal was attacked by both the right as preposterously grandiose, and by the center as utopian and too expensive. When more than 300 economists issued a statement attacking that version of a Green New Deal, it included many moderately liberal economists who had served with Barack Obama, including former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen.

These attacks did damage. When our colleague Stanley Greenberg polled on the popularity of several large-scale progressive

GREEN NEW DEAL

policy initiatives, including Medicare for All and free higher public education, most were net positive. The only issue scoring seriously net negative was a Green New Deal, with a net minus 23.

Some would conclude from this result that the Green New Deal “brand” is hopelessly tarnished for the sin of dreaming big before it has even begun; that even relatively liberal politicians will avoid it. We emphatically disagree. The New Deal, as Nelson Lichtenstein explains in his article, is the only large-scale public initiative in American history with all of the right resonances.

Most Americans also have a positive view of the need to move to green, renewable energy. The current attacks on a Green New Deal only demonstrate that we have public-education work to do. Hence this special report.

While liberals always need to be pressed and prodded by radicals, the practical challenge is getting a Green New Deal through Congress. AOC ’s version of a Green New Deal, H. Res. 109, has 95 House co-sponsors. Long ago, when an enthusiast told 1952 presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, “You have the vote of every thinking person,” Governor Stevenson replied, “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.” As realists, we need to recognize that a majority of the House and Senate have to legislate a Green New Deal, while even some Democrats are far too cozy with extractive industries. The grassroots pressure of a movement on the march can help, and yet some of the initial bills will necessarily be more incremental than we might like, focusing on aspects of a Green New Deal that can command majority support, such as infrastructure, jobs, and aid to help localities get to zero carbon. This also evokes the original New Deal, which was not a single grand plan, but a series of initiatives that built more support along the way. The French radical theorist André Gorz coined the term non-reformist reform, meaning reforms that seem incremental, but whose cumulative dynamics turn out to be transformational. We need to legislate in that spirit.

Economic and racial justice must be built into every aspect of a Green New Deal. Here again, as Harold Meyerson’s article explains, crisis presents opportunity. Justice is harder in a climate of struggle over a dwindling supply of good jobs and insufficient funds for resilience and remediation. A just transition means good jobs, not just for the mostly white and male workers in the extractive economy, but for people who never got to share in the environmentally ruinous good times. It means special attention and resources for the communities that have borne the brunt of the toxicity. A Green New Deal at adequate scale can provide these resources for all.

While we may believe that denial of climate change is limited to oil magnates and Trumpians, it is broader than we think.

Mainstream economists keep issuing reports that are ignorant of the science and built on pitifully rosy assumptions. William Nordhaus, the liberal Yale economist who won a Nobel Prize for his work on climate change, uses a model that considers a 3.5 degree Celsius warming acceptable and projects global economic damages at just 2.1 percent of GDP. By contrast, the

IPCC and most climate scientists view that degree of warming

as catastrophic. Nordhaus thinks we can reach that goal purely with a carbon tax of just $44 per ton. The IPCC calculates that a tax required to cap warming at a barely tolerable 1.5 degrees would have to be at least $135 and as much as $5,500 per ton depending on what other complementary policies were used.

Complacency is also a form of denial. Though the ravages of climate change are upon us in California’s fires, ever more intense hurricanes, and in the daily flooding of streets in several Southeastern coastal cities, for most Americans daily life goes on. Amid something like normalcy, the projections of general catastrophe within a few decades create a form of cognitive dissonance that can also be disabling. Breaking through that denial also requires leadership and education, and a sense of a Green New Deal not as shared sacrifice but as hopeful, positive possibility. Our closing conversation with Bill McKibben offers something of that hope.

THE PROSPECT’S SPECIAL VALUE is to connect prac-

There are aspects of a Green New Deal that command majority support: infrastructure, jobs, and aid to help localities get to zero carbon— incremental reforms whose cumulative dynamics can turn out to be transformative.

tical policy and social movement to politics. In the effort to literally save the planet, what seems utopian has to be understood as realism. Radical change is pure realism when it comes to survival.

Yet it also needs to become realism as politics. If the Prospect is good at anything, it is in explaining how the radical can become real. In this special issue, we hope to demonstrate that drastic change is not only urgent, but possible.

The issue is divided into three parts. Part I discusses infrastructure investment as a key part of a Green New Deal. It reminds us what the original New Deal did, and then lays out what an infrastructure and jobs program needs to be today. Part II addresses the challenge of a rapid shift to a post-carbon economy. How fast can it be done? What are the gross and net costs, and the net benefits measured against the escalating costs of inaction? How do we pay for it? What are the relative roles of different levels of governments and citizens?

Happily, the pieces by two of the nation’s leading economists who study climate, Jeffrey Sachs and Robert Pollin, agree that the total new cost of financing a green transition is an affordable 2 percent of GDP, factoring in costs and benefits.

Part III is all about the politics. How do we assemble the majority support to make the utopian thinkable, and then irresistible? And how does the national connect to the global? Our purpose is not to duck the hard questions by putting forth proposals that can be defended as “aspirational,” with the politics glossed over, but to look the hardest questions directly in the eye.

We cannot fail. Progressives sometimes say, half-joking, that if Trump is re-elected there is always Canada. But if we lose this planet as our home, there is no other.

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 7

Getting to a Carbon-Free Economy

can be accomplished through two kinds of carbon storage: geological storage (capturing CO2 in the air and pumping it into geologic reservoirs) and biological storage (afforestation, reforestation, and restoration of degraded lands, all capturing CO2 in vegetative cover and soils).

To stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, all regions of the world should reach net-zero emissions by 2050 at the very latest. The U.S. currently represents around 15 percent of global CO2 emissions, and that share will decline in the coming years. Therefore, decarbonization of the U.S. energy system must be complemented by decisive actions abroad, but the U.S. needs to lead. The Green New Deal should include a pillar for U.S. diplomacy and international economic policy designed to speed actions abroad, not only in the United States.

At a minimum, the U.S. must remain a leader of the Paris Agreement.

The urgent is attainable, and at entirely affordable cost.

BY JE F F R E Y S A C HS

T

he Green New Deal refers to two distinct ideas. The narrower idea, which I discuss here, is a strategy to decarbonize the U.S. energy system in line with the Paris Agreement. The broader, urgent idea is an integrated program including renewable energy, infrastructure, health care, education, and jobs.

Contrary to some commentaries, decarbonization will not require a grand mobilization of the U.S. economy on par with World War II. The incremental costs of decarbonization above our normal energy costs will amount to 1 to 2 percent of U.S. GDP per year during the period to 2050. By contrast, during World War II, federal outlays soared to 43 percent of GDP from the prewar level of 10 percent of GDP in 1940.

The key today is to redirect outlays now spent on fossil fuel–based technologies toward zero-carbon technologies instead. That redirection will require a serious increase in federal and state public infrastructure spending, but most importantly will depend on new federal and state regulations to redirect the energy-related spending. Carbon pricing (such as a carbon tax) will be one useful tool for redirecting the spending, but will be of less importance than regulations.

LIMITING GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RISE

The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to strengthen the global response to climate change by: Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would

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significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change. (Article 2, Section 1a) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) followed the Paris Agreement with a crucial study (2018) highlighting the very grave risks of exceeding the 1.5 degree Celsius limit. There are three kinds of dire risks. First, the global damages from 2 degrees of warming would be significantly higher than from 1.5 degrees. Second, even 1.5 degrees may well be above the threshold for major irreversibilities such as a multi-meter rise in the sea level caused by the partial disintegration of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Third, increases in temperature above 1.5 degrees threaten to unleash powerful positive feedbacks that could lead to a spiraling of further warming, such as the massive release of CO2 and methane from the melting permafrost.

A superb comprehensive scientific overview of several of these issues was written by James Hansen and co-authors.1 Indeed, the long-term risks of even a 1.5 degree warming sustained over decades or centuries are so high that we must be more ambitious than merely stabilizing at 1.5 degrees. Hansen cogently argues that we should return CO2 concentrations to levels consistent with long-term warming of just 1 degree Celsius. That means that after reaching a peak CO2 concentration of perhaps 450 ppm (parts per million) or less at mid-century, we should enter a sustained phase of global net negative CO2 emissions so that CO2 concentrations gradually return to 350 ppm over the long term, or ideally even sooner. Besides phasing out carbon emissions, this goal

FIVE TECHNOLOGICAL PILLARS OF DECARBONIZATION

notes 1

James Hansen et al. “Young People’s Burden: Requirement of Negative CO2 Emissions,” Earth System Dynamics 8, 577–616, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5194/ esd-8-577-2017.

2

There is, in fact, a sixth pillar that will be needed in a comprehensive national climate policy: sustainable land use, mainly involving the agriculture sector. Agriculture contributes CO2 from deforestation and land degradation, and also non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions, including methane released by ruminant animals (especially cattle) and flooded rice paddy, and nitrous oxide emissions from nitrogenbased fertilizers. Agriculture must be part of an integrated strategy, but is beyond the scope of this article.

Hundreds of scholarly and policy studies have reached a broad consensus on the technology pathway to decarbonization. The consensus points to five pillars of decarbonization.2 The first and most important single pillar is zero-carbon electricity.

This is the most important measure since zero-carbon electricity can be deployed directly (in battery electric vehicles, for example) and indirectly in green chemistry to manufacture zerocarbon fuels (hydrogen, for example).

Zero-carbon electricity involves a shift toward zero-carbon primary energy sources and a very significant overall expansion of electricity production for the electrification of transport, buildings, and industry.

Zero-carbon electricity worldwide will tap multiple primary energy sources, including renewables (broadly defined to include wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, ocean, and tidal); nuclear; biofuels; and carbon capture and storage of fossil fuel–generated electricity. Recent global studies have emphasized the core role of renewables in zero-carbon electricity. This is because the costs of renewable energy

GREEN NEW DEAL

have plummeted (especially solar photovoltaics), while nonrenewable energy sources—nuclear, biofuels, and carbon capture—each pose major technical and social obstacles leading to public opposition. Nuclear power of course raises massive concerns over nuclear accidents and nuclear wastes. (See the companion article

by Alexander Sammon on page 57.)

Biofuel raises great concerns about ecosystem degradation and competition with food supplies. Carbon capture raises massive opposition over technological doubts (e.g., leakage of CO2), land use obstacles (e.g., pipelines to carry the CO2), and high costs.

The second pillar of decarbonization is the electrification of end uses. There are many sectors currently using fossil fuel energy that can be converted to direct use of (green) electricity. These include battery electric vehicles (BEVs), heat pumps for residential and commercial buildings, electric cooking (e.g., induction and microwave stoves), and direct reduction of ores in metallurgy. These pathways of electrification seem more likely today than just a few years ago. Major automakers are now making significant commitments to electric vehicles, for example, with dates set for the phaseout of conventional internal combustion engine vehicles.

The third pillar is green synthetic fuels for economic sectors not easily electrified. In aviation transport, there is continuing debate about the feasibility of electrification. It seems increasingly likely that electrification will cover short-haul flights (e.g., under one hour) but that longer-haul flights will continue to require liquid fuels of high energy density. These synthetic fuels can be manufactured using green electricity. (See the companion article

by Mara Prentiss on page 54.)

The fourth pillar is a smart power grid, built on big data, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

The idea of a smart grid is a self-regulating system that can shift among multiple sources of power generation and multiple uses to provide reliable and low-cost systems operations despite the variability of renewable energy. On the supply side, a smart

We need to enter a sustained phase of global net negative CO2 emissions so that these concentrations gradually return to 350 ppm over the long term.

grid will integrate variable renewable energy from many sources in order to smooth the variability of power generation.

A larger connected grid, covering more geography and more sources of variable renewable energy, will reduce variation of power. Various storage options, including batteries, pumped hydro, compressed air, and conversion of renewable energy into synthetic fuels, will help to stabilize the supply side. The demand side will also show flexibility by enabling smart meters to turn on and off electricity consumption of users depending on temporal needs, urgency, and shifts in market prices that reflect supplydemand conditions.

The fifth pillar is energy and materials efficiency to economize on the use of primary energy, and on the plastics, metals, cement, and other industrial materials that emit CO2 in their production and use. Improved materials and material flows, popularly known as “reduce, reuse, and recycle” or “circular economy,” can significantly improve energy and materials efficiency, reduce the process emissions of CO2 (such as in the manufacture of clinker for cement), and slash energy inputs needed for industrial processes.

EASIER AND HARDER SECTORS

Decarbonization of electric power will be relatively straightforward, though there remain important challenges to managing power grids that are fully dependent on renewable energy.

Low-carbon power sources such as photovoltaics and wind have already come down dramatically in cost so that their levelized costs (that is, their long-term costs including the costs of capital investments) are already competitive with fossil fuels.

The biggest operational challenges arise from the intermittency of the renewables and their limited dispatchability (the relative inability of renewable-energy sources to ramp up and down quickly in response to market needs). There are two complementary solutions to intermittency.

One is power storage, for example in grid-scale batteries, synthetic fuels (e.g., hydrogen), and systems such as pumped hydro, in which excess renewable energy is used to pump water into an uphill reservoir for later use in hydroelectric power generation.

The other solution is geographical diversification of renewable-energy sources through a large interconnected grid. A more extended grid reduces the variability of power generation relative to the average load and therefore reduces the need for energy storage as a percentage of the average load. As for dispatchability, storage solutions such as pumped hydro and synthetic fuels (e.g., hydrogen) offer the necessary dispatchability.

Some downstream users of fossil fuels will be easily electrified, while others will be difficult or impossible to electrify. Light-duty vehicles and urban delivery vans, for example, will almost certainly shift soon from internal combustion engines to zeroemission battery electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The hydrogen will have to be produced in a zero-emission manner, such as by hydrolysis using renewable energy or by fossil fuels combined with carbon capture and storage. Other transport modes—long-distance trucking, ocean shipping, and aviation—are “hard sectors” in that electrification is much less straightforward or out of reach. Onboard batteries are heavy and take up considerable volume needed for freight. Other solutions, such as synthetic green fuels or biofuels for aviation, hydrogen fuel cells for ocean shipping, and catenary lines for electric trucks along major highway routes, will be necessary.

The recent report by the Energy Transitions Commission, “Mission Possible: Reaching Net-Zero Carbon Emissions From Harder-to-Abate Sectors by Mid-Century,” and the FEEM-SDSN report, “Roadmap to 2050: Power, Industry, Transport and Buildings,” discuss the technology possibilities for the harder sectors.

Most new buildings will be relatively easy to electrify using electric heat pumps and overall improvements in insulation and ventilation. Older buildings that currently rely on fossil

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fuel heating will have to be retrofitted for electric heat pumps. Retrofitting will require a long national effort and will be moderately expensive. Major challenges remain in decarbonizing certain industrial sectors, including metallurgy, petrochemicals, cement, and some other heavy industries that intensively use fossil fuels for process heating and feedstocks. There will be no one-size-fits-all strategy. Certain kinds of process heating can be electrified; others not, at least currently.

Certain feedstocks can be replaced by non-carbon-emitting materials; others not, at least currently.

The essence of decarbonization is the replacement of today’s fossil fuel– using capital stock with a new zerocarbon capital stock. Coal-fired power plants need to be phased out and replaced by renewable-energy power generation. Internal combustion engine vehicles need to be phased out and replaced by electric vehicles. Boilers and furnaces in buildings need to be phased out and replaced by electric heat pumps. And so forth.

The least-cost solution in each case is to retire the existing capital at the end of its normal life and replace it with zero-carbon capital. Cars and trucks last 15 to 20 years; power plants 30 to 50 years; buildings 50 to 100 years; and so forth. This means that with the natural life span of vehicles, we would require 15 to 20 years from the first date at which all new vehicles brought to the market are zero-emission vehicles. The alternative strategy, which is more costly, is to scrap the existing capital stock early, for example by removing even new internal combustion engine vehicles from the road. Of course, if we factor in the costs of the worsening climate, the cost-benefit calculus changes.

Consider, for example, the challenge of decarbonizing the U.S. fleet of some 200 million light-duty vehicles. Suppose, as an illustration, that cars last for 20 years, and that ten million vehicles are currently retired each year and replaced with ten million newly produced vehicles.

The industry’s production capacity is

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Smart meters turn electricity consumption on and off depending on the needs of users, and shifts in market prices that reflect supply and demand conditions.

geared to ten million sales per year.

In order to shift the U.S. automobile fleet to electric vehicles, the industry must be retooled.

Let us stipulate for purposes of illustration that converting the U.S. automotive industry to the production of ten million BEVs per year will require a decade, providing the time not only to retool existing production lines and to design the new vehicles, but also the time to build new supply chains for batteries and other components. As of 2030, all new U.S. vehicle production and sales will be electric.

Between 2030 and 2050, the entire fleet of 200 million internal combustion vehicles will be phased out and replaced by electric ones.

Could this happen, instead, by 2040? That would require replacing 200 million vehicles during a ten-year period, 2030 to 2040. Annual production and sales of electric vehicles in the 2030s would have to average 20 million vehicles, twice the current industrial capacity. Yet after 2040, production and sales would fall for many years because of the young age of the BEV fleet. The production boom would be replaced by a bust. In the long run, production would revert to ten million per year on average. Moreover, the early conversion of the fleet would only reduce emissions to the extent that the U.S. power system also had been decarbonized and expanded by 2040 to accommodate the 200 million electric vehicles.

Perhaps the early replacement of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2040 could be accomplished, but the extraordinary costs of the early scrappage of existing vehicles, the massive rise in overall vehicle production to 20 million per year during the 2030s, and the subsequent closure of industrial capacity after 2040 would effectively require the nationalization of the automobile industry. And the emissions from the temporary boom of automobile production could easily overwhelm any emissions reductions achieved by the early scrappage of the internal combustion engine fleet.

This simple parable is meant to illustrate a point. We will need until 2050 to achieve full decarbonization. Even then, we will be incurring many extraordinary costs to meet the mid-century target, including the early closure of hundreds or even thousands of fossil fuel–based power plants. Yes, we should have started decarbonization in earnest in the 1990s, by adopting the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, it was spurned by the U.S. Senate. So here we are in 2020 with far too little time left for climate safety. Yet we must proceed.

Zero-carbon power generation can probably be achieved nationwide by 2040 to 2045. New York state has set 2040 and California has set 2045 as respective target dates. Given the older ages of most existing coal-fired power and many gas-fired plants, such a timeline would permit the

gerry broome / ap images

Installing a smart meter in Raleigh, North Carolina

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natural retirement of most carbonbased power generation, with only a modest need for early closures. Market forces will also lead to some early closures, as the capital-inclusive costs of new renewable-power generation decline below the marginal operating costs of some existing thermal plants.

The conversion of the automobile and trucking fleet will require most of the period to 2050. We should anticipate—and regulate—that as of 2030, all new sales of light-duty vehicles will be zero-emission vehicles, mostly battery electric vehicles. New buildings could become all-electric within the next few years, since the technologies to build all-electric heating and cooking systems are already at hand. The retrofitting of existing buildings, however, will take far more time, almost surely to 2050.

THE INCREMENTAL COSTS OF DECARBONIZATION

The best current estimates put the incremental cost of decarbonization at around 1 percent of GDP each year or perhaps even less. Decarbonization will neither break the budget nor massively spur the economy by itself. But yes, it can save the planet from environmental ruin.

The extra costs incurred to shift from fossil fuels to zero-carbon energy include the incremental costs of providing electricity with renewables rather than fossil fuels; of shifting to zero-emission vehicles; of buildings using green electricity for heating, ventilation, and cooking, rather than fossil fuels; and the incremental costs of decarbonizing several “hard” sectors, including aviation, ocean shipping, steelmaking, cement, and petrochemicals.

The incremental costs also include all the complementary infrastructure needed to operate a zero-carbon energy system. For example, the U.S. will need additional grid transmission to connect high-quality renewable energy (Southwest solar energy, Midwest wind energy, Canadian hydropower, and offshore wind energy) with final users. New charging stations across the nation will be needed for electric vehicles. New catenary lines (overhead electric lines) may be added to

notes 3

Geoffrey Heal, “Reflections—What Would It Take to Reduce U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions 80 Percent by 2050?” Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Volume 11, Issue 2, Summer 2017, 319–335. https://doi. org/10.1093/reep/rex014.

4

Jim Williams, “Decarbonizing the United States: Challenges of Scale, Scope, and Rate” (lecture, National Academy of Sciences) July 22, 2019. https://sites. nationalacademies.org/ cs/groups/depssite/ documents/webpage/ deps_195074.pdf

interstate highway lanes for electric trucks. Extensive new investments in 5G capacity will be needed to manage smart grids. And so forth.

Several recent studies have nonetheless concluded that the overhaul of the energy system will not be large relative to the economy. My Columbia colleague Geoffrey Heal provided an especially insightful estimate of transition costs, showing that renewable energy plus storage can cut U.S. emissions by 80 percent by 2050 for less than 1 percent of GDP per year.3 Another colleague, Jim Williams of the University of San Francisco, has similarly calculated that an 80 percent reduction of U.S. emissions by 2050 could be accomplished for around 0.8 percent of GDP per year.4 A recent study on global decarbonization by 2050 led by Christian Breyer at Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland concludes that the levelized costs of a 100 percent renewable-energy system in 2050 will be less than the costs today (52 euro/MWh compared with 70 euro/MWh today). And a 2015 study by Alexander MacDonald and co-authors found that CO2 emissions from the U.S. electricity sector can be reduced by 80 percent relative to 1990 levels without any increase in the levelized cost of electricity. Moreover, the transition to renewable energy will create many more jobs than will be lost in the closure of the fossil fuel sector.

(See the companion article by Harold Meyerson on page 28.)

A major ongoing study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reportedly finds that a U.S. “super-grid” connecting highquality renewable-energy resources with major population centers would cost around $80 billion in total, a mere 0.4 percent of GDP as a one-time investment, and would deliver economic benefits of at least twice that sum. There are fears that the NREL findings are being suppressed or delayed by the Trump administration.

I should underscore that most of the studies to date examine the incremental costs of 80 percent decarbonization rather than 100 percent decarbonization. It is likely true that the marginal costs of decarbonization will rise as we approach 100 percent. As one example,

Jessika Trancik’s team at MIT has determined that the storage costs to back up 95 percent of an all-renewable power system would be roughly half of the costs to back up 100 percent of the system, since 100 percent backup requires vastly more storage to protect against an extremely rare shortfall of intermittent energy.

In summary, the gist of recent studies is that decarbonization is not hugely expensive as a proportion of the total economy. The estimates suggest that 80 percent decarbonization can be reached at a cost of 1 percent of GDP or less per year. Complete decarbonization by 2050 could perhaps cost up to 2 percent of GDP per year, taking into account the higher marginal costs of decarbonizing the harder sectors, but could in fact end up being much less costly than 2 percent of GDP, and even below 1 percent of GDP. Would it be worth the extra costs to accelerate U.S. decarbonization to 2040 rather than 2050, assuming that it would be technically feasible?

The answer is no. U.S. CO2 emissions from energy in 2020 will be around 5.3 billion tons. If we compare a linear ramp-down to zero by 2050 and a faster linear ramp-down by 2040, the faster ramp-down would reduce U.S. cumulative emissions of CO2 by around 27 billion tons. That in turn would reduce the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by around 1.8 ppm, with reduced global warming on the order of 0.01 degrees as of 2100—in other words, negligible. The shortterm effect on temperature would be even less. And we must remember that an accelerated decarbonization might not actually cut cumulative emissions as assumed by a steeper linear rampdown because of the larger buildup of new industrial capacity (e.g., electric vehicle production) needed in the accelerated transition.

Even if the entire world were somehow to decarbonize on a linear rampdown by 2040 rather than 2050, the reduction of global warming as of 2100 would be on the order of 0.1 degrees, with a smaller short-term effect. Yes, such a reduction in warming would definitely be beneficial; each 0.1 degree warming hurts. Yet the practical time needed to phase out

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the world’s existing fossil fuel capital stock, build massive new infrastructure, retool major global industries such as automotive production, and solve countless technological challenges, all while attending to the urgent sustainable-development needs of the more than six billion people in developing countries, argues overwhelmingly for a timeline to 2050 rather than 2040. Decarbonizing globally by 2050 will itself be a nearmiracle, one that requires a global breakthrough in politics and policies starting imminently and carried forward for decades.

A NATIONAL POLICY FRAMEWORK FOR DECARBONIZATION

The national policy framework for decarbonization should aim at three overriding objectives: (1) the end of U.S. energy-based emissions of CO2 by 2050; (2) a low-cost pathway for the transition; and (3) a fair transition to address vulnerable groups and regions, including workers in fossil fuel–related sectors who will lose their jobs in the transition; regions currently dependent on fossil fuel production; and low-income households.

An effective plan should involve distinct strategies for each of the four major energy sectors: power generation, transport, buildings, and industry, with special attention paid to key subsectors, such as light-duty vehicles, intercity trucking, aviation, and ocean shipping. The plan should distinguish between the easy and hard sectors, including R&D for the hard sectors.

The plan should address several dimensions of public policy, including: ■ Timelines for phasing out fossil fuel–related capital stocks ■ Allocations of responsibilities among federal, state, and local governments ■ Carbon pricing, including carbon taxes, feed-in tariffs, and renewableenergy auctions ■ R&D outlays for the hard technologies ■ Public investments in interstate transmission, charging stations, catenary lines, government fleets and buildings, and other public infrastructure ■ Financing for a fair transition

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(job retraining, income supplements, regional development) ■ Public financing for building retrofits ■ U.S. international leadership within the Paris Agreement ■ There are two heatedly debated questions that dominate the policy debate. The first is over the use of carbon pricing, especially carbon taxation. The second involves the allocation of responsibilities across levels of government.

Carbon regulation and pricing.

There are two basic policy approaches to pollution control that also apply to decarbonization: (1) quantity regulation and (2) corrective pricing. Under quantity regulation, the government sets quantitative limits on pollution (either in absolute amounts or per unit of output) and timelines to abide by the limits. Under corrective pricing, the government taxes the pollutant and/ or subsidizes the green alternatives.

In the case of decarbonization, both quantity regulation and corrective pricing will be needed, but the relative balance between the two should vary according to the sector of the economy.

Quantity regulation is the preferred option when the technological alternatives are well known, easy to monitor, and already cost-effective.

Corrective pricing makes sense when the alternatives are uncertain, difficult to monitor, and with highly varying cost-effectiveness depending on the context. In those cases, a corrective price (e.g., a tax on the pollutant) allows markets to search for low-cost solutions and promote innovations.

The most important international pollution abatement to date has been the highly successful global phaseout of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). This phaseout was governed by the 1987 Montreal Protocol and subsequent amendments. In this case, the pollutant (CFCs) had a known and cost-effective alternative, the hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs).

The Montreal Protocol thereby relied on quantity regulation. All signatory governments to the Montreal Protocol agreed to timelines for the phaseout of CFCs. The U.S. also deployed a bit of corrective pricing mainly in the form of import levies to block the

The Green New Deal should involve all levels of government, including state and local, rather than put all responsibility at the federal level.

importation of CFCs while U.S. production of CFCs was being curtailed.

Another notable success story of quantity regulation is the removal of lead from gasoline, a process mandated by federal law rather than carried out by corrective pricing.

In the case of decarbonization, quantity regulation has been used for power plants both at the federal level (such as President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan to phase out coalfired power plants) and at the state level (for example, in state renewable portfolio standards that require utilities within the state to phase out fossil fuel–based power generation on a timeline). Quantity regulations have also been used to raise the fuel efficiency of the U.S. vehicle fleet under Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Corrective pricing, by contrast, has also been used in a variety of ways to induce profit-oriented utilities to choose zero-carbon power solutions. These include tradable emissions permits, where the market price of the permit creates the incentive to shift technologies; feedin tariffs, whereby utilities are given a bonus per unit of low-cost energy; and reverse auctions for the supply of zerocarbon power (the low bidder wins the supply contract). No state has yet adopted a carbon tax, but it is under consideration in several states.

I would suggest that quantity regulations for decarbonization will be most effective for four sectors: power generation, light-duty vehicles, heavyduty vehicles, and buildings. For these sectors, the federal government should implement a timeline for phasing out the fossil fuel–based capital stock.

For example, the federal government might mandate that all new power generation capacity in the U.S. should be zero-carbon after a certain date, say 2022, and that remaining fossil fuel– based power generation should be phased out by a certain date, say 2040.

Similarly, the federal government should mandate that all new light-duty vehicles sold from 2030 onward must be zero-emission vehicles, and that internal combustion light-duty vehicles must be phased out no later than 2050. A somewhat extended timeline might be given for trucks, e.g., all new

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trucks must be zero-emitting as of 2035. For buildings, a federal building code for new construction might mandate zero-emission buildings (electric heating, ventilation, cooking) from 2030 onward, and retrofits on existing buildings by 2050. Such quantity regulations can be supplemented by a gradually rising carbon tax that will accelerate the transition process and ensure the retirement of old carbonemitting capital.

Corrective pricing makes more sense as a primary instrument for sectors in which the best alternative technologies and incremental costs are still highly uncertain. Thus, we should consider a gradually rising carbon tax on aviation, ocean shipping, steelmaking, cement, and petrochemicals. Since the capital stock in these sectors rolls over gradually, the carbon pricing should be introduced with enough lead time to enable companies to make changes in planned future investments. Thus, the carbon tax on aviation, ocean shipping, and other sectors might be introduced into law but begin only as of 2025 or 2030. This will avoid an arbitrary rise in taxes on current capital,

Near the Winchester Mountains in Arizona, 450-foot-tall wind turbines and fields of solar panels produce electricity for the city of Tucson. The costs of renewable energy have plummeted, especially solar photovoltaics.

but will incentivize firms and industrial sectors to replace that capital in the future.

The Green New Deal should avoid the social eruptions that have recently hit France, Chile, and elsewhere where governments introduced a new levy on transport that essentially taxed the existing capital (e.g., automobile use), often in a regressive manner, without any real opportunity for those hit by the levies to change their behavior in the short term. Carbon taxes should be phased in gradually, and focus on future decisions, rather than tax existing carbon-using capital that only serves to redistribute income regressively without affecting shortterm emissions to any significant extent. (See the companion article by James Boyce on page 62.)

Federal, state, and local responsibilities. The regulation of the U.S.

energy system is shared among the federal, state, and local governments.

The Green New Deal should tap into this intergovernmental structure rather than put all responsibility at the federal level. Bypassing the states would create huge inefficiencies,

political backlashes, and serious obstacles for ongoing state-level regulation of the utilities.

The federal government should lead on nine dimensions of the Green New Deal: ■ Federal timeline and standards for electric-utility decarbonization ■ Federal timeline and standards for zero-emission vehicles ■ Federal standards for electrification of buildings ■ Federal financing for building retrofits (e.g., as grants to states) ■ Federal infrastructure, including an expanded interstate energy grid, interstate highway charging stations, interstate highway catenary lines for trucking, federal zero-emission fleets and buildings ■ Federal R&D program, including energy storage technologies, smart grid, aviation, ocean shipping, smart transport systems, etc.

■ Federal green bank for utility sector financing ■ Fair-transition programs for vulnerable individuals and regions ■ U.S. leadership under the Paris Agreement

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all utilities to decarbonize by 2050, the states will still have responsibilities for regulating the power utilities within each state, including the licensing of sites, the regulation of transmission and distribution lines, system safety and reliability, environmental protections, and of course electricity pricing.

Each state should be directed to adopt and implement a renewable portfolio standard (RPS) program that is consistent with the federal mandate to decarbonize by 2050.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) reports that 29 states have RPS requirements to raise the share of renewable energy in overall retail sales. Some non-RPS states, such as Indiana, North Dakota, and Wyoming, have also increased their renewable-energy capacity to serve RPS demands in nearby states. The 29 RPS programs cover 56 percent of total U.S. retail electricity sales.

Three states have recently set dates for 100 percent zero-carbon power

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A capacitor bank at an electrical transmission substation in Westerville, Ohio. A smart grid can shift among multiple sources of power generation to provide reliable electricity despite the variability of renewable energy.

in their RPS: California (2045), New Mexico (2045), and New York (2040).

In total, ten states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have set zero-by-2050 targets into law or executive order: California (2045), Hawaii (2045), Maine (2050), Minnesota (2050), Nevada (2050), New Jersey (2050), New Mexico (2045), New York (2040), Washington (2045), and Wisconsin (2050).

The RPS requirements provide a very important institutional mechanism for implementing federal zeroemission power standards. RPS programs to date have mandated 45 percent of the increased delivery of renewable-power generation since 2000. In 2018, 37 percent of solarcapacity additions and 19 percent of wind additions were to meet RPS requirements.

Some of these renewable-energy investments would have happened without RPS, but RPS surely played a significant role, not only in directing the utilities toward zero-carbon energy, but supporting them to do so

in an efficient manner consistent with overall objectives of power plant siting, low costs to consumers, system reliability, and other objectives. At the same time, the current power crisis of California’s PG&E points to the reality of significant underinvestments in systems infrastructure when privatesector utilities pursue short-term profits at the expense of long-term standards.

FINANCING DECARBONIZATION

There are two basic ways to finance the energy transition. The first is through market transactions. The government mandates zero-carbon technology, and private-sector producers invest and sell goods and services to the public. For example, utilities are required to invest in renewables, and they recoup their costs by their sales to households and businesses. Automobile producers are mandated to sell zero-emission vehicles, and they recoup their costs through vehicle sales. In this case, the direct role of government financing

j o h n m i n c h i l lo / a p i m a g e s

State renewable portfolio standards. Even with a federal mandate on

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is very limited. The second is through direct government provision of zerocarbon energy. In this case, the federal or state governments would directly own and operate power generation facilities and transmission and distribution grids. They would recoup some or all of their costs through market sales by public enterprises, or alternatively finance their operations through general government revenues.

There will be a mix of the two. Outlays for certain public infrastructure will require government financing, for example the expansion of the interstate transmission grid for renewable energy. As a natural monopoly, the expanded transmission grid would be unsuitable for private ownership.

Another case will be the federal outlays for a fair energy transition, which by design will not recoup a flow of earnings. Federal support for building retrofits will also likely be grants rather than loans.

Most of the transition costs, therefore, will be borne not by the federal and state governments but by energy users: household and commercial buyers of electricity, car owners, and others. Since the zero-emission technologies are already close to the costs of fossil fuel–based technologies, there is no reason to anticipate any major hardships on energy users. As noted earlier, the total national costs might come to around 1 to 2 percent of national income per year, roughly $200 to 400 billion, with most of that borne by the private sector. There are of course many technological uncertainties, and the total costs could end up higher or lower. Indeed, as the costs of clean energy continue to fall and as conservation measures improve (improved building insulation, more efficient appliances), many users could experience net savings on energy bills.

Total federal outlays could reach up to $400 billion per year, or roughly 2 percent of GDP, if we factor in the total costs of new infrastructure spending on roads, fast rail, protected coasts and waterways, restored bridges, expanded transmission grids, and other infrastructure that is needed in any event given the decrepit state of U.S. infrastructure. This added spending is not the incremental cost of

decarbonization per se, but the cost of restoring and modernizing America’s overall infrastructure, a worthy and much-needed objective. Research and development outlays should also rise significantly. We may estimate that research outlays for renewable energy should be of roughly the same scale as the biomedical research budget of the National Institutes of Health, roughly $30 billion per year.

It is notable that Senator Bernie Sanders has presented a multiyear Green New Deal plan with a headline price tag of $16 trillion. The main reason for this enormous sum is Sanders’s call for the federal government to build and operate the new renewableenergy system, essentially displacing the existing utility industry in the process. In the plan that I have sketched, I assume that the utility sector, not the federal government, will bear the investment costs. Sanders also includes generous outlays for retrofitting buildings and for a highly accelerated replacement of the existing vehicle fleet. My cost estimates, and those of the studies I have quoted, are based on decarbonization by 2050 in line with the IPCC 1.5 degree scenario.

GETTING STARTED IN 2020 FOR THE NEXT PRESIDENCY

Proponents of the Green New Deal will need to do their homework if they are to triumph in Congress over the Big Oil lobby. Public opinion is in favor of climate action, but that doesn’t matter in Congress. What counts is who pays the campaign bills. Unfortunately, the answer is Big Oil. In the 2016 federal election cycle, the oil and gas industry gave $56 million in campaign financing to Republican candidates compared with just $8 million to Democratic candidates. In the 2018 election cycle, the Republicans received $43 million compared with just $6 million for the Democrats.

To beat Big Oil, the Green New Deal advocates need a specific plan: one that demonstrates how decarbonization will work, and how it will benefit every part of the country.

With such a plan, Green New Deal advocates will be able to turn public opinion into votes in Congress. Every congressman, indeed every voter,

To defeat Big Oil, advocates need a specific plan that demonstrates how renewableenergy alternatives will benefit every part of the country.

should have a specific idea of what the Green New Deal would mean for their district and region. Without such a plan, climate activists will continue to win the battle over climate science but still lose the war over climate action.

To date, advocates of decarbonization have tended to focus their advocacy on pricing policies (cap-andtrade, carbon tax, feed-in tariff, etc.).

Yet such pricing proposals only serve to raise suspicions and opposition to new taxes. Such policy proposals fail to win the hearts and minds of the general public, and the public fails to press the Congress for action.

A historical analogy may be useful.

When President Dwight Eisenhower first proposed the Interstate Highway program in 1953, conservatives in Congress were reluctant to support the program. The congressmen could not see what was in it for them and the proposal was stalemated. Then, in September 1955, the Bureau of Public Roads of the Department of Commerce put out a book of maps showing the “general location” of the proposed highway system in dozens of major metropolitan areas. Suddenly, congressmen could see the benefits of a new highway system passing through their district. The vividness of the proposed plan helped to carry the day in Congress. (See the article by Robert Paaswell on page 35.)

The good news is that the specifics of a Green New Deal to decarbonize the energy system are finally coming into focus. We now understand clearly the key pillars of decarbonization. We now understand that today’s technologies can get most of the transition accomplished, and that even the “hard” sectors can be decarbonized after a bit more R&D. And the truly great news is that all of this can be achieved at very low cost. Decarbonization to save the planet is actually the greatest bargain of our time.

Jeffrey Sachs is University Professor at Columbia University and director of the Center for Sustainable Development. He directs the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network on behalf of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, and has been special adviser to three U.N. Secretaries-General.

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Dreamers With Shovels How the first New Deal remade America

BY NE L S O N L I C H T E NS T E I N

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n May of 1941, a New Deal agency, the Bonneville Power Authority, paid an itinerant left-wing songwriter $266 for a month’s work. BPA officials hired Woodrow Wilson Guthrie because they were in an extended battle with the private interests who’d denounced as “a socialist boondoggle” the New Deal’s great public-power projects in the river valleys of the Tennessee and the Columbia. Maybe a few catchy jingles and folk songs would help tell the public-power story and humanize the BPA’s image.

For the first week of his employ, Woody Guthrie was driven up and down the Columbia River to see the great dams, locks, spillways, generators, and irrigation systems still under construction by a federal government newly determined to get billions of kilowatt hours online for Pacific Northwest ship and warplane production. Thousands of workers were crawling over precipitous cliffs and giant concrete bulwarks from Portland to the Canadian border. Guthrie was awestruck and energized. In the back seat of his government car, he began to strum, and he scribbled lyrics on any scrap of paper he could find.

Back in Portland, nothing had prepared Guthrie’s employers for the poetry that poured out of Woody’s typewriter. At the height of his creative powers, and in an astonishing burst of inventiveness and discipline, he turned out 26 songs in 30 days. These included “Pastures of Plenty,” “Hard Travelin,’” “Roll on, Columbia,” and “The Biggest Thing That Man Has Ever Done,” his tribute to the Grand Coulee Dam. Guthrie saw little distinction between the BPA’s vast government bureaucracy and

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the working men and women who were making good money doing the hard and sometimes dangerous work. Guthrie loved the Northwest and liked feeling part of something big, important, and progressive.

Roll on, Columbia, roll on.

Your power is turning our darkness to dawn.

Guthrie’s “Grand Coulee Dam” captured one distinctive strand of the New Deal ethos: the mutually supportive linkages between grand governmental ambitions, the new technologies of the era, and the aspirations of millions of ordinary people for a better life.

In the misty crystal glitter of that wild and windward spray / Men have fought the pounding waters and met a watery grave / Well, she tore their boats to splinters but she gave men dreams to dream / Of the day the Coulee Dam would cross that wild and wasted stream.

Uncle Sam took up the challenge in the year of Thirtythree / For the farmer and the factory and all of you and me / He said, “Roll along Columbia.

You can ramble to the sea / But river while you’re ramblin’ you can do some work for me.”

Now in Washington and Oregon you hear the factories hum / Making chrome and making manganese and light aluminum / And there roars a mighty furnace now to fight for Uncle Sam / Spawned upon the King Columbia by the big Grand Coulee Dam.

Though the songwriter had little in common with David Lilienthal, both men recognized the democratic power unleased by the New Deal’s great infrastructure projects. Lilienthal, a hard-driving lawyer and utility regulator, was a sharp-elbowed insider who rose to control the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s and 1940s and then went on to run the Atomic Energy Commission and plunge into a lucrative career as an international businessman. But when he published TVA: Democracy on the March in 1944, his story of the TVA was not all that different from one Guthrie might have sung. “We are not carried irresistibly by forces beyond our control,” wrote Lilienthal, “whether they are given some mystic term or described as the ‘laws of economics.’” Like so many New Dealers, the architects of the TVA and other state-funded infrastructure projects were “Dreamers with Shovels,” visionaries ready to get their hands dirty. “The physical achievements that science and technology now make possible may bring no benefits,” Lilienthal

Woody Guthrie in 1943

wrote, “may indeed be evil, unless they have a moral purpose, unless they are conceived and carried out for the benefit of the people themselves.”

It would be easy to make the case that the original New Deal, the one inaugurated by President Franklin Roosevelt and then celebrated by Guthrie and Lilienthal, was anything but green. New Dealers wanted to dam the nation’s great rivers, build scores of coal-fired generating plants, drill for more oil, build thousands of miles of new roads, subsidize mortgages for energy-inefficient single-family houses, and in general, make the dirt fly. Remembering Woody long after the songwriter’s death, both Pete Seeger and Studs Terkel recognized that giant, riverplugging projects were no longer in ecological favor. But as Terkel observed just before his own passing, “Twenty-six songs in 30 days.

What were they about? They were about the possibilities … About what man could do!”

This is why architects of the Green New Deal are not labeling their project a “Green New Frontier” or a “Green Great Society.” The New Deal was the most important and progressive reconstruction of American life since the Civil War. It had many silences and failures—most notably in terms of the Faustian bargain Roosevelt struck with the white supremacists in the American South—but the memory of the New Deal remains a potent source of inspiration for all those who want to make a radical change in the structures of American capitalism. And this will be accomplished not merely as a protest movement prodding establishment centrists ever so slightly to the left, but as a new generation of progressives in power, women and men with the same kind of energy and ambition as those who flocked to Washington in 1933 and 1934.

That newly innovative federal power was sustained by its dialectical reliance on an energized

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PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

populace, above all those mobilized within a trade union movement that was both a bulwark of New Deal electoral power and a disruptive, plebian prod to its further advancement.

Then and now, conservative opponents denounced the growth of federal authority as a “road to serfdom” or worse, but New Deal laws opened space and opportunity for millions of people to make their voices heard and collective power felt, transforming Depression-era statecraft into the basis for a new social and political order. As FDR put it in a 1932 campaign speech, “These unhappy times call for plans that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the pyramid.” Historian Meg Jacobs has called this “state building from the bottom up.”

Our own idea of a Green New Deal is ambitious, and its costs, both for the nation’s transition to an entirely new energy infrastructure and for the social programs designed to make America a more egalitarian country, are considerable: Estimates range from 10 to 20 trillion dollars over the next decade. A lot of money! Perhaps 2 to 5 percent of the gross domestic product each year. But the New Dealers also spent big money, and they did

Construction of the Grand Coulee Dam

The memory of the New Deal remains a potent source of inspiration for all those who want to make radical change in the structures of American capitalism.

it when both the entire economy and the federal budget were but a small fraction of that today.

The New Deal appropriated $3.3 billion for public works construction, an enormous investment relative to the rest of the federal budget. It amounted to 165 percent of federal revenues in 1933, or 5.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product that year. The money was spent in two ways. Under the incorruptible leadership of Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, a Chicago progressive, the Public Works Administration built giant dams, bridges, schools, and other public buildings.

Putting the unemployed to work was important, but actually building infrastructure that would last for decades was a prime focus of their work. Using private contractors, the PWA financed, in California alone, such iconic structures as the Oakland Bay Bridge, Shasta Dam, the Pasadena Freeway, and, following the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, the entire school system of Los Angeles County. In all, PWA had projects in almost every one of the nation’s 3,071 counties.

The second big spending program was for immediate job creation. Emergency job programs in 1933 and 1934 were followed in 1935 by the Works Progress Administration, ably administered by onetime social worker

GREEN NEW DEAL

Harry Hopkins, which did lighter construction work and employed men and women directly by the federal government. Although primarily intended as a vast relief effort for employing the unskilled, the WPA’s remarkable array of developments included more than 480 airports, 78,000 bridges, and almost 40,000 public buildings. During the Great Depression, the payrolls of the PWA and the WPA were much larger than those of the largest private enterprises. The WPA alone employed three million people in 1938, equal to about 7 percent of the entire labor force. That would come to nearly ten million today.

New Deal programs of direct job creation have often been devalued, even by latter-day liberals. There was too much leaning on shovels; and besides, it was World War II that really ended unemployment. But these critiques miss a lot. First, Depressionera economists held to a bizarre definition of employment. Those working for government relief and construction agencies were excluded from the count. Factor them in and unemployment was not 9.9 percent in 1941, but a far more respectable 6.6 percent.

Second, WPA and PWA employment had a huge and salutary impact on the labor market. African Americans were disproportionate beneficiaries of such projects, especially in places like Cleveland and Chicago where about a third of those working for the WPA were black. That’s an important reason African Americans shifted their political allegiance from Republicans to Democrats in the 1930s. Moreover, government work was sometimes higher-paid than in the private sector. FDR and other New Dealers wanted to keep WPA wages below private norms, but the American pay structure was so miserly and chaotic that there were millions of workers who saw even temporary government pay as a big step up. This was especially true in the rural South, which is one reason local white elites sabotaged these programs and turned so quickly against the New Deal.

A massive Green New Deal infrastructure program would have much the same impact today, even if official unemployment statistics stand below 4 percent. Many Americans currently

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The TVA was the most fully realized of New Deal public works.

It was a governmentowned corporation designed to carry out the development of an entire river watershed spanning seven states.

them—the government’s money.”

What the engineer was actually complaining about were the inefficiencies of private enterprise in an industry that was a natural monopoly. He was arguing private capitalism against state capitalism; corporate autonomy against social democracy. And in the Depression era he was losing the battle. “You can’t blame the people,” he admitted. “They don’t care who freezes their ice cubes. If the government pays the Tennesseans’ power bill, you can’t expect the Tennesseans to complain.”

Private power’s second big failing was that it was just not profitable to extend electric power lines to much of rural America. The TVA would do that for a good slice of the mid-South, and a separate Rural Electrification Administration would provide loans and expertise for virtually every rural county in the nation. For those who benefited, this was a social revolution. One Wyoming ranch woman referred to the day when the electricity arrived “my Day of Days because lights shone where lights had never been, the electric stove radiated heat, the washer turned, and an electric pump freed me from hauling water. The old hand pump is buried under six feet of snow, let it stay there!”

The author of this article grew up in rural Maryland in the 1950s. Adult neighbors remembered well the days before the local electric co-op strung power lines up our gravel road. They voted for FDR in the 1930s and the Democrats in each election afterward.

The TVA brought electricity to rural Morris, Tennessee, by 1936.

And finally, the TVA , BPA , and the other regional planning initiatives of the New Deal were designed to “develop” those rural, Southern, and Western parts of the country left behind by the dynamic growth of the industrial Midwest and the capital-rich Northeast. California and Texas got the most money, but New Deal developmentalism became national policy when FDR declared the American South “the nation’s number one economic problem.” A scarcity of capital and a paucity of governmental taxing power had generated misery and isolation there. By the time his administration released its widely noted “Report on the Economic Conditions of the South” in 1938, FDR and other New Dealers were not just trying to spread the wealth around. Southern Democrats were increasingly conservative, edging away from the New Deal on a variety of fronts, of which hostility to organized labor and maintenance of the Jim Crow order were paramount.

Many New Dealers believed that if the federal government could help the South industrialize, opportunities for trade unionism would expand and white supremacy fade. They were more wrong than right about that, but their effort to bridge the rural-urban, North-South divide is one that advocates of a 21st-century Green New Deal should try to emulate.

Donald Trump’s steadfast support in rural America has many sources, but a bleak, low-wage economy is one that might just be improved with a new round of governmental investment.

The New Dealers were planners.

During the late 1930s and early 1940s the National Resources Planning Board, chaired by FDR’s uncle, Frederic Delano, put out one increasingly radical plan after another, enough to put Elizabeth Warren to shame.

There were 220 reports on everything from “Post-Defense Economic Development in Alaska” to “A Development Plan for Puerto Rico.” The most ambitious of its reports was a comprehensive plan for the future, “Security, Work, and Relief Policies,” was submitted to Roosevelt on the eve of the war. It was a fundamentally radical plan, envisioning a

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counted as employed have lousy, low-paying jobs, so any substantial employment opportunities paying an hourly $15 or more would suck workers out of their part-time, minimumwage jobs—thereby forcing thousands of employers to dramatically improve the jobs they have on offer.

Many of the New Deal’s projects amounted to state capitalism. From FDR on down, New Dealers hated the holding companies that monopolized the nation’s private power production and distribution. As with the Silicon Valley mega-firms of our day, vast fortunes were being made from the privatization of what were natural monopolies. Both the BPA and the TVA were experiments in regional planning that would stand athwart such a corporate expropriation.

The TVA was the most famous and fully realized of New Deal public works. It was a government-owned corporation designed to carry out the comprehensive development of an entire river watershed spanning seven Southern states. Building 20 new dams, the authority tamed the floodprone rivers of the Tennessee Valley, and in the process became the largest producer of electric power in the United States. With FDR’s staunch backing, Lilienthal led the battle against the private electrical utilities, including Wendell Willkie’s Commonwealth and Southern, that wanted to curb TVA’s dynamic growth. The New Dealers saw the TVA as accomplishing two things that corporate capitalism could not.

First, it would provide a “yardstick” to measure the real cost of electrical power. During World War I, when FDR was assistant secretary of the Navy, he complained that he never knew the true cost of the metal plate the federal government bought in such quantity to build its battleships. But the TVA would know how to generate cheap electric power and thereby give state regulators the ammunition to lower rates.

Naturally, the utilities screamed murder: “It’s not a yardstick; it’s a club,” complained a utility engineer.

“They get their money from Uncle Santy and no interest charged …

And when they want to take a whole town of customers away from us, they lend the city fathers—or give it to

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PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

fully developed welfare state and the highly progressive taxes to pay for it.

Congressional conservatives zeroed out NRPB funding in 1943, but FDR remained loyal to its expansive vision.

This became clear in the president’s 1944 State of the Union speech, which Roosevelt biographer James MacGregor Burns has accurately termed “the most radical speech of his life.”

Roosevelt proclaimed a “Second Bill of Rights,” which included the right to a job, to food, clothing, medical care, education, and “protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.” “True individual freedom,” proclaimed the president, “cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

The only problem with FDR’s great speech was that he delivered it in the wrong country, or at least, at the wrong time. By the end of World War II, American politics were drifting steadily to the right, and despite the president’s fourth-term victory, white Southerners and Republicans would be in effective control of Congress for a generation. In the United Kingdom,

on the other hand, the aggressively social democratic Beveridge Plan, which created the National Health Service and other welfare state provisions when the Labour Party took power in 1945, was clearly on offer.

FDR complained to Labor Secretary Frances Perkins that the British planning scheme ought properly to be called the Roosevelt Plan.

FDR’s speeches were memorable, but the New Deal resonates today because it was far more than a welfare state planning bureaucracy. The mobilization of millions of workers into trade unions proved the bedrock upon which a generation of reforms depended. State-sanctioned unionization was successful in the 1930s and 1940s not just because a staunch cohort of working-class radicals revolted against industrial autocracy, but because unionism was functional to the New Deal’s larger purposes.

And these were two. First, increasing plebian purchasing power would end the downward cycle of wage and price cuts that had turned an economic panic into a worldwide depression;

In 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt inspected the Chickamauga Dam, a project of the Tennessee Valley Authority, near Chattanooga.

GREEN NEW DEAL

and second, unions would be the key institutions necessary to a democratization and therefore the ultimate legitimization of a refurbished American industrial order. In the early 20th century, the widely invoked phrase “industrial democracy” was not quite the same thing as socialism, but it nevertheless constituted a radical redistribution of power within the workplace and the larger economy.

Most New Dealers thought that “underconsumption” was why the Great Depression proved so devastating. The American economy was highly productive, but workers’ wages were too low, so companies, even in the booming 1920s, were burdened by “overproduction,” especially in “sick” industries like textiles, coal, and agriculture. As department store magnate Edward Filene put it, “the machinery of production choked with its own product, unemployment spread like pestilence, and the world starved in the midst of plenty.” But even with all its spending plans and job creation programs, the New Deal state was simply too small to generate enough Keynesian stimulus to move the economy ahead. A revolution in the labor law would therefore be essential. The Wagner Act, argued Robert Wagner, the New York senator who pushed through Congress the law that bears his name, would ensure that the “fruits of industry must be distributed more bounteously among the masses of wage-earners who create the bulk of consumer demand.”

But higher wages per se were not enough. A democratization of the world of work was also essential. FDR ratified this quest in his June 1936 speech accepting the Democratic National Convention’s renomination.

There, President Roosevelt denounced the “economic royalists” who had “carved new dynasties” and “created a new despotism.” Decrying the pervasive influence of the corporations and banks, which had flourished since the late-19th-century merger movement, FDR saw concentrated industrial and financial power as a threat to democracy itself. But he was not only talking about electoral politics. “The hours men and women worked, the wages they received, the conditions of their

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labor—these had passed beyond the control of the people, and were imposed by this new industrial dictatorship.” The metaphorical language deployed by FDR—citing royalists and despots—made clear to all who heard him that the object of presidential scorn was not an economic abstraction, like inequality, financial speculation, or an unpredictable market, but concrete institutions often led by men— Ford, Dupont, Morgan, Sloan, and Whitney—whose names were familiar to many a household. They presided over a set of giant, highly integrated institutions whose regulation and democratization was essential if the New Deal was to truly transform the nation and uplift forgotten America.

Against fear and dependency, the New Deal and the new unions counterposed “security.” This was an idea—if not a condition—that achieved near hegemony during the 1930s and 1940s. That idea has gotten a bad rap of late—it often is used to mean compliancy, laziness, and deadwood. But the New Dealers knew that security represented a sense of psychological liberation. Conservatives, then and now, condemn employment guarantees, work rules, and seniority rights as debilitating and inefficient fetters on the flexibility managers need to make their enterprises flourish. But from the workers’ point of view, the security achieved through union contracts or employment law represents a form of liberation that is founded on an assurance that their life chances are backstopped by a set of recognized work standards.

“What do they want, these millions of newly organized workers?” asked labor journalist Mary Heaton Vorse. “Security first of all.

They want the right to work.”

The cultural and ideological impact of the new unionism of the ’30s and ’40s cannot be underestimated. Today, Donald Trump and his base attempt to wrap themselves in flag and nation. But in the 1930s and 1940s, a huge proportion of all those who became

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unionists were African Americans, Mexicans, or from European immigrant families. And these men and women “captured the flag” during the Depression decade. “Unionism is the spirit of Americanism,” announced a Woonsocket union newspaper that appealed to immigrant workers long marginalized by their Yankee “betters.” Strikers, picketers, and demonstrators almost always marched with large American flags in the van.

As I observed in my history, an emblematic moment came on the day in late 1933 when Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins visited the unorganized steelworkers of Homestead, Pennsylvania, to hear their grievances and explain to them the New Deal’s new labor laws. In a town tightly controlled by the United States Steel Corporation, the burgess (mayor) abruptly cut short a Perkins speech in the city hall when union militants—he called them “undesirable Reds”—sought to make their voices heard. Ushered onto the street, Perkins and her party were temporarily bewildered.

Where to continue the meeting?

The city park? “You can’t do that,” shouted the red-faced mayor, “there is an ordinance against holding meetings in a public park.”

But the secretary of labor would not be stymied, and when she saw an American flag flying above the local post office she quickly led the working-class throng inside.

There in the lobby of a federal institution, under a flag representing the power of a self-confident, reformist government, Perkins resumed her speech detailing for a largely immigrant audience their new rights. She later wrote, “We ended the meeting with hand-shaking and expressions of rejoicing that the New Deal wasn’t afraid of the steel trust.”

The Homestead Post Office meeting points to an even larger dialectic that linked New Deal political mobilizations to the union-building impulse of that era. In the United States today, it

is almost impossible to organize a union from scratch because of the intense and well-schooled opposition of local elites, be they factory managers, local politicians, or even elements of the working class fearful about or hostile to collective protest. This was true in the 1930s as well. Despite our vivid memories of the spectacular and sometimes violent strikes that convulsed San Francisco, Minneapolis, and the textile South, most workers, most of the time, feared to form a trade union. They needed the state on their side, not just in the form of a law—the Wagner Act remained in legal limbo for nearly two years after its passage until the Supreme Court upheld it—but in a far more tangible and mobilizing fashion. Thus, in Flint, Michigan, in the fall of 1936, one could hardly fill a living room with those who were committed unionists.

But those same autoworkers were wildly enthusiastic proponents of Roosevelt and the New Deal. When the president’s motorcade made its winding way through the factory districts of Flint, Pontiac, and Detroit in late October of that election year, workers downed their tools and crowded the windows for a look. A week later, FDR won a smashing victory—taking the largest proportion of the popular vote since the early 19th century—in an election that also saw turnout take a quantum leap upward. In some Midwestern industrial cities, Polish and Italian neighborhoods voted at a rate higher than 90 percent. For these immigrants and offspring of immigrants, a vote for Roosevelt and the New Deal was practically a rite of citizenship. Detroit socialists soon put out a leaflet: “You voted New Deal at the polls and defeated the Auto Barons. Now get a New Deal in the shop.” The sit-down strikes in Flint, Detroit, and elsewhere would do just that in the months that followed.

The labor movement was not just about power-sharing in the workplace. “Revolution, up and down the river!” headlined a Western

Pennsylvania news magazine after newly organized steelworkers and coal miners swept Republicans out of office in late 1937. In company-dominated towns and cities, the emergence of unions in steel, coal, auto, rubber, electrical products, textiles, and lumber had a transformative impact on the distribution of local political power.

There laborite ethnics—“Roosevelt Democrats”—took over the Democratic Party and demolished the rule of the corporate-backed Protestant Republicans who had monopolized civic leadership for decades. Journalist Samuel Lubell called this “the revolt of the city.” In Western Pennsylvania steel towns like Aliquippa, Duquesne, Donora, Braddock, Homestead, and Clairton, working-class mayors and city councils now controlled the local police, defended freedom of speech and assembly for unionists, dismantled many Jim Crow traditions, increased taxes on corporate property, and spent those tax dollars paving streets and building schools in blue-collar neighborhoods. These “Little New Deals”— and one could also find them in Toledo, Gary, Wheeling, Kenosha, Tacoma, Lackawanna, Bridgeport, Flint, and Youngstown—not only made the Democratic Party powerful, but gave to its northern wing a social democratic flavor that lasted for two generations. When controversy arose in 1940 over FDR’s third-term bid, Lubell asked a Detroit auto unionist why he was so unconcerned. Came the reply: “I’ll say it even though it doesn’t sound nice. We’ve grown class conscious.”

This democratic current often infused New Deal programs with a highly participatory spirit.

Despite conservative attacks on what they saw as an overweening federal government full of intrusive bureaucrats, the New Deal never had enough employees to directly implement and regulate the new order it sought to construct. The Wagner Act could not function without the active participation of tens of thousands of local trade unions that “policed”

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Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (far right)

the labor law and negotiated new contracts. Hundreds of rural co-ops were formed to take out governmentbacked loans, construct new electrical transmission systems, buy the power at wholesale prices, and then deliver it to rural households that were both customers and owners. And the Resettlement Administration built and operated scores of migrant labor camps, not unlike the democratically run California camp depicted in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath.

During World War II, the Office of Price Administration sought to police nothing less than the retail costs millions of consumers would pay for tens of millions of products sold by hundreds of thousands of stores. The OPA employed 60,000, but alone no set of government officials could make such a vast regulatory apparatus actually work. The government therefore recruited and trained almost 300,000 volunteer “price checkers.” They came from trade unions, women’s clubs, and other civic organizations. OPA chief Chester Bowles, a spirited liberal, called the agency’s housewife volunteers “as American as baseball,” even as some merchants and conservative politicians denounced them as a “kitchen Gestapo,” whose enforcement of government price controls at every sales

Against fear and dependency, the New Deal and the new unions counterposed “security.”

New Dealers knew this meant a sense of psychological liberation.

counter and cash register bolstered working-class living standards and put a lid on merchant prices and profits.

And the New Deal did much to democratize American culture. In the 1930s, almost all newspapers were hostile to labor and the New Deal, and most of the Hollywood moguls were staunch Republicans. There was a radical student movement in some of the largest urban schools, but conservatives had a firm grip on what was taught in virtually every college and university. Still, there were a lot of economically desperate artists, writers, actors, and musicians, and the WPA soon found them jobs and projects that employed their talents.

A Federal Writers’ Project published guidebooks and collected folk songs.

A Theatre Project employed nearly ten thousand actors who put on plays in both the largest cities and in towns and villages that did not even host a movie theater. Director Hallie Flanagan was a radical and an innovator: “The theatre can quicken, start things, make things happen. Don’t be afraid when people tell you this is a play of protest. Of course, it’s protest, protest against dirt, disease, human misery.” Most of those social realist plays have been forgotten, but a Federal Art Project left a visual legacy that can still be seen across America.

Employing as many as 6,000 painters and sculptors, this forerunner of the National Endowment for the Arts commissioned artists to create murals for the walls of federal and state buildings and establish public art centers in remote communities.

Today, when a government arts program funds a writer, musician, or painter, it is likely to award them with a monetary grant, but in the 1930s the WPA put them on its payroll, just like those workers who paved the roads, constructed the playgrounds, and built the schoolhouses. The idea that creative people should work directly for the government became anathema during the Cold War when intellectuals and propagandists in the West celebrated the singular artistic spirit and denounced as Stalinist or fascist any government efforts to deploy art and literature for a collective purpose.

But such fears can stifle and privatize

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artistic creativity and its popular reception. In contrast, the New Dealers saw no contradiction between their statecraft and its artistic depiction. The work of these governmentpaid muralists, architects, and sculptors embodied the hope of philosopher John Dewey that “our public buildings may become the outward and visible sign of the inward grace which is the democratic spirit.”

World War II actually advanced the New Deal project. A generation ago, liberals like I.F. Stone thought that business took advantage of the war to bring social reform to an abrupt halt.

He wrote a book entitled Business as Usual denouncing capital’s allegiance to its profit-making prerogatives. FDR himself declared late in 1943 that Dr. Win-the-War had replaced Dr. New Deal for the duration of the conflict.

Liberal complaints had a lot of validity.

Dollar-a-year business executives— they got a dollar from the government but kept their corporate salaries— came to run many a government procurement agency; labor lost the right to strike and to bargain for higher wages; the Japanese were herded into internment camps; the Army remained segregated; and both the TVA and BPA generated the electricity that helped build the atomic bomb and sustain corporate behemoths like Alcoa and Boeing. Many American radicals thought the war helped create a security-conscious “garrison state” and the “military-industrial complex” that would so distort American democracy.

All this was true, but the war was hardly a pre–New Deal capitalist restoration. World War II ended the Depression with a massive dose of government-stimulated demand, doubling the gross national product within four years. At the peak of the war, the military commanded about 47 percent of all production and services.

Unemployment virtually disappeared by early 1943. Fifteen million workers—a third of the prewar workforce— used their new power to change and upgrade their jobs. Some shifted from one factory department or office to another; at least four million—triple the prewar total—crossed state lines to find better jobs. Washington, D.C., was inundated by tens of thousands

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of “government girls.” Factory work, especially in defense facilities, grew in prestige and earning power. An innovative “Training Within Industry” (TWI) program, largely pushed forward by liberals and organized labor, upgraded the skills of several million workers. Unlike other job-training programs, workers already held the job for which they were being trained or one very similar to it. This made TWI extremely successful. Thousands of women learned arc welding, an exclusively male trade before the war, and the TWI program taught hundreds of thousands of young people draftsmanship, tooling skills, and production-oriented mathematics.

Despite a government-mandated set of wage controls, real wages rose by 27 percent between 1939 and 1945, with wages of those at the bottom of the social scale growing more rapidly than the highly taxed incomes of those at the top. The war boom inaugurated the most progressive redistribution of American wealth in the 20th century.

The modern civil rights movement began when railroad unionist A. Philip Randolph threatened FDR with a 1941 march on Washington unless the president signed an executive order advancing black and other minority employment in the booming defense industries; and throughout the war, the unions grew and grew, not just in the industrial heartland, but in the South and West as well. The War Labor Board prohibited strikes, but that board, composed of representatives from labor, management, and the government, wanted uniform wages in every industry over which it held jurisdiction. This was a kind of “sectoral bargaining” that raised Southern and small-town wages in dramatic fashion. Agricultural pay in Mississippi leaped upward far more than in any decade since Reconstruction. The historic North-South wage differential in the textile industry began to shrink.

Despite rationing—an egalitarian social policy that limited the rich to the same quota of meat and sugar as the poor—people were eating much better during the war, which probably accounted for the dramatic growth in life expectancy: five years for African Americans and three for whites. Infant

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Today’s advocates of a Green New Deal are right to find in the first New Deal a radical and democratic template for a new set of social and ecological ambitions.

mortality declined by more than onethird between 1939 and 1945.

All this helps explain why World War II was the most popular mobilization in American history. Unlike every other multiyear conflict—the Civil War, World War I, Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq—public support for the war increased as each year went by. The popular, anti-fascist character of the military struggle explains part of this, but the successful battle on the home front, where working-class empowerment linked itself to a decline in social inequality and a material increase in living standards, also accounts for the golden glow in which subsequent generations have evaluated America’s “good war.”

One might think that American capitalists could live with all this.

After all, during the war the government suspended antitrust laws, paid most of the cost of constructing new defense plants, and lent much of the rest at low interest rates. Cost-plus contracts guaranteed corporate profits on all defense business. The unions refrained from most strikes. And big business got bigger. In 1940, the top 100 companies turned out 30 percent of the nation’s total manufactured goods. By the end of the war, those same 100 companies held 70 percent of all civilian and military manufacturing contracts.

But the successful conversion of the U.S. economy into the “arsenal of democracy” owed as much to socialism, albeit military-administered, as it did to capitalism. Because of chronic shortages in machinery, raw materials, and labor, the government could not let the cost and pace of either military or civilian production be determined by the free market. That much became clear even in 1941, when I.F. Stone and other liberals denounced Detroit’s failure to convert its auto factories to military production of tanks and aircraft.

Henceforth, the armed services would set overall production requirements.

From FDR on down, government officials, military and civilian, concluded that the whole economy would have to be centrally planned, and controls placed on the cost of virtually everything, from steel and machine tools to chickens, chocolate, and clothing.

Investment in new plant and equipment was dictated by the government, not private enterprisers seeking to game the market.

The war economy was therefore full of state enterprise, ramped-up regulation, and other New Deal approaches to the administration of economic life.

Far exceeding the wildest ambitions of the TVA’s Lilienthal, the federal government purchased and owned countless new industrial plants; it built and administered its own shipyards and factories and managed complex national supply chains. It collected huge amounts of information about its contractors’ costs and business operations, which helped it to strictly control prices and profits. It enforced a set of labor laws and rules that helped to swell union ranks, sometimes by seizing the operations of the most intransigent employers. And this version of state socialism was hugely successful, not only arming U.S. allies and outproducing our enemies, but demonstrating that an effective and intrusive big government remained a potent rival to the economic and ideological hegemony of corporate capitalism.

At the end of the war, General Motors Chairman Alfred P. Sloan, like most businessmen, could see little distinction between the New Deal and the wartime mobilization effort. He declared, “It took 14 years to rid this country of Prohibition. It is going to take a good while to rid the country of the New Deal, but sooner or later the ax falls and we get a change.”

Sloan and his heirs got their wish, but today’s advocates of a Green New Deal are right to find in the first New Deal a radical and democratic template for a new set of social and ecological ambitions. It is time to make America over again. As FDR put it in the first hour of his presidency, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Nelson Lichtenstein teaches history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There he directs the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy. He is the editor, with Gary Gerstle and Alice O’Connor, of Beyond the New Deal Order: U.S. Politics from the Great Depression to the Great Recession.

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

The Role of Public Capital

A Reconstruction Finance Corporation for the 21st century

BY K E V I N BA K E R

libr ary of congress

T

here is an obvious reason why the New Deal is the model for the immense changes we need to address global climate change. The New Deal, and our response to the war that followed, were the only times in American history that we moved so fast, and so well.

In less than ten years, the New Deal transformed the United States from an immensely energetic but ramshackle and barely connected gaggle of regions into what would soon emerge as the wealthiest, most powerful nation the world had ever known, and the champion of freedom around the globe.

Most obviously, the New Deal succeeded in physically remaking the country. We all know the different litanies of public infrastructure built: the nearly 5,900 school buildings, the 325 new firehouses, the 400 post offices and nearly 400 airports; the 212 dams and canals, the 894 sewage plants, the 29,000 units of public housing, the 78,000 new bridges, the 381,000 miles of power lines, the quarter-million miles of road—the list goes on and on.

And there was the physical environment restored: the 2.3 billion trees planted, the billion fish restocked into waterways, the 2,400 plant and tree nurseries established, the thousands of square miles of soil reclaimed.

Yet the New Deal was a moral revolution as well. It remade how we did things in America, leaving us—all of us—with new rights and responsibilities. We—our democracy—was to be the steward of the land around us.

Moral and material accomplishments aside, speed was an indispensable element in the original New Deal, just as it will be in a Green New Deal.

The original New Dealers of the 1930s were acutely aware that they, too, faced an existential threat—to our democracy, and even to civilization itself. It was why Franklin Roosevelt remarked that if his program failed,

Jesse H. Jones, director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation

he would be the last American president. Would-be demagogues and dictators and crackpots were all around.

The rise of the Nazis and their allies brought a new and urgent threat from overseas to which many Americans were just as oblivious then as they are to the threat of climate change today.

The New Dealers understood that they would have to go fast to have any chance. One key instrument and the man who made it work have sunk into obscurity today, but both were indispensable at the time, and are worth recalling as we look for a new role for public capital. These were the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) and its director, a canny Texas businessman named Jesse H. Jones.

The original Reconstruction Finance Corporation was not started by FDR or a New Dealer at all, but by President Herbert Hoover—and only at the insistence of the nation’s leading bankers. Two years into the Great Depression, the economic slide was becoming an avalanche. Consumer spending had fallen by more than 22 percent, and

Moral and material accomplishments aside, speed was an indispensible element of the original New Deal, just as it will be in a Green New Deal.

GREEN NEW DEAL

business investment was little more than a third of what it had been. The nation’s jury-rigged banking system was coming apart. In 1930 alone, 1,350 banks were compelled to close their doors, and the rate of failures continued to accelerate the next year.

In a meeting with Hoover, the nation’s financial magnates pleaded with him to restore the War Finance Corporation (WFC), which had been established to stabilize the economy during and after World War I. The WFC had been an unprecedented government intrusion into the private sector, purchasing war bonds but also lending money “to a wide variety of enterprises, including public utilities, electric power plants, mining and chemical concerns, railroads, and banks.” Now, the titans of American finance wanted it back. In December 1931, Hoover reluctantly gave in to the bankers’ request and asked Congress to create the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—a new War Finance Corporation, by another name.

“We are engaged in a fight upon a hundred fronts just as positive, just as definite and requiring just as greatly the moral courage, the organized action, the unity of strength, and the sense of devotion in every community as in war,” Hoover declared.

And yet, he could not pull the trigger.

The RFC moved warily and secretively under his administration—the exact opposite of what was needed. The new agency made just $126 million in loans to 45 banks in the first two months of its existence—and over half of that amount went to just three large banks.

At the same time, the RFC refused to give money to the Chicago municipal workers—including 16,000 schoolteachers—who had not had a paycheck in months and who were clubbed by the city’s cops when they dared to protest.

Hoover insisted on a primitive form of “trickle-down” relief. RFC loans to banks, he believed, would permit them to loan to businesses, which would in turn put people back to work.

He did not detect that the methodology was flawed. Financial institutions tended to hold on to their government money, rather than circulate it through the economy. Already drowning in debt, taking on loans from the government

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JONES WAS THE VERY archetype of the

larger-than-life Texan legend, not least in that he hailed from somewhere else. Prosperous farmers in Tennessee, Jones’s extended family had moved to Dallas when he was a boy. In his early teens, he went to work for a cantankerous uncle who had built an empire in lumber. Jesse inherited the business, moved to Houston, and parlayed it into a fortune of his own in real estate, construction, finance, and banking. He would extend his construction business to Dallas, Fort Worth, and even New York during the building boom of the 1920s, erecting office towers and apartment buildings in Manhattan.

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President Franklin Roosevelt called a special session of Congress on March 9, 1933, to deal with the banking crisis.

With the exception of William Ogden in Chicago, no single individual ever did as much to develop a major American city. It was Jones who led the drive to dredge the Houston Ship Channel, and transformed the inland city into a major port. He lured Texaco, Houston’s first major oil company, to town—and to another office building he had constructed. He built the city’s leading department store, its grandest movie palace, its finest hotels. He bought and housed its leading newspaper—and used it to fight the Ku Klux Klan.

Like so many future New Dealers, Jones entered national politics during the Wilson administration, when he became a director of the American Red Cross, in charge of providing medical aid and general relief and comfort to American and Allied soldiers. It was in Woodrow Wilson’s

Washington that Jones first met Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the Navy. Fifteen years later, with his nearly unerring eye for talent, FDR lit upon Jones as his new RFC chairman even before his administration got under way. Roosevelt had intended to dissolve the RFC, then seen as hopelessly corrupt and ineffectual. Jones convinced him not to, persuading him that it could be a key tool in the New Deal. In turn, FDR’s trust in Jones grew stronger. The Texan was one of the three key advisers Roosevelt worked with almost around the clock, to prepare the opening salvo of the Hundred Days and the New Deal: saving the banks.

Here was nothing of the “timid and slow” that Jones had deplored. After Roosevelt ordered a “bank holiday” to temporarily shut the doors of the financial institutions still open across

ap images

only made them shakier still.

“For a fatal year and a half,” Morgan banker Russell Leffingwell later claimed, “the Reconstruction Finance Corporation continued to lend money to the banks on adequate collateral security and gradually bankrupted them in the effort to save them.”

By the end of the Hoover administration, in March of 1933, just $197 million in public works had been okayed by the RFC and only $20 million of that money had been spent. By the last morning of the Hoover administration, every bank in the country was about to shut its doors. The American economy had collapsed.

“The conception of the RFC, for which credit must be accorded to President Hoover, had been good, but it was a year too late. Even when it started, its board, for a time, was entirely too timid and slow to save the country from the disasters of 1932 and 1933.”

This assertion, spoken with characteristic certainty, came from Jesse H. Jones, a disgruntled Democratic member of the RFC’s bipartisan board.

“A few billion dollars boldly but judiciously lent and expended by such a government agency as the RFC in 1931 and 1932 would have prevented the failure of thousands of banks and averted the complete breakdown in business, agriculture, and industry,” Jones concluded.

It was a lesson he would take to heart, when the new president made him director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

America, Congress passed his Emergency Banking Relief Act in the space of just seven hours. FDR went on the radio in the first of his “fireside chats,” to explain to the American people—in less then 13 minutes—how banking works, how banks would reopen “as soon as examiners found them to be financially secure,” and how “I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under your mattress.”

By March 15, just 11 days into the Roosevelt administration, over 70 percent of the nation’s banks had reopened, and Americans were lining up to put their money back into their vaults. But that still left some 2,000 banks that had to be reorganized before they could be judged sound again. The task fell largely to Jones and the 1,500 employees he now directed at the burgeoning RFC. The device Jones hit upon to make it happen was not to swamp the banks with new loans (and collateral demands), but to have them make preferred stock issues that the RFC would then buy up, bestowing them with new assets—and public confidence.

This came very close to nationalizing the nation’s banking system, particularly since the government could and did influence the banks’ lending policies as well as personnel. Crucially, Jones insisted that not just the wobbling banks but the largest, strongest New York banks issue preferred stock for the RFC to buy up as well, thereby imbuing the whole banking system with new public confidence. The RFC would, before it was through, pump over $1.1 billion—or about $18 billion in today’s money—into more than half of the country’s banks through these preferred stock purchases.

In insisting that all major banks issue stock to the government, Jones was establishing a precedent for the 2009 bank bailouts of the Obama presidency, which provided emergency funds to the threatened and the safe alike. But the New Dealers went well beyond the more conservative Obama officials in their semi-nationalization of the nation’s financial institutions.

There were many who thought the administration should have gone all

the way. “I think back to the events of March 4, 1933 with a sick heart,” Senator Bronson Cutting, a liberal Republican from New Mexico who had supported FDR in 1932, wrote afterward. “For then … the nationalization of banks by President Roosevelt could have been accomplished without a word of protest. It was President Roosevelt’s greatest mistake.”

Yet the president had no clear legal authority to take over the nation’s banks, and such an attempt might well have resulted in a protracted court or congressional battle, at a time when the nation’s financial system needed to get back up and running in a matter of days. Restoring confidence in the banking system, in the American government, in democracy itself, were priorities that would not wait.

“For the government to be willing to buy stock in a bank and advertise to the world that it is a partner in that bank is the greatest compliment and source of strength that could come to any bank,” Jones wrote.

The strategy worked. Some 20 million depositors saw their savings saved. The vast majority of depositors even in failed banks eventually got their money back, thanks to New Deal reforms. In just nine months, the U.S. banking system had been reborn— and “BIG JESSE JONES” made the cover of Time magazine.

“There was no need of higher authority,” enthused Time, whose infatuation with Jones never dimmed, on the eve of World War II. “Not J.P. Morgan, not even Franklin Roosevelt could be of as much comfort to the public. To many a U.S. citizen great or small, if Jesse Jones says O.K., it’s O.K.” During the 2008-2009 fiscal crisis, more than $360 billion was pumped into major financial institutions under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). But as The New York Times was already reporting in January of 2009, “few [banks] cited lending as a priority,” after getting their government bailout. Instead, “an overwhelming majority saw the program as a no-strings-attached windfall that could be used to pay down debt, acquire other businesses or invest for the future.” PNC even used its TARP infusions to snap up another bank,

Jesse Jones, director of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, was one of the three key advisers FDR worked with almost around the clock, to prepare the opening salvo of the Hundred Days and the New Deal: saving the banks.

GREEN NEW DEAL

National City Corp., at a bargain rate.

Executive pay and bonuses soon shot up to record highs, despite efforts by President Obama to contain them through moral suasion.

During their once-in-several-lifetimes opportunity, Jesse Jones and the Roosevelt administration insisted on quid pro quos. They succeeded in curbing bankers’ self-compensation, and prodded them to start lending again. Appearing at the annual convention of the American Bankers Association, in August of 1933, Jones bluntly urged his fellow moneymen to “be smart, for once. Take the government into partnership with you and then go partners with the President in the recovery program without stint.”

But bankers have smaller purposes than the government, and lending, under both the Obama and Roosevelt presidencies, was far from their first priority. Jones “nagged, begged, and bullied bankers to lend,” especially in “industries of the smaller and medium-sized type,” throughout the Great Depression. Unlike the Obama administration, however, the New Deal and the RFC called the bankers on their bluff—or their cowardice— from the start. In June of 1934, Roosevelt signed legislation—initiated in part by Jesse Jones, and crafted by lead RFC counsel Tommy Corcoran—that gave the RFC and the Fed the authority to make loans directly to businesses. Within four months, the RFC had loaned $30 million to private industry, providing money wherever and whenever it was needed most.

Within days of his inauguration, Roosevelt had the RFC lend $22.3 million to the Chicago Board of Education, to finally pay those longsuffering schoolteachers. When an earthquake struck Los Angeles, $13 million in low-interest RFC loans was rushed out to the coast to help small businessmen there rebuild. It was the urgency itself in such responses that helped convince Americans that the new president and the new administration got it, that they really were on the side of the forgotten man.

“No one must be allowed to suffer for a lack of food or clothing or shelter, or become mendicants, for the lack of credit for agriculture, business, and

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industry, small as well as large,” Jones told bankers to their faces.

Yet the RFC was much more than an early version of FEMA , much as that was needed. It also provided seed money for what proved to be some of the most lasting New Deal initiatives.

RFC loans funded the seminal farm subsidy system instituted by Agriculture Secretary Henry Wallace under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). It was the RFC that funded Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) projects, and the mortgage subsidies from the Home Owners Loan Corporation and the Federal Housing Administration that helped keep millions of Americans in their homes. It was the RFC that funded the Rural Electrification Administration’s (REA) extension of cheap electrical power throughout the countryside—and the Electric Home and Farm Authority’s (EHFA) program to let farmers buy electrical appliances on credit. The thousands of EHFA credits averaged $150 a loan, enabled the sale of over one million electrical appliances, and turned a profit of $175,000—which went right back to the Treasury.

The RFC loaned to universities and schools, to cities and towns, and public authorities. It bought up municipal bonds and drove down the cost of borrowing. When a syndicate of 70 Wall Street banks made the only bid on a massive public works project in New York City, the RFC intervened to knock down the interest rates the banking cartel offered, saving the public $3.5 million, or about $55 million today. The same year, 1934, the RFC created the original ExportImport Bank, doing what it could to revive international trade.

The agency’s efficiency was undeniable. For all that it did, the RFC, at its height during the Depression, employed only 3,200 people, and spent only one-half of 1 percent on overhead.

Politically, Jones was just as invaluable to the president, a connection to both the business community “west of the Hudson” and the already powerful Texas delegation in the Congress.

“While the President knew I was on

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How did we become the America that can’t even lay a few hundred miles of track without ruinous cost overruns and political gridlock?

the conservative side, he frequently indicated to me that he thought my course a good antidote for the extreme liberals, a sort of balance, as it were,” Jones would write in his 1951 memoir, Fifty Billion Dollars. “He allowed me to run my job my own way and soon learned that the Congress liked the way we operated.”

“Jones and Roosevelt’s relationship was not just professional,” noted Jones’s biographer, Steven Fenberg.

“They both liked to play cards, tell jokes, and exchange gossip.”

Many described Jones as a “conservative.” (Jones certainly did.) But when it came to economics, Jones epitomized the pragmatic liberalism of the New Deal. He repeatedly denounced great disparities of wealth and the concentration of corporate power as threats to American democracy, and he became close friends with such leading New Deal liberals as Corcoran and especially Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s other man of immediate action.

For all these reasons—and thanks to the marvelously flexible charter of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation itself—Jones found more and more jobs heaped upon him as the New Deal continued. In 1939, Roosevelt consolidated all of the federal government’s lending programs under his direction, making him the federal loan administrator— and in 1940, consolidated Jones in the cabinet as secretary of commerce. (“If jobs were wives, he would be the patriarch of polygamists … Jesse Jones is Biblically big,” Time would marvel.)

With World War II came a whole host of new responsibilities for the RFC. The agency was a natural for the speed required to meet the emergency: running the nation’s petroleum reserves, developing a synthetic rubber process, securing precious metals and other strategic war materials, financing munitions plants, and helping fund America’s allies through the Export-Import Bank.

As Jones noted in his memoir, the RFC got back every penny of the $10.5 billion it spent to fight the Depression, “without loss to the taxpayers,” and “with approximately $500,000,000

profits, after paying the Corporation’s operating expenses and a fair rate of interest on the money which it borrowed to finance this phase of its operations.” Of the further $34 billion the RFC authorized to spend on the war, all but $9.3 billion in “unrecoverable” losses—fired shells, crashed planes, sunken ships, etc.—was returned as well.

AS A MODEL FOR A Green New Deal,

both the advantages and the drawbacks of a new Reconstruction Finance Corporation seem obvious.

A self-sustaining, all-purpose bank for the executive branch, it was built for an emergency—and probably should not exist except in an emergency. (The creation of similar self-sustaining agencies by Robert Moses nearly brought New York City to ruin, long after the worthy purposes for which they had been created had been fulfilled.)

The RFC proved to be a flexible funding mechanism, able to deliver that crucial element of speed. Nothing would be more critical in a Green New Deal.

There have been many proposals for some sort of a national “green infrastructure bank” or “green investment bank.” The estimates of what sort of difference this might make vary widely. A green bank could be used to finance all sorts of different green-energy projects, which is where the RFC might be a useful model. The agency proved to be incredibly flexible in what it ended up doing, which was just about everything. Keep a bank or a railroad afloat, fund a works program, build a bridge, help victims of a natural disaster, pay schoolteachers, let a farmer buy a washing machine on credit, develop a synthetic rubber process, fight a depression or the worst war in human history—the RFC did it. A Green New Deal Bank would face the same variety of missions and challenges.

Robert J. Klee, former commissioner of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection in Connecticut—the first state to develop an actual green bank, in 2011—has laid out all the different approaches that can and must be taken in order to reduce carbon. They include

rich pedroncelli / ap images

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

everything from planting wetlands to switching to carbon-free energy sources; from retrofitting our homes to inventing much of the technology still required.

But could an RFC-like agency exist and thrive today? While everything the RFC undertook had been authorized by some legislation or other, it was an amazingly independent agency by today’s standards, given its head as long as it brought in desired results.

It’s almost impossible to imagine any agency remaining so free of regular congressional control, for so long.

The RFC, like the rest of the New Deal, had the incomparable advantage of taking the stage after three years of immediate and vivid crisis, a rapidly collapsing economy and social order. One of the most confounding aspects of the climate crisis, by contrast, is that it seems unlikely to ever gain that urgency in the public mind before it is too late.

For obvious reasons, efforts to build green banks and the like have been moving away from Washington, not toward it, since Hillary Clinton’s defeat. But at the state level, progress

has also been painfully slow. The United States Climate Alliance cites California Lending for Energy and Environmental Needs (CLEEN) as the first green-bank prototype, begun back in 1994. Over the past 25 years, it has raised $860 million in private investments, to spend on $1.2 billion in clean-energy and water projects.

New York’s green bank—the largest in the United States, according to the Alliance—began as a $1 billion fund to leverage private money, in 2013. Five years later, it had invested a total of $1.6 billion in clean energy.

These are all noble efforts, but proceeding at a Hooverian pace compared to what is needed. It may well be that there are just too many restrictions and regulations in place today— ironically enough—to facilitate the sort of “action, and action now” the original New Deal could bring to bear on the Great Depression. And we’re not even talking about the active Republican “wreckers” of the sort who, for instance, simply refused to build President Obama’s high-speed rail corridors in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Or the Democrats who

An elevated section of the high-speed rail under construction in Fresno, California. In his first State of the State address, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that, while work would continue on the 171-mile Central Valley segment from Bakersfield to Merced, the rest of the system would be indefinitely postponed, citing cost overruns and delays.

GREEN NEW DEAL

destroyed chances for high-speed rail in California by turning the plan over to greedy contractors. How did we ever become the America that can’t even lay a few hundred miles of track without ruinous cost overruns and political gridlock?

Right now, only nine states and the District of Columbia have what might really be called green banks—California, New York, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Maryland. Results from the few other national efforts to establish green banks—in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan, for instance—have been just as toddling.

Our current effort, at its petty pace, seems to make the case for a national agency all the more compelling. Certainly, as Klee notes, “[The] decarbonized world is an electrified world, and only works with an upgraded electric grid and transportation infrastructure.” Such a program, requiring so much money and coordination, will not get built without a major federal commitment. Klee insists that “states recognize” that “the future of energy and environmental policy is neither ‘command and control’ nor ‘market mechanisms,’ it is both.” But there are precious few states even taking up the fight, and “market mechanisms” promise to slow the pace down again.

If the past is any indication, and if speed is of the essence, change will have to come from federal leadership. But no Congress—no matter which party is in charge—and no federal bureaucracy, no state or city government, no citizens’ group, and no well-greased professional lobby will let a new RFC have anything like the leeway it did under Roosevelt and Jones. A green RFC will have to bring the federal government’s authority and unmatched financial resources to bear, but also find a way to incorporate mass participation and move with alacrity. It is impossible to think how this might be brought about, but it will have to be done.

Kevin Baker is a novelist, historian, and journalist. A 2017 Guggenheim fellow, he is writing a history of America between the world wars for Houghton Mifflin.

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The Green New Deal as Economic Development

It can create millions of jobs. It can compensate old-economy workers who lose theirs. It can rebuild America.

BY H A RO L D ME Y E RS O N

O

f all the campaign slogans that helped Democrats win formerly Republican-held offices in the 2018 midterm elections, the only memorable one—that of Gretchen Whitmer, who was elected governor of Michigan—was perhaps the bluntest: Fix the damn roads.

At first glance, that may seem an unlikely guide to how to persuade Americans to enact a Green New Deal.

Roads, like cars and trucks (at least until they’re electrified), are so ancien régime. Then again, bikes, scooters, and pedestrians need smooth roads and sidewalks, too. And Americans at all points on the political spectrum agree that their nation’s sagging infrastructure needs shaping up. Our potholed roads, our crumbling bridges, our go-slow rails, our combustible grid; our drafty, energy-inefficient buildings; our lead-laden water systems, our porous flood controls—and beyond the merely infrastructural, our befouled air and our roasting planet—they all need fixing, do they not? And how about our economy, which even amid a decade of job creation isn’t creating the decent-paying blue-collar jobs it used to? It could use some fixing, too.

To all these ailments, a Green New Deal offers not just a plausible cure, but the only cure on offer. And yet, when pollsters run the phrase

by Americans, respondents are remarkably cool to it, including many blue-collar workers whose lives and fortunes would improve if a Green New Deal came to pass.

That coolness is due in part to the demonization to which right-wing media and their ilk have subjected the Green New Deal. But it is also due to the strategic tone-deafness with which some climate activists have

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made their case—prescribing sacrifice to compatriots for whom the presumably fat years of American excess have largely been lean.

In fact, a Green New Deal would spark an era of clean growth. Here’s how: JOB CREATION

In 2018, there were already approximately 2.1 million workers in the green-energy field: 1.3 million in such energy efficiency occupations as retrofitting, 800,000 in solar and wind energy. Any projections for the number of jobs that a Green New Deal would add to these totals depend, of course, on the level of carbon reduction the project seeks to reach, and by what year. University of Massachusetts economist Robert Pollin, who did work for the Department of Energy during the early years of the Obama presidency on the $90 billion share of the stimulus that went to green energy, has authored the most comprehensive reports on what a Green New Deal would look like in three states: New York, Washington, and Colorado. The reports outline what each state would need to do to reduce its carbon emissions by 90 percent by the year 2050, and how many jobs such a change would both create and eliminate. While he has only done preliminary work on a nationwide report, Pollin estimates that if the federal government set that 90 percent by 2050 target and allocated the funds required to reach it, it would create roughly five million new jobs in the first year of the project, rising to 7.5 million in later years.

The number of new jobs each state would create varies not just by population, of course, but also by how much of

Our potholed roads, our crumbling bridges, our go-slow rails, our combustible grid; our leadladen water systems, our befouled air and roasting planet—they all need fixing, do they not?

its energy is already produced by clean sources. In his studies of the three states, Pollin estimates that New York would see an increase of between 1.8 percent and 2.5 percent of total jobs from a Green New Deal program, and Washington an increase of between 1.2 percent and 1.7 percent. Colorado, by contrast, would see an increase of between 3 percent and 4 percent, because it lacks the existing hydropower generation of New York and Washington, where the hydropower stations abutting the Columbia and St. Lawrence Rivers, among others, generate a considerable share of those states’ electricity. Dry Colorado has no comparable waterways. (As Nelson Lichtenstein documents in his article in this issue, it was the original New Deal that built the dams and power stations along the Columbia River.)

Based on Pollin’s three state reports, it appears that a very rough onethird of the jobs the Green New Deal would generate would be blue-collar construction jobs, while the others would be jobs maintaining, running, and administering wind and solar power. The creation of construction jobs is important not just in itself, but also because construction workers and their unions have often been the most skeptical about the promise that a Green New Deal economy could enable them to maintain, much less improve, their living standards.

Indeed, in some states, construction unions are allied with oil companies in opposing Green New Deal initiatives.

Absent Green New Deal plans that prioritize good jobs, their skepticism is understandable. The majority, and certainly the plurality, of construction jobs in any Green New Deal would be in retrofitting the tens of millions of buildings in the nation, and most of the retrofitting jobs created by the Obama stimulus had an hourly wage of no more than $15, which would be a step down for workers in the building trades. Under a Green New Deal, however, major retrofitting of office towers and apartment buildings would require serious construction work by serious construction workers, and could pay accordingly.

One way to ensure decent pay is to require that all such construction

bob leverone / ap images

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

work be done under project labor agreements, which mandate bargaining between management and construction unions for the work to proceed. Another is that work be covered under prevailing-wage legislation (which currently exists in 28 states), which requires the payment of prevailing—customarily, union—wages on all public projects. A third requirement is that projects hire new workers from union or joint union-management apprenticeship programs.

What are the prospects for such requirements? Some of them, particularly the hiring requirement from union apprenticeship programs, made it into a new law enacted in 2019 in Maine, where this Green New Deal statute was written with the state’s unions at the table, and where the state AFL-CIO officially endorsed it. Pollin’s plan for Colorado, commissioned by the state’s AFL-CIO and devised with continual input from that state’s building trades unions, has won the trades’ endorsement. Project labor agreements and union apprenticeships were also part of a Green New Deal ballot initiative put before Washington state voters in 2018, which a majority of that state’s unions supported, but which failed at the ballot box after

Crews complete construction of the solar panel structure at a solar panel farm in Newland, North Carolina.

fossil fuel companies spent more than $30 million on a campaign to defeat it. Hewing to their alliance with the oil industry, the state’s building trades unions opposed the measure, too.

In recent years, a substantial share of unionized construction work has been concentrated in the fossil fuel sector. The wave of anti-union legislation that swept the Midwest in the wake of the 2010 elections contained bills specifically targeting construction workers. Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arkansas—all with newly elected Republican governors—enacted laws repealing their prevailing-wage statutes, which had the effect of substantially reducing the pay of workers on public projects. In those states and many others, the construction crews on public projects are invariably nonunion. For many giant oil and pipeline companies with immense financial resources, however, maintaining union contracts on some of their projects has proved a smart political investment, winning them allies in their battles against decarbonizing the economy. (Much of the work for the oil industry involves building and maintaining pipelines, but a Green New Deal will require even more pipeline

GREEN NEW DEAL

work, but of a climate-friendly nature.

Due to the decay of aging water systems and to the advent of more extreme weather, says Joe Uehlein, who heads the Labor Network for Sustainability, “the entire system of storm management and delivery of fresh water needs to be rebuilt.”)

The Green New Deal plans put forth by such Democratic presidential candidates as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Joe Biden—and former presidential candidate Jay Inslee, who was the first to put forth such a plan—could, if enacted, allay construction workers’ concerns. The plans set a high minimum wage for work on Green New Deal projects; most also call for both a prevailing-wage standard and project labor agreements, and specify ways that the work will be done by a unionized workforce. As well, the sheer size of those plans— ranging from $150 billion to $300 billion a year—signals a commitment not just to funding a new infrastructure and more energy-efficient buildings, but also to paying middle-class wages to those who build them.

The magnitude of the green-energy investments in all these plans also addresses another ailment from which the nation in general and construction workers in particular both suffer: the chronic underinvestment, both public and private, in America’s infrastructure and physical plant. In the private sector, according to one study from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, the share of corporate revenues going to investment since 1980 has declined by 7 percent (the share going to wages also declined by 7 percent), while the share going to shareholders through dividends and buybacks has risen by an offsetting 14 percent. In the public sector, the unwillingness of Republicans to spend public dollars on infrastructure—the Trump administration offered to cover just 10 percent of the costs of its proposed national infrastructure upgrading—has stymied efforts to build needed rail lines and a host of other long overdue projects.

What the Green New Deal offers construction workers, then, is the only plausible construction boom in the nation’s future, assuming the

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Democrats take the White House and Senate next year. If the project is undertaken along the lines of the plans laid out by Inslee and his fellow Democrats, it effectively guarantees union jobs at union pay with union benefits. “Addressing the climate crisis can be a full employment plan for the building trades far into the future,” says Uehlein. “We need to do a better job of making that case.”

In 1977, the congressman to whom labor most looked to advance its interests—San Francisco Democrat Phil Burton—introduced legislation that would greatly expand the Redwood National Park in California’s north coastal region. The expansion, however, would have cost more than 2,000 loggers their jobs. Despite his indisputable bona fides as labor’s champion, Burton quickly became the target of the California union movement’s rage.

As I documented in the Prospect’s Summer 2019 issue, Burton came up with a plan to compensate the loggers until and unless they found comparable work. Under the plan, the loggers would receive full pay and benefits from a federal fund for up to six years—up to 11 years for older workers. Thus amended, Burton’s bill was endorsed not just by the Sierra Club but also by the loggers’ union (though the association of chain saw manufacturers remained opposed) and was enacted into law.

The Redwood Park Solution was largely forgotten, but the particulars of its arrangements for the workers who lost their careers now reappear in various Green New Deal proposals.

In the 1970s, Tony Mazzocchi, an official of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, advanced the idea that compensating workers in such situations had to become routine, and he gave that idea the name of “just transition.”

Before that decade was out, with the crisis at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the discovery of toxic poisons in New York’s Love Canal, and with growing public awareness of other sites around the nation where toxic waste had been dumped, the government established a “Superfund” program to clean up such sites.

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“Our slogan at the time,” says Dave Campbell, who now heads a local of refinery workers in the Los Angeles area, “was, ‘We need a Superfund for workers’”—those who lost their jobs when their contaminated worksites were shut down.

In a 2016 Prospect article, Pollin and his co-author Brian Callaci tallied the number of workers in the nation’s fossil fuel industries. There were then 69,000 workers in the coal industry (a figure now reduced to roughly 50,000 as mines continue to close), with an additional 412,000 workers in supportive positions. The oil and gas industry employed 192,000 workers, with an additional 200,000 workers in support. The downsizing of those industries as part of a Green New Deal, Pollin and Callaci wrote, would take many years, so the number of displaced workers in any given year would be small relative to the total workforce. As well, a number of the workers in supportive roles would likely be able to find comparable jobs in the greener energy industries. Factoring in those considerations, Pollin and Callaci calculated that the annual costs of providing those workers with a just transition in wages and benefits over the next half-decade, as well as

Above: A wind power career training class at a private technical school in Houston, Texas Opposite: Tunneling beneath a highway in Roanoke County, Virginia, to make way for the Mountain Valley Pipeline

guaranteeing their pensions, would come to roughly $500 million per year.

Let’s say, however, that the 2016 Pollin-Callaci figure is an underestimate. Even if the figure is a billion dollars per year, that’s still considerably less than 1 percent of the yearly outlay in any of the plans put forth by the Democratic presidential candidates.

The Washington state 2018 ballot measure provided one version of that kind of just transition. It called for providing workers who’d lose their jobs with five years of full wages and benefits if they were within five years of retirement, and for other workers, comparable wages and benefits scaled to the number of years they’d been employed in the industry—until such time as they found comparable work.

If the work they found offered lower wages and benefits, the workers would receive wage insurance payments scaling them up to their past levels of pay, along with payments scaling up their health insurance and pensions.

After a series of mergers, Mazzocchi’s union became part of the United Steelworkers in 2005. By then, the Steelworkers had already taken the lead in forming the BlueGreen Alliance with environmental organizations, to ensure that a transition to a

steve gonzales / houston chronicle via ap images

JOB LOSS AND JUST TRANSITIONS

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PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

green economy goes forward, but not at workers’ expense. Dave Campbell, who heads the Steelworkers local of Los Angeles–area refinery workers, notes that his members are among the most well-paid blue-collar workers in the land. For his members and other fossil fuel workers, he says, “just transition has to be very concrete—nothing merely general. People on the edge of losing their careers want to know what exactly will happen to them and their families.”

Noting that members of his local make up to $125,000 a year and that comparable blue-collar jobs are very few in number, he asks, “Do we expect them to take jobs in movie theaters?”

“No family will sacrifice themselves for someone else’s family,” Campbell says. “But for the future of our children and their children, we are willing to make sacrifices together.”

FIXING COMMUNITIES

When the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers first began looking for allies in their struggles to win just transitions for members losing their jobs, as plants were shuttered as toxic hazards, Campbell recalls, “we did a probe of the environmental organizations we could partner with. We basically decided that the environmental

Oil industry work involves building and maintaining pipelines, similar to work a Green New Deal will require: rebuilding systems of storm water management and delivery of fresh water.

justice wing of the environmental movement was more promising. It was working class, it was in our communities, and it understood our need to put food on the table.” And, of course, those communities were often devastated by the closures, and also often bore the brunt of their proximity to the toxicity.

Historically, such communities have a disproportionate share of people of color. In Los Angeles, for instance, oil refineries are clustered in the heavily Latino community of Wilmington. In the 1960s and ’70s, the center of the city’s Latino population, East L.A., was divided and hemmed in by the greatest concentration of freeways in Southern California: The neighborhoods with the least political power got to breathe the city’s most polluted air. Throughout the nation, the residents of such neighborhoods are exposed to more illness-inducing substances—and have consistently shorter life spans—than other Americans.

So a Green New Deal needs to be not only a just transition for workers, mostly white men, who had well paying jobs in the carbon economy, but also a transition to economic opportunity and neighborhood remediation

GREEN NEW DEAL

for the tens of millions of people who’ve lived on the front lines of environmental predation.

Accordingly, the Green New Deal plans put forth by the Democratic candidates and outlined in Pollin’s three state proposals include funding for those frontline communities that have suffered most from the fossil fuel economy. In the 2018 Washington ballot measure, fully one-third of the state’s Green New Deal outlays would have been spent in communities disproportionately impacted by carbon pollution. In formulating the measure, says Jeffrey Johnson, who then headed the state’s AFL-CIO, a chief concern of the drafters was “how do those disproportionately impacted by carbon pollution and climate disasters come out of this whole?”

The drafting process in Washington included representatives of those chiefly minority communities, as well as labor, business, and environmental activists. Had the measure passed, the disbursement of Green New Deal funds would have been controlled by a similarly diverse group. A governorappointed commission with members from those communities would have been charged with directing $1.3 billion annually to various projects.

Prospective grantees, says Johnson, “had to show that their projects would lower emissions, pay prevailing wages, employ community benefit agreements [which require hiring from poor and historically disadvantaged communities], use union apprenticeship programs, buy domestically produced products and materials, and respect tribal sovereignty. It would have put real people in charge of real money.”

In that sense, the Green New Deal should and can be both a top-down and bottom-up project—using government funds derived from taxing and bonding to meet urgently needed environmental standards arrived at democratically, and disbursing those funds through processes involving the impacted communities of workers and residents. Like the original New Deal, it affords America an opportunity to remake itself into a more egalitarian and prosperous nation. It is at one and the same time the way to fix the damn roads—and the only way to save the planet.

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Healing Waters

Water helps restore and cool the land. It’s one more natural element we have plundered and need to reclaim.

BY J U D I T H D. S C H WA R T Z

M

y local theater in Bennington, Vermont, just staged an original play on an unlikely theme for a drama: fouled drinking water. Entitled Water, Water, Everywhere, it’s the story of two young, breezily flirtatious reporters exposing the scandal of industrial chemicals in the water supply. The villain here is perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA , a man-made chemical used in local factories to manufacture Teflon coating for fiberglass fabrics, the stuff of sports stadium domes, airport terminals, and the like.

This cutting-edge alchemy was a boon to the local economy. In 1968, a Chemical Fabrics Corporation VP boasted, “The area within a 15-mile radius of Bennington may well be the Teflon glass coating capital of the world.” Through the decades, however, PFOA—which persists in the environment and is toxic in minute amounts—leached into soil and flowed into rivers. Illnesses associated with PFOA include thyroid disease, kidney and testicular cancer, ulcerative colitis, and hypertension: medical conditions that had been cropping up with unnerving frequency in our communities. Starting in 2015, people living in towns that housed these plants learned the water they’ve sipped on and bathed in for years is unsafe. Which explained a lot.

The Vermont–New York corridor is hardly alone in our water woes. In Flint, Michigan, tainted water has resulted in high blood lead levels in children, the developmental impacts of which may not manifest for years.

Several years after news of the crisis broke, Flint residents still report skin rashes, hair loss, and other symptoms. Newark, New Jersey, too, is plagued by lead in drinking water from corroded pipes.

Water wreaks havoc in other

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ways. Many parts of the U.S. have bumped up against water emergencies like flooding, drought, or wildfire. Words like “recordbreaking” and “unprecedented” appear so often as to lose meaning. Our industrial habit creates its own crises: transporting fuels via pipelines and tankers means potential spills; fertilizer runoff from farmland adds to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, hurting marine life; and overdevelopment means paving over wetlands that serve as buffers during storms. The latter is one reason the 2017 hurricanes Harvey and Irma—in Texas and Florida, respectively—were so destructive.

The landmark 1972 Clean Water Act required permitting for commercial activity that posed a threat to the nation’s navigable waters, tightening regulations on industry.

Over the decades, the Clean Water Act’s purview has been expanded, notably by the Waters of the U.S. rule, enacted in 2015 under President Obama, which broadened protection to many streams and wetlands. The rule, an inconvenience to extractive industry and Big Ag, was in Trump’s sights from day one, and in September EPA chief Andrew Wheeler signed its repeal. This rollback of water protections leaves more streams, lakes, and wetlands vulnerable to pollution, putting at risk the people and wildlife that depend on them. The change could directly affect more than 100 million people, whose drinking water was safeguarded under the 2015 rule.

Despite water’s centrality to human well-being, food security, and ecological stability—to the sustenance of life—our country has not lately done a great job of stewarding it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Water, by definition, is at once fluid and cleansing; we can choose to repair

Understanding how water works, and incorporating this into water policy, will not only replenish water sources but also help us to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

our broken relationship with water. A Green New Deal focused on climate resilience, meaningful employment, and environmental justice is an ideal opportunity to turn this around. Doing so carries multiple benefits for health, biodiversity, climate, community selfdetermination, and overall quality of life in cities and rural areas alike.

To truly embrace this new water ethic we need to change how we think about water. Specifically, in two ways: One is to situate water within the commons. This will guarantee access to clean water for all—and ensure that corporate entities can no longer pollute water with impunity.

The other is to bring to water policy an understanding of how water “works”: how it moves across the landscape and through the atmosphere. This presents opportunities to work with nature’s water cycling, rather than fight against it, as is often the case. Allying with hydrology has implications for how we grow food and how we build. And by creating the conditions for landscapes to absorb water, we can minimize the damage from ongoing land degradation and extreme weather events, saving costs as well as lives. A water-wise mindset also means promoting natural hydrological cooling processes, an added buffer in the face of climate change.

OUR WATER COVENANT

In 2010, the United Nations recognized the human right to water for drinking and sanitation; the motion passed easily, though the United States was among the 44 nations that abstained. This stance has to change: Acknowledging clean drinking water as a basic civil right is an essential starting point, a foundation for a just water deal.

Universal access to water is only possible when water belongs to everyone. With water shortages looming in many parts of the globe, there’s growing interest in water as a commercial investment: the ultimate cynical market ploy, scarcity as an opportunity to broaden your portfolio.

Apart from the humanitarian

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PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

factor, treating water as a commodity takes us down the wrong path. In the U.S., schemes to privatize water systems have been unsuccessful. According to Food and Water Watch, private control of water results in inflated costs, poor service, and diminished public trust. As food justice advocate Anna Lappé writes, “we have seen the results of water privatization: It doesn’t work. Water is not like telecommunications or transportation.

You could tolerate crappy phone service, but have faulty pipes connecting to your municipal water and you’re in real trouble.” Private and public alike, today’s drinking and sewer systems are deteriorating and overstressed.

The bottled-water market is another threat to water access. A fair water scenario means the public, not private interests, controls local water.

A while back, I met Hayu Patria, a food sovereignty advocate from Indonesia, who told me about a village where she works that’s known for its

Last spring, the Midwest endured epic flooding from melting snow followed by day after day of torrential rains.

high-quality spring water. Once it was branded and bottled by a subsidiary of Danone, locals struggled to get clean water, often walking long distances across mountainous terrain to do so.

In the U.S., Nestlé, the world’s largest water bottler, draws millions of gallons a year from the San Bernardino National Forest, leaving streams dry. According to the state of California, this water isn’t legally theirs to take. In north Florida, more than 100,000 people signed a petition asking the regional water district to save Ginnie Springs and not “let Nestlé pillage community water and churn out more plastic garbage.”

The global bottled-water business is where two environmental challenges, plastic pollution and water access, converge.

Aside from cases of clear negligence, the financial and health costs of polluted water are primarily borne by the public. The burden needs to be

GREEN NEW DEAL

on the polluter; when the cleanup fees get dumped on taxpayers, companies have scant motivation to reduce contaminants at the source. The biggest assault on water comes from agriculture: nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and animal waste. Farmers often hedge their bets by applying more fertilizer than they need. The excess lofts skyward to form N2O, a potent greenhouse gas, or dribbles into waterways as nitrates, a health hazard in drinking water.

The integrity of our waters is one reason to expedite a transition to regenerative agriculture, farming that avoids chemical inputs and improves soil ecology. Soil that’s high in organic matter filters out nitrates and curtails runoff. Livestock appropriately managed build soil organic matter and enhance water cycling. Animal waste only becomes a concern with confined operations—as we’re reminded of when a hurricane rips through North Carolina hog country.

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Our built environment is designed to sluice away water as quickly as possible. To a degree this makes sense: Water standing around poses the risk of disease and gums up travel in cities.

By contrast, nature seeks to hold onto water to sustain plants, animals, and microbial life. The challenge is that man-made surroundings keep growing, with more ground paved over and more water lost to local ecosystems.

Impervious surfaces—roofs, sidewalks, highways—are conduits for falling and flowing water, which picks up pollutants that are then carried to sea.

We need to acknowledge the water cost of development and address this in planning. Instead of a system that drains water from one place only to flood areas downstream—a standard that wastes perfectly good water and creates urban heat islands— let’s manage water to keep it in the environment. We can see rainfall as a resource rather than an inconvenience, and make small adjustments to construction and landscaping so that water is held and flows slowly to where it can be productive. In Tucson, rainwater-harvesting guru Brad Lancaster grows a food forest on his small urban lot. He even convinced the city to approve curb cuts that direct wastewater to food-bearing trees.

Municipalities can devise incentives to build simple earthworks or other means to infiltrate water. Some cities

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The global bottled-water business is where two environmental challenges, plastic pollution and water access, converge.

CONNECTING WATER, LAND, AND CLIMATE

Water is always in flux, absorbing and releasing heat, shape-shifting from gas to liquid to solid and back again. A new lens on water takes into consideration how water functions in nature.

Water in the environment generally calls to mind “blue water”: lakes, rivers, and oceans, what would be colored blue on a map. Equally important is “green water,” moisture held in soil and living plants, as this is what supports vegetation, protects against erosion, and bolsters aquifers.

This in-ground water also keeps landscapes cool. Within a vegetated area, moisture circulates: It moves upward through plants and evaporates from soil (evapotranspiration), then descends as rain or dew. This “small water cycle” helps moderate the temperature differential between day and night: Plant transpiration dissipates heat from the sun, which is then embodied in water vapor—heat that is later released via condensation, in the air at cloud altitude, or on the ground as dew. This sequence, repeated continuously across the world’s varied landscapes, is the primary means by which the Earth regulates solar energy and therefore manages heat.

Understanding how water works, and incorporating this knowledge into water policy, will not only replenish water sources but also help us mitigate and adapt to climate change.

We’ve long accepted a connection between water and climate, but the link tends to go in one direction: that climate change will intensify storms and have a negative impact on water availability. We can also look at how water affects climate and explore ways to support water’s cooling properties.

An interesting water development is the granting of rights to lakes and rivers. The Whanganui River in New Zealand and the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India have personhood rights—the right to flourish and be free from harm. In North America, the Klamath River now has legal standing in Yurok tribal court, and this year Ohio voters approved the Lake Erie Bill of Rights, which allows the people of Toledo to act as legal guardians to the lake, which has been marred by nutrient runoff. These examples reflect a growing rights-ofnature movement, based on the belief that nature has inherent value, not just in its use for humans.

Bestowing agency to rivers and lakes may seem a novelty right now, but maybe it’s not such a crazy idea.

For at the end of the day, what’s good for water is good for us.

Judith D. Schwartz is a Vermontbased journalist and author of Water In Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World.

eric risberg / ap images

KEEPING WATER WHERE IT FALLS

impose a charge per area of impervious roofing, recognizing the public cost of extra runoff.

“Water infrastructure” generally refers to pipes, dams, and culverts.

But we can also think of soil as water infrastructure. For our ability to meet our water challenges—whether a flood means millions in disaster relief or whether a river stays within its banks—largely hinges on how we treat our soil.

More than half of the organic matter in soil is carbon, and carbon turns soil into a sponge: According to the USDA, every 1 percent increase in soil organic carbon (i.e., moving from 1 percent to 2 percent) represents an additional 20,000-plus gallons of water per acre that can be held on the land. Given the stress on farmers due to inadequate or unpredictable rainfall, this is huge: Carbon-rich soil maintains moisture in times of drought, so crops can last longer between watering. Plus, water soaking into the ground reduces the chance of flooding.

We can think of bare soil as malfunctioning infrastructure: the ecological equivalent of busted pipes.

Absent plant cover, when there’s a heavy rain soil seals over and water streams away. Healthy, covered soil has pore spaces for water to linger and filter through, replenishing underground water stores. Much of what we now regard as “water problems” can be understood as a failure-to-keepwater-on-the-ground problem. Several states have passed soil legislation, highlighting that healthy soil improves water-holding capacity and overall watershed health.

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

Making Public Works Work

Public projects in the U.S. seem to take forever. Why is America so bad at public investment— and how can we get better?

BY RO BE R T E . PA A SW E L L

B

y now, it’s no longer startling to read that America’s infrastructure is near failing. In the highly respected Infrastructure Report Card issued every four years by the American Society of Civil Engineers, the grade assigned to 16 different categories of our infrastructure, including roads, transit systems, bridges, and public buildings, has toggled between a D and a C. Their assessment: “Our nation’s infrastructure is aging, underperforming, and in need of sustained care and action.” But this measures only the condition of our current infrastructure. When we consider that any infrastructure renewal strategy must address the need to carry us into the next century, the urgency of raising this grade to an A becomes even clearer.

Why is our public infrastructure such a consistent national disgrace?

Why can we make no progress in creating the infrastructure we need for the next 100 years?

First, there is no national consensus on what should be fixed or built, or where, or how it will be paid for. Major physical infrastructure projects— roads, bridges, rail systems—take years and sometimes decades to build, which is itself a source of cost escalation. A few notorious ones: ■ East Side Access, a commuter rail project in New York City originally scheduled to open in 2009 and to cost $4.3 billion, is now to open in 2022 at a cost of $11.2 billion.

■ The Oakland Bay Bridge, following catastrophic earthquake damage, was to be rapidly rebuilt in 1989 at a cost of $1 billion and opened 17 years later at a cost of $6.4 billion.

■ The first phase of Manhattan’s Second Avenue Subway was started in 1972, halted in 1975 for fiscal reasons, and then restarted in 2007, finally opening ten years later at a cost of $4.45 billion instead of the

original projection of $3.8 billion.

Thus, the two most common phrases that we hear or read about infrastructure projects of all kinds are “over budget” and “beyond schedule.”

From project planning through ribbon cutting and beyond, into operations, the major causes include: uncertain, discontinuous, and inadequate funding; faulty estimates; funding agency mandates; local building codes; stakeholder disputes; unanticipated and unknowable physical conditions; poor project management and oversight; and unanticipated increases in material and equipment costs. The cost of the federal Davis-Bacon Act, mandating that federally funded construction projects pay prevailing wages, a favorite scapegoat of the right, has been a trivial factor. On many projects, labor and management agree on cost-saving “partnering” agreements.

Perhaps the biggest single source of delays and cost overruns is stop-andgo funding, which leads to stop-andgo implementation. In that respect, one of the most important contributions of a Green New Deal would be predictable, guaranteed, long-term federal funding. This would not just pay for more and better public infrastructure; it would allow it to be built much more efficiently, with more coherent public planning and with more public confidence.

Less well recognized but no less serious a problem is that deferred maintenance has pushed capital replacement costs ever higher. Mostly for funding reasons, much of our infrastructure is not kept in a State of Good Repair (SGR)—an industry term that means maintained in the operating condition for which it was designed. As deterioration of roads and transit systems accelerates, capital replacement costs escalate.

A large part of this dysfunctional

The greatest single source of delays and cost overruns is stop-and-go funding; one of the most important contributions of a Green New Deal would be predictable, guaranteed, long-term federal funding.

GREEN NEW DEAL

picture lies in the way the federal government and states now execute and operate established infrastructure programs—from planning to ribbon cutting—and in how they devolve financial responsibility for system operation to the system itself.

Do other economies do better at major project development? Let’s dispense with the Chinese model, because China is an autocracy that can literally command labor and spend unlimited money both for valid project costs and for the corruption that has been reported around all of its major public works. Rail can be built at what seems like breathtaking speed, unaccountable for safety, environmental impacts, labor exploitation, community disruption, and costs. Equally rapid highway building has been accomplished at a very high cost to air quality, public health, and personal productivity.

Looking to more comparable societies, it’s a mixed picture: ■ The famous London Crossrail—a major infrastructure project in England—was to be completed in nine years and opened in 2018 at a cost of £15.4 billion. It has now cost £18.25 billion and will open in 2021. Official reasons given for the delay are writing and dynamic testing of the system’s software.

■ Paris is building the Grand Paris Express, a 200-kilometer suburban Métro expansion. The estimated cost was about ¤25 billion in 2012 prices, at that time average for a European subway. New cost estimates are now at ¤35 billion. Some of this increase occurred because small projects were added to the scope. But most of it was due to faulty understanding of physical conditions risk, and management risk. As in many European countries, the national government gives such projects priority and substantial funding.

■ The Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway (MTR), an extension to the then-new Hong Kong International Airport, was built with adequate and reliable funding, on time and within budget. The MTR was set up as a public corporation, with the (pre-1999) government the majority owner. To build the rail, the government sold the land needed for the new extension to the MTR at its then-current, undeveloped value. The MTR then sold the land to

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developers at an appreciated value and used this arbitraged difference to pay for the system. It was built quickly under the expertise of an international group of professionals who had constructed urban rail around the world.

What is the lesson here? You don’t have to look hard to find massively delayed European megaprojects. The reasons for those overruns and delays are almost identical to those we experience here in the U.S.: poor planning; underestimation of costs; poor project management and oversight; unanticipated physical conditions; unanticipated increases in material and equipment costs; and a big culprit, review delays, often by the federal government.

But there’s something really significant missing from that catalog of problems, a problem that American infrastructure development consistently and universally confronts but that our European counterparts do not: inadequate, inconsistent, and unreliable funding. And although it’s only one factor, it is the one that outweighs all the others in causing delays and cost increases.

What underlies this difference?

European projects are conceived of and executed as national in scope and purpose, supported by a national consensus that recognizes the nature of collective and mutual benefit and responsibility. Is it unanimous? Not by a long shot. There is opposition and debate, often intense and messy. But the basic principle has long been accepted, and with some exceptions (the U.K., currently) it doesn’t divide along lines of right and left. When there is resolution, based on a forged agreement of what is best for the country, funding support doesn’t waver. No stops and starts, no local interference or rogue locally generated redirection of funds. Funding is even there for cost overruns.

PARADOXICALLY, AND even per-

versely, the only modern example of our capacity to accept and act on the concept of national purpose in public infrastructure was the federal

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government’s long-term planning and financing of the 1950s National Interstate Highway system. With a different constellation of interest groups, a lot of that money might have gone for mass transit.

We do have infrastructure needs that cannot be viewed as anything but national but which have made no progress—inland waterways and high-speed rail (HSR) are just two examples. But federal agencies are limited to apportioning national funding to states and regions, in accordance with congressional intent. To reinforce the concept of infrastructure as a national imperative, history is on our side.

The federal government has provided funding to build and maintain roads since the beginning of the Republic, to encourage settlement of the country and the movement of goods. The FederalAid Highway Program began in 1912 with explicit deference to the motorcar and a requirement that states that received federal aid to build roads establish departments of transportation to act as stewards for the federal dollars.

In 1944, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in response to an FDR proposal for a 40,000-mile national system of interstate highways, but not until 1952 did Congress allot funds specifically for interstate construction. That program evolved into President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System, evoking the needed role of highways in national defense. The federal government covered 90 percent of the costs, paid from a Highway Trust Fund (HTF) financed with motor fuel and related taxes—a brilliant and innovative concept, on a par with the conceptualization of the system itself. With few mandates—OSHA , Buy America, environmental impact statements, and the Americans With Disabilities Act were yet to come—the country built 42,500 miles of high-design highways in relatively short times.

The macroeconomic benefits of this achievement are well known, including the tens of thousands of

construction jobs. Another salutary effect was the creation of a new generation of professionals trained to plan, design, and implement these projects.

But there were consequences, beyond the stated goal of providing a streamlined new way to drive around the country, giving powerful dominance to motorized transport.

Much of the social and physical organization of American society was rattled and reconfigured.

Changes in the American landscape brought new patterns of land use that disrupted communities, helped devastate our urban centers, and hastened the decline of urban transit systems, as well as disastrous deterioration of air quality.

The Johnson administration restored, imperfectly, a concern for our urban centers and populations. In 1964, the federal government passed the Urban Mass Transportation Act, providing the means for capital development of urban transit systems, but no relief for the high costs of maintenance.

Highway funding continued to dwarf funding for mass transit, and the social fallout continued.

Beginning in 1981, Ronald Reagan’s devolution policies caused an unanticipated shock to the decades-old arrangement by which the federal purse supported transportation infrastructure.

Funding declined, but more radically, structures were changed.

States were required to bear a much greater share of capital costs, and nearly all the operating and maintenance costs.

The terrible effect of the automobile on air quality could not be ignored. Clean Air Act (CAA) measurement and compliance requirements brought indisputable evidence of the damage, building environmental awareness and robust public debate. In fact, it was concern for air quality that drove the introduction and passage of the first environmentally constrained transportation planning and policy legislation in the post–Interstate Highway System era, the Intermodal Surface Transportation

Efficiency Act of 1991, sponsored

by Senator Pat Moynihan of New York. It required that transportation projects in an urban area, taken singly or collectively, must meet clean air standards as set in the CAA and CAA amendments. This was a requirement for any federal funding, putting a brake on new highway building. The bill established a compliance mechanism through metropolitan planning organizations (mandated in 1975) to certify each year’s funding applications through appropriate transportation/air quality models. And it has worked, with measurable and meaningful improvement in air quality. It has also led to renewed planning for transit, transit-oriented land uses, and the use of non– fossil fuel vehicles. Unfortunately, today many of the CAA standards are being rolled back. Another job for the next administration.

The intense but inconsistent infrastructure development since the 1950s has led us to our current circumstances, some positive but mostly negative. These frame the context for the forward-facing infrastructure policies that will be a key component in responding to our global and national environmental, social, and economic challenges.

Highway-induced traffic, especially the growth of trucks (and the decline of rail), continues to cause road deterioration, requiring a shift from new capital construction to maintenance. Elevated understanding of the environmental, economic, and social issues around personal automobiles led to a recognition that public transit must be sustained and revitalized.

The federal government’s local match requirement is now as high as 50 percent for public transit.

But in spite of its reduced funding role, the federal government adds substantial costs through complex regulations, lengthy project reviews, and special mandates. The Surface Transportation Program imposes specific planning and design criteria as conditions for funding. Additional federal mandates include Buy America, ADA ,

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

Clean Air and Clean Water standards, and certification of Clean Air standards. Some of these mandates are necessary and socially beneficial, but they add costs, which must be recognized in funding programs.

Each mile of highway, each mile of track is different from all others.

Land costs, geological features, climate, and stakeholder values affect the cost of each mile. (JustiThe East Side Access fied) political involveproject in New York City ment or (not-so-justified) political interference can also throw a project off-balance, offschedule, and off-budget.

But it is uncertainty of funding that most drives up project costs by causing delays and hiccups in project progress. Dollars available through federal programs are inadequate to meet the immense scope of infrastructure need, so these inadequate funds are now allocated through competition.

Applicants must endure a complex and time-consuming competitive process and review of many steps in planning—from pre-engineering to final environmental impacts. These efforts alone add millions to every project, whether or not it receives funds.

The pressures to build infrastructure during periods of devolution have led to the federal government asking for “innovative solutions,” most notably so-called public-private partnerships. They might cost less, but mostly by reducing wages paid to workers.

Overall they have not achieved promised success in performance, often returning to the public sector for some type of subsidy and even bailouts.

Even in Europe, where “contracting out”—a loosely defined concept—was an EU requirement for transit systems two decades ago, a review after ten years found that while labor costs came down, service quality declined.

Failures in privatization are all around us, but the scope and scale of the U.K. Conservative privatization spree, beginning with the Thatcher government, has left much infrastructure and public service—rail, buses,

m a r y a lta f f e r / a p i m a g e s

Infrastructure not only creates public value but also enhances the value of privately owned land and real estate. The public role in creating this wealth also demands a public share in it.

water systems—in near failure, with the public sector having no choice but to step in and rescue the providers over and over again. Even on its own terms, “the market” has failed. Big firms overran the small firms, obliterating any advantages of competition.

Few recognize that private enterprise has always been involved in the public delivery of infrastructure. The government buys planning, engineering, and construction services, but applies labor and other standards to that work. There is usually a bidding process, designed to optimize quality and cost.

The backlog of needed repairs or improvements for our roads and transit systems is as much as $2 trillion.

Cash-strapped state DOTs and transit authorities have to juggle funds available for keeping facilities in a good state of repair and for new capital investment. Today’s technology and its impact were literally unimaginable by most even a few years ago. And the pace of technological change itself adds to the challenge.

The federal government was once the single most impactful component of our infrastructure systems. Our history shows that it alone has the resources and the mandate to address the sweeping national challenge of building a system to carry us into the next century. Public accountability, access, and democratic values demand that this be a fully public initiative.

Many of the current policies, procedures, and programs have been layered onto what is essentially a

GREEN NEW DEAL

mid-20th-century framework. A new government, pledged to address 21stcentury environmental, economic, and social needs, can make a fast and fresh start with forward-facing resources and policies.

There is an opportunity to hit the ground running. As we work to put in place a long-term, green program for economic development and infrastructure, we can take existing, planned, approved, and ready-to-go projects off the shelf. They fit the criteria of any Green New Deal, and public consensus has already been built around these projects. All a new government has to do is create the systems and mechanisms for reliable, consistent, and continuing funding—and break ground.

Ready to go are HSR in California, Texas, and the Midwest; bridges and tunnels on the Northeast Corridor; and NextGen air-traffic control.

This is a rare opportunity to deliver quickly on the real promise of public action and at the same time begin a more deliberative process for the long term: ■ Build on the national consensus for infrastructure need, using real mobility and economic criteria. Green New Deal proposals provide a framework for infrastructure and economic development that will meet climate-change challenges. Input and participation from stakeholders—community, labor, elected officials, NGOs—must be baked into the plan. Projects should respond to the rapidly changing cultural and environmental demands on new infrastructure development.

■ Legislate and appropriate a funding system that is continuous and reliable. This is the single action that will have the greatest impact on cost escalation and delay.

■ Review the role of metropolitan planning organizations; streamline current standards and methods of cost-benefit analysis, together with modern risk analysis, and the many layers of pre-funding. Redesign and speed up the review process, and encourage innovation.

■ Look to all feasible sources for revenue to support increased funding, especially at the local level. Infrastructure not only creates public value but also enhances the value of

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privately owned land and real estate.

The public role in creating this wealth also demands a public share in it.

■ Support the development—and use—of new data-based methods of project planning, design, construction, and operation as developed and used with success in other places. Utilize new data-based methods of project management. Support improved and realistic methods of cost estimation and risk assessment.

■ Protect the environment, reverse environmental damage, and promote best land use practices. Attention to the environment and addressing climate change has been, since 1991, an integral objective of transportation and land use planning. These can no longer be treated separately. Reverse the changes made to the Clear Air Act and Clean Water Act by the present administration.

The economic role and impact of infrastructure is universally acknowledged. At a time when a strong economy has still left too many workers underemployed and underpaid, the job impacts alone would be reason enough for immediate action. For every $1 billion spent on highways, 42,000 direct and indirect jobs are created. Building infrastructure— smart infrastructure—is a mighty and rewarding jobs machine. But more profoundly, there is no real, sustained, equitable economic progress possible, in the long run, without it.

We face a real hope and possibility that a new government and a new president with a serious commitment to progress and equity will be in place in 2021. Substantial capital commitment for roads and transit, smarter cities, and better environment will be in their power to deliver. This is a generational opportunity to return to the value of public goods provided for the advancement of our entire country—all regions, urban and rural—and to build an economy that serves the 100 percent.

Robert E. Paaswell is a Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering at City College of New York and director emeritus of the University Transportation Research Center. He is an elected distinguished member of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

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Industrial Policy and the Climate Challenge

Industrial strategy is back. Let’s use it to tackle the greatest challenge of our time.

BY M A R I A N A M A Z Z U C AT O

T

he 21st century is increasingly being defined by the need to respond to major social, environmental, and economic challenges. These “grand challenges” include climate change, demographic challenges, and promotion of health and well-being. The challenge of generating sustainable and inclusive growth, like other major policy challenges, is complex, systemic, interconnected, and urgent, requiring insights from many perspectives. For example, poverty cannot be tackled without attention to the interconnections between nutrition, health, infrastructure, and education—as well as more traditional approaches such as redistributive tax and transfer policy.

“Grand challenge” thinking is being applied across the world, with some of the most interesting experiments around sustainability being driven by the needs of emerging economies.

Both the rate and direction of investment and innovation are critical to all these challenges. Innovation and the finance that supports it are not neutral: The role and characteristics of finance in innovation influence the shape and success of investments.

A green-directed transition thus requires lining up policies to fuel radical changes in production, distribution, and consumption. This cannot be achieved through initiatives in separate silos and discrete approaches, but rather requires a new lens for economy-wide green growth. This has to be underpinned by long-term, patient finance, which is willing to take risks and able to mobilize and “crowd in” other investors. Business investment reacts to the perception of where future opportunities lie: The climate crisis can be both carrot and

stick to create new economic possibilities at home and globally.

AN ECONOMY-WIDE REORIENTATION: HARNESSING INDUSTRIAL STRATEGY

A green transition will not happen on its own. Reliance on pure market pricing has led to a catastrophic overinvestment in carbon and an underinvestment in needed public systems and renewable-energy sources.

The conventional view of what the state should do to foster innovation is simple: It has to fix different types of market failures—taking care of positive and negative externalities due to pricing failures—and then get out of the way. At best, supposedly, governments merely facilitate the economic dynamism of the private sector; at worst, their lumbering, heavy-handed, and bureaucratic institutions actively inhibit it. The fast-moving, risk-loving, and pioneering private sector, by contrast, is what really drives the type of innovation that creates economic growth.

Yet a patchy approach did not get us the IT revolution—nor will it get us a green one. In fact, as I argued in The Entrepreneurial State, in Silicon Valley the state did not just “fix” private markets; rather it took active risks, investing in all the radical technologies that fuel our “smart” products today: the internet, GPS, touch screen, and even Siri. The interaction with the private sector was dynamic and directed: Help us solve a problem— whether to get the satellites to communicate (internet was the answer) or to aim missiles better (GPS was the solution). Today we have the opportunity to use this same level of strategic investment and dynamic partnering for social, not only technological,

bill cl ark / cq roll call via ap images

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

problems. And this is harder but just as urgent.

A key lesson is that government often needs to take risks precisely because business is risk-averse and reacts to opportunities. This means investments across the entire innovation chain, from basic research (e.g., National Science Foundation), to areas that fuel science-industry linkages (National Nanotechnology Initiative), to the provision of longterm finance (e.g., through the Small Business Innovation Research program, but also through the CIA’s public venture capital fund In-Q-Tel).

And further downstream through the ambitious use of procurement and demand-side policies, including those related to suburbanization back a century ago, which is what allowed mass-produced products to get fully deployed. Why not think about green today as a demand-side pull for the IT revolution?

This kind of public spending has proved transformative, creating entirely new markets and sectors, including the internet, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and clean energy. It strikes at the heart of the neoclassical economic theory taught in most economic classes, which takes the view that the goal of government policy is simply to correct market failures.

Industrial strategies are having a revival around the world: Increasingly developed by governments at the national and local level, they are one antidote to the market-failure approach that keeps the public sector insulated from the private sector, and from the role of market creation.

Today’s industrial strategies must be about directing economies toward green growth through innovation and investment, toward new “technoeconomic paradigms,” as innovation economist Carlota Perez describes it.

Rather than ending up as a static list of sectors to support, industrial strategy must be about outlining the key problems a country is facing— those related to clean growth, health, and mobility—and steering investment-led growth across many different sectors. This means changing the way that procurement, grants, and loans work to be less about handouts

GREEN NEW DEAL

Bernie and AOC include public-housing legislation in their Green New Deal.

to those that ask to be helped or bailed out. It means picking not the “winners” but the “willing”—those companies willing to transform toward a green form of growth. This was recently seen in Germany, where the Energiewende mission saw the steel sector receive support only if it lowered its material content. Which it did.

Direct help to companies ready to commit to green growth needs to be coupled with taxation and regulatory strategies to deter carbon-based energy. Vital infrastructure systems— energy, transport, digital communications, water, and waste—which generate interdependent, long-term, high-investment, and high-employment projects—must be designed to direct economic activity toward green growth, and must be aligned with a cross-sectoral sustainable industrial strategy. And taxation can be used to tax material more than labor, and reward long-term investors rather than those making billions from millisecond trades.

Green growth goes well beyond a carbon transition; climate change is felt from the creative economy to the financial sector; it affects public health and health care. And of course, conservation is central. Nor can a green transition happen in one isolated economy; it requires coordinated shifts in global value chains.

With global production chains, even

Green growth is more than just a carbon transition; climate change impacts are felt from the financial sector to the creative economy, and from conservation to health care.

products that are “greener” at point of use, such as electric cars, require nonrenewable elements such as cobalt and lithium—often extracted in countries with weak or nonexistent child labor and human rights laws. Private-sector owners of these supply chains and public regulators must co-design the new system.

Policies aimed at big societal challenges require confronting the direction of growth—to become more inclusive and sustainable. But this is very hard to do within the traditional framework that sees policy as simply fixing market failures or simply derisking and facilitating value creation.

Challenge-led growth requires a new tool kit—one that is more based on market shaping and market co-creating. Industrial policies have always been composed of both a “horizontal” and a “vertical” element. Horizontal policies have historically been focused on skills, infrastructure, and education; while vertical policies have focused on sectors like transport, health or energy, or technologies. These two traditional approaches roughly embody differing schools of economics: neoclassical economics–inspired horizontal policies focusing on supply-side factors and inputs; and evolutionary economics–inspired policies putting emphasis on demand-side factors and systemic interactions.

Although certain sectors might be

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more suited for sector-specific vertical strategies, the grand challenges expressed in societal goals like the Sustainable Development Goals are cross-sectoral by nature. Hence we cannot simply apply sectoral or vertical approaches to such challenges. The idea of structural renewal through directing innovation found an original expression in Albert Hirschman’s idea of development through unbalanced growth. Hirschman argued that consciously keeping development unbalanced—meaning letting some economic activities develop faster than others—keeps development momentum going as it enforces crosssectoral learning and experimentation. Given that firms often base their investments on the perception of future growth opportunities, vertical or “unbalanced growth” policies can help to drive future business investment and, as Hirschman argued, induce cross-sectoral positive-feedback loops.

In this view, innovations are economy-wide learning and selfdiscovery processes that help companies hedge their balance sheets, and provide analytical linkages between macroeconomic financial stability and microeconomic firm behavior.

If firms are confident about future technological and market opportunities, they will invest and seek to innovate; if they are not confident, or see few market opportunities, they will not invest or innovate. This requires both direct investments, such as those provided by ARPA-E in the Department of Energy, fueling new innovations in areas like battery storage, and then the certainty provided by government-led energypricing strategies, such as feed-in tariffs (guaranteed prices paid to green-energy producers), which then give private companies the confidence to expand renewable-energy capacity. Therefore, any industrial strategy should not only seek to improve the conditions under which firms invest, but also aim to stimulate demand and increase business expectations about where future growth opportunities might lie. It is interesting that a company like Tesla has benefited from supply-side strategies of the U.S.

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government (receiving a $500 million guaranteed loan from the Department of Energy) and demand-side policies in Scandinavia, where a large percentage of the cars are sold (due to taxation regimes that favor the use of electric cars).

Climate innovation approaches need to be cross-sectoral, harnessing supply and demand, innovation and procurement, and public and private actors. A Green New Deal cannot operate only within sectors like renewable energy, through focusing purely on decarbonizing automobiles, or with any other sector-specific initiatives in a vacuum. Instead, we require innovative transformations across all sectors, one of the largest shifts ever attempted by humans.

Markets will not find the green direction on their own. Only when there is a stable and consistent direction for investment will regulation and innovation converge along a green trajectory. Business does not invest unless it sees an opportunity for growth—so turning mitigation into opportunities for investment and innovation is key.

This requires more than tax incentives or public subsidies: It requires bold investments like those witnessed in Roosevelt’s New Deal in the wake of the Great Depression.

POLICY AND PEOPLE-CENTERED APPROACHES IN THE UNITED STATES

When President Obama bemoaned in 2011 that “we live and do business in the Information Age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of blackand-white TV,” he was pointing out a lack of bold institutional innovations over the last half-century. It is not a coincidence that the Information Age was heralded and funded by the U.S. government. More specifically, what makes our modern devices “smart” was bold government investment into missions—specific urgent problems that need to be solved.

In Democracy in America (1835), Alexis de Tocqueville famously admired American townships “whose budgets are neither methodical nor uniform.” De Tocqueville valorized then-innovative governance institutions (such as elected officials) for

One of humankind’s greatest feats occurred when imagination, common purpose, and a systematic approach to problem solving won out over siloed thinking and anxiety about where the money would come from.

their power to constantly rejuvenate communities.

At the heart of green growth is the role of citizens. The questions of “who” —who will benefit from the green-growth outputs; who takes on the “transition risk”—are key. The cross-sectoral, systemic, supply-anddemand-side change needed means that we have an opportunity for inclusive, sustainable economic growth that brings everyone along with it, including traditionally overlooked groups, working in poor-quality jobs.

Those working in the old carbon economy should not simply be displaced, but be re-skilled as part of the transition. Unions should be at the negotiating table, thinking in forward-looking ways to make sure the green economy is co-created and co-shaped rather than handed down from above.

Inclusive growth requires understanding the deeply embedded nature of markets, both at the national level and in a “place-based” manner. Markets are embedded in institutions and norms—and incumbent policy processes help shape the kind of outcomes that result. To strengthen and reform the institutions and the rules at play requires ambitious innovation in the policies themselves, in the institutional configuration, in the instruments that are used on the ground, and in new metrics that capture the dynamic effects of policies. There is a need to address all four dimensions: ■ Ambitious, “moon shot” policy frameworks for inclusive growth; ■ New institutional configurations needed for such policies; ■ Dynamic organizational capabilities; and ■ New metrics to understand and monitor the dynamic effects of missions.

This does not only happen at a national level, or through international direction and agreements.

States and cities are catalysts of green growth, helped by civil-society support. In the U.S., where the Trump administration has defaulted, 3,629 leaders, including governors, tribal leaders, faith leaders, and business executives signed the “We Are Still In” pledge to support climate action.

The institute I founded and direct

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

President Kennedy takes a close look at the nation’s moon program during a visit to Cape Canaveral, Florida, November 16, 1963.

at University College London—the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP)—has been working with national industrial strategies and local officials in different cities including Manchester, U.K., which is aiming for carbon-neutrality by 2038—one of the most rapid timelines in Europe, to develop a mission road map with a cross-sector model that delivers a citizen-centric, bottom-up approach. This has become part of the city region’s Local Industrial Strategy, one of the first “trailblazing” strategies of this type in the U.K.

ap images

SHARING RISKS AND REWARDS

For the green transition, we need entirely new, flexible, agile, and openminded institutions and structures to take on uncertain innovation

challenges. There are several examples of these institutions in the U.S. Successful mission-oriented organizations include DARPA in the Department of Defense and ARPA-E in the Department of Energy. DARPA is an excellent example of public funding bringing about innovation: The progenitor of the internet was ARPANET, a program funded by DARPA in the 1960s. It was “an absurdly high-powered team of brainiacs” that started at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) in the mid2000s. That agency was specifically designed as a “DARPA clone,” bringing mission-oriented investment to the energy sector. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) was launched with an intelligence tech mandate in 2006.

GREEN NEW DEAL

ARPA-E takes on the same organizational mindset of DARPA—both expecting and tolerating failure. Like DARPA , ARPA-E does not set its own research agenda at “top-down” level— instead it draws on the priorities set by industry experts and academics who are working on high-risk, cutting-edge technical solutions.

If the public sector takes risks, it will of course also make mistakes. Any venture capitalist will have to accept failures for every success. To naysayers, the failure of public funding, for any reason, is often considered indicative of an inability to “pick winners” or “distortion” of (otherwise optimal) markets. Yet many of the successes go unnoticed and even result in public rewards being privatized.

The Department of Energy attracted criticism for providing a guaranteed loan of $535 million to the solar power startup Solyndra, which went bankrupt once the price of silicon chips fell dramatically, leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill. However, few critics acknowledged that a similar guaranteed loan ($465 million) supported Tesla for the development of the Model S electric car, which led to success. Even fewer have ever questioned why the government accepted early payment of the underlying loan (earning $12 million back) instead of negotiating stock options that could have been worth almost $1.4 billion, according to some estimates. Had the Energy Department chosen the stock options, the royalties retained could have covered the Solyndra losses many times over and continued to fund promising ventures; this shows the importance of government’s highrisk funding for achieving renewableenergy technologies.

This example also sheds light on the set of strategic decisions that policymakers face regarding the selection of profit-sharing mechanisms suitable for each context. Profit-sharing mechanisms may include repayable grants with profit-sharing via royalties on sales or equity stakes, public venture capital funds enabling royalties on equity, debt financing convertible into equity, and other sorts of funding mixing elements of equity and debt. Hence, besides the timing for

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the public sector to reap any rewards, a critical distinction concerns the revenue basis upon which public and private actors agree to share; ranging from low-end intellectual property to high-value (capital gains), as the Solyndra versus Tesla case illustrates.

The state of California is developing a regional-level mechanism for sharing the profits of the tech sector: In 2016, an investment fund was created to be owned by all citizens, with or without pensions, and with the potential over time to invest into housing, infrastructure, and other state priorities.

THE NEED FOR A CLIMATE MOON SHOT

Last July was the 50th anniversary of the first lunar landing. The moon shot, one of humankind’s greatest feats, was a triumph of imagination, common purpose, and a systemic approach to problem solving. President John F. Kennedy’s resolve won out over anxiety about where the money would come from and siloed thinking.

Greening the economy is not a question of picking a series of outcomes that are worthwhile only for some market participants, to the disadvantage of others: Climate orientation must be a win-win strategic approach for all participants. Public, private, and civil actors alike need to take on the mindset of long-run outcomes and profits, rather than short-term gains, particularly against the background of financial-stability and transition risks that make up the landscape of climate change. Industrial strategies don’t just need grand challenges: We require moon shots.

Imagine having leaders who would proudly declare, in the spirit of John Kennedy: “We choose to fight climate change in this decade not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”

Mariana Mazzucato is professor in Economics of Innovation and Public Value and director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London.

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Turning Trade Green The Green New Deal needs to replace corporate trade and industrial policies with ones that put people and the planet first. BY ADAM S. HERSH

T

he Green New Deal demands that America think differently about how, and for whom, the global economy works.

In particular, we must rethink trade policies that have pumped up corporate profits at the expense of workers and the environment.

American trade policies were problematic before Donald Trump took office, and since then things have only gotten worse. Past policies helped decimate America’s industrial base, encouraging lowroad development overseas that’s helped hasten global warming. Now Trump’s trade wars aren’t proving good or easy to win.

Manufacturing is in a slump and employment in the sector is falling.

Share prices of U.S. Steel and Alcoa, prime beneficiaries of Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, have seen their stocks plunge more than 60 percent from their pre-tariff peaks.

Trump’s domestic economic policies are faring no better. U.S. business investment has collapsed in spite of sweeping deregulation

and nearly $2 trillion in tax cuts for so-called “job creators.”

It’s time for a new direction in our approach to trade, one that incentivizes innovation and industrial development in America and supports sustainable growth around the world. Over the past few decades, administrations from both parties have worked closely with corporate lobbyists to write the rules of international trade. In one trade deal after another, the profits and property rights of corporations have taken precedence over the rights of workers and the well-being of the planet.

Today, with production relocated to farflung offshore supply chains, American business sees little benefit in the social investments needed for a highperformance domestic workforce or in the public investments in infrastructure and research and development that spur homegrown innovation and productivity growth. Blinded by profits, American business leaders nurtured a formidable geostrategic

competitor in China by moving so much production there. And yet executives would still rather spend their money on share buyback schemes than on investing in the United States and technological solutions to our most pressing social problems.

A Green New Deal, aimed at reclaiming American jobs and technological leadership, requires drastic changes in both trade rules and trade goals.

Domestic reconstruction needs to take priority over corporatedriven globalism. This will be good not just for the U.S. but for other nations eager to chart their own courses.

Back in the Obama administration, the president suggested that the Trans-Pacific Partnership could bring a healthy balance back to our trade relationships. President Obama argued, correctly, that deepening economic relations with a bloc of countries ring-fencing China could promote higher standards in trade. However, he then left the details of the treaty to his trade appointees, such as

Michael Froman and other officials in the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative who rotate from Wall Street and corporate lobby shops into government and back out again.

TPP repeated the past mistakes of segregating worker, environmental, and social concerns. It made sure they were subordinate to corporate priorities in trade and investment.

The agreement also failed to implement rigorous “rules of origin” that would track where goods and their component parts were made to prevent “leakages” to low-standard countries. What TPP did do, primarily, was extend protections for investors in real and intellectual property and give them teeth to enforce these rights. Those provisions made it marginally more attractive for multinationals to divert some investment from China to Vietnam and Malaysia, but were never going to remake world trade. Trump was right to reject the TPP, whatever his reasons.

But the track he has led us down since is more of the same, done

PART I BUILDING ON THE NEW DEAL: JOBS PUBLIC AND INVESTMENT PUBLIC INVESTMENT AND JOBS

with Trumpian bellicosity, unpredictability, and profound ignorance.

In working to build a new model for trade, it’s important to understand that Americans are not soured on trade per se, just on how it’s conducted on their behalf. A recent Gallup poll shows a solid majority of Americans, 74 percent, believes foreign trade can be an opportunity for economic growth. Conversely, only 31 percent of Americans think our ongoing trade war with China benefits the United States economically. So how do we make a progressive vision of trade a reality?

First, we need to pursue policies that spur innovation instead of stifling it.

Today’s trade agreements and the World Trade Organization give far too much power to the owners of intellectual property rights. The existing IPR regime discourages the dissemination of knowledge and limits access to vitally needed products.

Price-gouging on essential medicines like insulin

has made recent headlines, but the problem is much bigger.

The monopolies granted by intellectual property rights constrain access to all sorts of technological advances, deterring others from building on those innovations and denying benefits to people across the globe.

Pervasive market failures in research and development lead the private sector to underinvest in science and produce too few innovations. To avert a climate catastrophe, we’ll need an all-out effort to re-engineer energy generation and distribution, revolutionize industrial and agricultural production, transform transportation systems, and drive transformational change in so many other critical areas of the U.S. and global economy. With American executives maniacally focused on short-term strategies to pump up share prices, we cannot leave the urgently needed effort to decarbonize our economy solely in the hands of the private sector. The public sector must play a leading role in fostering the development of targeted technologies and industries.

The current trade rules forbid the United States from giving preference to domestic industries and workers. But just as in the original New Deal,

domestic reconstruction and domestic jobs need to be priorities, especially when they are financed by domestic taxes and domestic government borrowing.

As future administrations rewrite existing trade agreements, we must be prepared to reconfigure existing rules so they set high standards that distinguish traded goods and services by how they are made—so-called process and production methods.

Traded goods and services not meeting those standards will face border adjustment costs or even be refused market access.

And we would also push to establish rights to crossborder collective bargaining that empower workers in all countries to stand together for real labor and community rights. Setting high standards for competition in U.S. markets will create demand that enables domestic firms to grow and expand to serve broader markets.

Only the government has the capacity to drive a mission of the scale and scope necessary to combat global warming and to bring so many stakeholders to the table in common purpose. The government must set a level playing field for competition to prevent the corruption or exploitation of the mission. Government must socialize key risks of large-scale investment projects and ensure that

the rewards are shared broadly. And government must make the requisite public investments to span the gaps in the innovation chain where private investment won’t go.

Creating the right incentives for investment in innovation is only part of the equation. America also needs a strategy to develop the demand side of markets in industries that produce green-technology goods and services. Supply will not create its own demand; predictable demand is what draws entrepreneurs to invest in projects that bring new technologies to scale and give fledgling industries opportunities to take root.

We can foster that demand through a mix of tax incentives, infrastructure investment, and public procurement, and by enforcing high standards in international trade throughout the supply chain.

America has a leading role to play in fighting climate change and rebalancing the global economy, but these are not problems we can solve on our own. America’s Green New Deal also necessitates a Global New Deal to reinvigorate the international cooperation and multilateral institutions and agreements critical to tackling climate change and reforming how the global economy works.

Although these institutions are now failing us, we should remember it

GREEN NEW DEAL

was not always like this.

Delegates in attendance at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference had seen how extreme inequality and the economic stagnation of the Depression led to a collapse of international cooperation, the rise of right-wing nationalism, and war. So they vowed to design a system for the postwar world order. Bretton Woods was not perfect— even in John Maynard Keynes’s idealized plan— but the system produced a generation of broadly shared growth across the world before political forces eventually pushed the institutions away from their ideals and toward the world we know today.

WHEN ACTIVIST Greta

Thunberg called out world leaders for putting economic growth ahead of the future viability of life on Earth, she was right. The United States will need to work with our international peers. The threat of climate change bears upon us all. The pain of rising inequality is felt across in the world. It’s not just about us. Realizing this Green New Deal will mean bringing everyone along.

We are all learning from Greta. That’s how you lead a global community.

Adam S. Hersh is an economist and fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 43

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

How Do We Pay for a Zero-Emissions Economy?

A clean economy is affordable—and the costs of inaction are incalculable.

BY RO BE R T P O L L I N

I

n October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative global organization advancing climate change research, issued an alarming report titled “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” This report emphasized the imperative of limiting the increase in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as opposed to 2.0 degrees, the previous consensus goal. The IPCC concluded that limiting the global mean temperature increase to 1.5 rather than 2.0 degrees by 2100 will dramatically lower the likely negative consequences of climate change. These include the risks of heat extremes, heavy precipitation, droughts, sea level rise, biodiversity losses, and corresponding impacts on health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, and human security.

The IPCC estimates that to achieve the 1.5 degrees maximum global mean temperature increase target as of 2100, global net CO2 emissions will have to fall by about 45 percent as of 2030 and reach net-zero emissions by 2050. I focus in this article on what it will take for the U.S. economy to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, and specifically, how we can pay for this project. In the interests of space, I do not delve into the additional specific financing challenges around also hitting the IPCC ’s intermediate target of a 45 percent CO2 emissions reduction by 2030, though important additional challenges do emerge with achieving this 2030 goal.

Purely in terms of the financing issues involved, it is an entirely reasonable and not especially difficult proposition to build a zero-emissions U.S. economy by 2050. By my higher-end estimate, it will require an

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average level of investment spending throughout the U.S. economy of about 2 percent of GDP per year, focused in two areas: (1) dramatically improving energy efficiency standards in the stock of buildings, automobiles, and public-transportation systems, and in industrial production processes; and (2) equally dramatically expanding the supply of clean renewableenergy sources—primarily wind, solar, and geothermal power—available at competitive prices to all sectors of the U.S. economy.

This level of clean-energy investment spending would amount to about $400 billion in the first year of the program, which I will set as 2021, and rise to about $850 billion as of 2050, assuming the economy grows at an average rate of about 2.4 percent per year. As an average figure between 2021 and 2030, investment spending would then be around $600 billion per year. Total clean-energy investment spending for the 30-year period would amount to about $18 trillion.

These figures are for overall investment spending, including from both the public and private sectors. Establishing the right mix between public and private investment will be a major consideration. As an initial rough approximation, let’s assume that the breakdown should be 25 percent public and 75 percent private investment.

For the first year of the project in 2021, this would break down to $100 billion in public investments along with $300 billion in private funds. A major part of the policy challenge will be to determine how to leverage the public money most effectively to create strong incentives for private investors.

Before plunging into the financing details, I need to emphasize a critical

This cleanenergy investment project will pay for itself in full over time because it will deliver lower energy costs for all U.S. consumers.

point at the outset: This clean-energy investment project will pay for itself in full over time because it will deliver lower energy costs for all U.S. energy consumers. This results because raising energy efficiency standards means that, by definition, consumers will spend less for a given amount of energy services, such as being able to travel 100 miles on a gallon of gasoline with a high-efficiency hybrid plugin vehicle as opposed to 25 miles per gallon with the average car on U.S. roads today. Moreover, the costs of supplying energy through wind, solar, geothermal, and hydro power are now, on average, roughly equal to or lower than those for fossil fuels and nuclear energy. As such, the initial up-front investment outlays can be repaid over time through the cost savings that will be forthcoming.

In addition to building a cleanenergy infrastructure, this new investment will be a major new source of job creation at all levels of the U.S. labor market—in the range of 7.5 million jobs on average between 2021 and 2050. This is true, even while recognizing that the workers and communities in the U.S. whose livelihoods depend on the fossil fuel industry will inevitably be hurt as this industry contracts, step-by-step, to zero between now and 2050. Advancing generous “just transition” policies for the affected workers and communities needs to be a central element of the overall clean-energy investment project. Harold Meyerson discusses these critical questions around job creation and just transition policies elsewhere in this issue.

For 2018, clean-energy investments in the U.S. economy amounted to about $64 billion, equal to about 0.3 percent of GDP. We therefore need to expand clean-energy investments roughly sixfold in very short order to get to the 2 percent of GDP target, and then maintain this heightened level of spending relative to GDP until 2050. At one level, this is obviously a daunting challenge.

On the other hand, it does still mean that roughly 98 percent of economic

GREEN NEW DEAL

activity in the U.S. can proceed largely independent of the clean-energy investment project.

s e a n d . e l l i o t / t h e d ay v i a a p i m a g e s

WHY 2 PERCENT OF GDP?

To show that my spending estimates are not based on a lot of hocus-pocus, I should describe where the 2 percent of GDP figure comes from. This estimate is derived directly from the figures on costs in the U.S. to achieve either a given improvement in energy efficiency or a given increase in the clean renewable energy supply.

The U.S. economy presently consumes a total of about 100 quadrillion British thermal units (Q-BTUs) of energy from all fossil fuel, nuclear, and renewable-energy sources. As a high-end estimate, working from the research literature, I assume that it will cost about $30 billion to achieve 1 Q-BTU of energy savings relative to the consumption level that would result through a business-as-usual economic trajectory between now and 2050. From this, I calculate that it will cost a total of about $3.3 trillion over the 30-year investment cycle, or about $100 billion per year on average, to stabilize overall U.S. energy consumption at about 110 Q-BTUs as of 2050. For Year 1, energy efficiency investments would be about $70 billion.

To operate the U.S. economy totally through clean-energy sources as of 2050, that means that we need a total of 110 Q-BTUs of clean-energy supply.

At present, total supply of wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal is about 6 Q-BTUs. We therefore need to expand supply by 104 Q-BTUs by 2050. Again, working from the research literature, a high-end figure for the average costs of expanding renewable-energy supply between 2021 and 2050 is about $150 billion per Q-BTU. Thus, over the 30-year investment cycle, we need to spend a total of roughly $14.6 trillion on clean-energy capital expenditures, or a bit less than $500 billion per year on average. For Year 1, the spending level would be about $330 billion.

The total average investment spending level will therefore need to be about $600 billion per year, with $500 billion going to renewable investments and $100 billion

Block Island Wind Farm was the first commercial offshore wind farm in the U.S. Establishing the right mix of public and private investment will be key to reaching the goal of zero emissions.

to efficiency projects. Average GDP between 2021 and 2050 will be about $30 trillion if the U.S. economy grows at 2.4 percent per year. This is how we reach the conclusion that cleanenergy investments will need to average about 2 percent of GDP per year between 2021 and 2050—i.e., $600 billion in investments divided by $30 trillion in GDP. As noted above, we are assuming that of the full $400 billion in spending that will be required in Year 1, $100 billion will come from the federal government, with the remaining $300 billion supplied by private investors.

We also assume that the $300 billion in private investment funding will not be forthcoming without strong and large-scale public-policy interventions. We therefore need to answer two big questions with a financing proposal: where to get $100 billion a year in new federal government funds, and how to most effectively induce the additional $300 billion in private funds? The table on page 46 provides a guide for following the main features of my proposed plan.

WHERE TO GET $100 BILLION IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT MONEY?

As of 2018, the U.S. federal government budget was $4.1 trillion. The $100 billion budget for federal cleanenergy investments that I am proposing would therefore amount to only 2.5 percent of the overall budget. Nevertheless, these funds will need to come from someplace. I propose three funding sources: (1) a carbon tax, in which 75 percent of revenues are rebated back to the public but 25 percent are channeled into clean-energy investment projects; (2) transferring funds out of the military budget, particularly from its nuclear weapons program; and (3) a Federal Reserve–based Green Bond lending program. Strong cases can be made for each of these funding measures. But each proposal does also have vulnerabilities, including around political feasibility. The most sensible approach is therefore to combine the measures into a single package that minimizes their respective weaknesses as stand-alone initiatives.

Carbon Tax With Rebates. As noted by James Boyce elsewhere in

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 45

this issue, carbon taxes have the merit of impacting climate policy through two channels—they raise fossil fuel prices and thereby discourage consumption while also generating a new source of government revenue. At least part of the carbon tax revenue can then be channeled into supporting the clean-energy investment project.

But the carbon tax will hit lowand middle-income people disproportionately, since they spend a larger fraction of their income on electricity, gasoline, and homeheating fuel. An equal-shares rebate, as proposed by Boyce, is the simplest way to ensure that the full impact of the tax will be equalized across the population.

Consider, therefore, the following tax-and-rebate program.

Focusing, again, on Year 1, we begin the tax at a low rate of $20 per ton of carbon. Given current U.S. CO2 emissions levels, that would generate about $100 billion in revenue. If we use only 25 percent of this revenue to finance clean-energy investments, that amounts to $25 billion for investment projects. This would then cover about 25 percent of the $100 billion in total federal funding needed for the clean-energy investment project. The 75 percent of the total revenue that is rebated to the public in equal shares would amount to about $230 for every U.S. resident, or nearly $1,000 for a family of four. The average price of gasoline would rise by about 7 percent, from about $2.70 to $2.90 per gallon.

Taking From U.S. Military Budget. The U.S. military budget in

2018 was about $700 billion. We would therefore need to devote about 14 percent of the military budget to clean-energy transformation to fully fund the $100 billion in total federal funding for the clean-energy investment project.

This would be an entirely justifiable transfer of funds on both logical and ethical grounds if we take at face value the idea that U.S. defense spending should be about protecting the well-being of U.S.

46 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG BONUS ISSUE 2019

citizens. But, on political grounds, it would represent an implausibly large military spending cut.

A more realistic approach would be to allow that the transfer out of the military budget would, like the carbon tax funds, be at $25 billion. This would require a transfer of about 4 percent out of the military budget. These funds could be raised through a 4 percent acrossthe-board military spending cut.

A more targeted approach would be to cut by cut by 50 percent the average annual $50 billion budget now devoted to nuclear weapons development. Given that, along with climate change, the existence of nuclear weapons represents a true existential threat to life on Earth, this would be a fitting approach to funding the

clean-energy investment project.

Federal Reserve Green Bond Funding. It was demon-

strated during the 2007–2009 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession that the Federal Reserve is willing and able to supply basically unlimited bailout funds to Wall Street during crises.

The extensive 2017 study “The Cost of the Crisis” by Better Markets documents this carefully: Within the first few years following the onset of the crisis, the government committed approximately $12.2 trillion to stop the crash of the financial system, stabilize the economy, and try to spur economic growth. Of that massive total, $9 trillion was

A Financing Framework for U.S. Clean Energy Investments

INVESTMENT LEVEL FOR 2021, YEAR 1: $400 BILLION IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE INVESTMENTS, AT 2 PERCENT OF GDP

Clean Energy Investment Areas ■ CLEAN RENEWABLE ENERGY: $330 BILLION

Wind, solar, geothermal, small-scale hydro, low-emissions bioenergy ■ ENERGY EFFICIENCY: $70 BILLION

Buildings, transportation, industrial equipment, grid and battery storage upgrades

Public Sources of Funds: $100 billion ■ CARBON TAX REVENUES: $25 BILLION

25% of revenues from tax; 75% returned to consumers as rebate ■ TRANSFER FROM MILITARY BUDGET: $25 BILLION

4% of overall military budget 50% of nuclear weapons program ■ FEDERAL RESERVE GREEN BOND PURCHASE PROGRAM: $50 BILLION

0.4% of Wall Street bailout support during financial crisis

Private Sources of Funds: $300 billion ■ POLICIES FOR INCENTIVIZING PRIVATE INVESTORS

Regulations Renewable energy portfolio standards for utilities Energy efficiency standards for buildings and transportation vehicles Investment Subsidies Investment tax credits PACE financing Loan Guarantees

allocated to bailing out Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail banks with direct investments in financial institutions, purchases of high-grade corporate debt, and purchases of mortgage-backed securities; $1.7 trillion was allocated to insuring debt issued by financial institutions and guaranteeing poorly performing assets; and $1.4 trillion went to a significant expansion of the government’s traditional overnight lending to banks.

What also became clear through these bailout operations is that there were no binding rules prohibiting the Fed from intervening in the private financial market in any ways it deemed appropriate.

I would propose $50 billion in Green Bond financing supplied by the Fed, which would then match the $25 billion each coming from both the carbon tax and military budget transfers. This would amount to a minuscule 0.4 percent of the Fed’s Wall Street bailout operations during the crisis.

It is true that the Wall Street bailouts during the crisis represented a dramatic deviation from normal Fed operating practices, induced by the incipient global financial collapse. But it is also obviously true that we human beings now face a far more dire crisis resulting from climate change.

The Fed’s funding support could be injected into the economy through straightforward channels. That is, federal, state, and municipal governments could issue long-term zero-interest-rate Green Bonds. The Federal Reserve would purchase these bonds.

The various levels of government would then have the funds to pursue the full range of projects that will fall under the rubric of the $100 billion in public funds needed to finance the clean-energy investment project.

In other words, we can raise the funds needed without any general

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

tax increase. The next administration may well want to repeal the $4 trillion Trump tax cut, or selectively raise taxes on the wealthy to finance other public needs. But a general tax increase is not needed to get to zero carbon.

RAISING $300 BILLION IN PRIVATE FUNDS

Moving the $300 billion into cleanenergy investments can be accomplished through a combination of sticks and carrots—i.e., strong regulations that require CO2 emissions cuts and significant subsidies for investors to invest in clean-energy projects.

Joan Fitzgerald’s article in this issue describes in depth a range of effective regulatory interventions, including renewable-energy portfolio standards for electrical utilities and energy efficiency standards for both buildings and transportation vehicles.

Focusing on the subsidy side, there are several tools that can be effectively deployed, all of which are already in place or have been recently operating at some levels of the state, local, or federal government.

An obvious starting point is tax incentives. It was telling that, in the 2018 federal tax legislation, the Trump administration flinched before eliminating the generous investment tax credits provided for private cleanenergy investors. At present, that credit amounts to fully 30 percent of the total investment costs.

Public policy can also significantly lower the risks, and therefore the costs, to private investors of borrowing money to finance clean-energy projects. One important tool here is Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing. Under typical PACE financing arrangements, property owners borrow from a local government or bank to finance clean-energy investments. The amount borrowed is then repaid via a special assessment on property taxes, or another locally collected tax or bill. The security of the tax collection mechanism reduces the risk to private lenders or bond investors, which in turn means that financing can be obtained at lower rates. Several states, including California, Florida, and New York, which themselves comprise nearly

25 percent of the U.S. population, have PACE financing programs presently in operation. These and similar programs in other states will need to expand greatly to help bring overall private clean-energy investments to $300 billion.

Government loan guarantees are probably the most cost-effective way for the government to provide largescale subsidies to private-sector borrowing for clean-energy investment projects. Evidence for this comes from the loan guarantee program for renewable-energy investments that was enacted in 2009 as part of the Obama economic stimulus program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). This loan guarantee program became notorious as a symbol of government ineptitude when Solyndra, a Northern California–based manufacturer of solar panels, declared bankruptcy in 2011. The federal government was therefore obligated to pay Solyndra’s creditors the full $535 million of Solyndra’s outstanding guaranteed loans. But the program also generated successes, as noted by Mariana Mazzucato in a companion article in this issue. The fair way to evaluate the relative success of the loan guarantee program is to consider the Solyndra experience alongside the complete portfolio of other renewable-energy projects that the ARRA program subsidized.

Overall, under this ARRA-based program, the federal government provided guarantees for a total of about $14 billion for 24 clean-energy projects. Of these, there was one other loan default case in addition to Solyndra. But once one accounts for the government having recovered about 50 percent of its costs through selling the assets of the two bankrupted firms, the net federal costs of the program were about $300 million. This implies that the government spent $300 million to support $14 billion in new private cleanenergy investments, amounting to a leverage ratio of $50 in clean-energy investments for every $1 in government subsidies.

If this leverage ratio could be applied to the overall clean-energy

Federal, state, and municipal governments could issue long-term zero-interestrate Green Bonds. The Federal Reserve would purchase these bonds.

GREEN NEW DEAL

investment project that I am outlining, it would mean that only $6 billion in government outlays would be sufficient to induce the full $300 billion in new private-sector clean-energy investments. Such an elevated leverage ratio will not likely be achievable for a broader loan guarantee program. One reason is that we do not know what percentage of the $14 billion total in new investments under the ARRA program would have happened anyway, without the government guaranteeing the private investors’ loans. It is also true that achieving a high leverage ratio will be more difficult when operating the program at a much larger scale, i.e., in trying to raise $300 billion as opposed to $14 billion.

Still, while recognizing these considerations, it is reasonable to allow for a leverage ratio in the range of 10 to 1, i.e., one-fifth of the ratio that emerged out of the ARRA program. That would still mean that the federal government would need to spend a total of only $30 billion in loan guarantees to fully underwrite $300 billion in private clean-energy investments. This is without taking account of the other incentives to investors accruing through the investment tax credits, PACE financing, or other risk-reducing policy interventions. In fact, these various policies will be most effective when operating in tandem. Through their combined impacts, it should not be excessively difficult to bring total private cleanenergy investments to the $300 billion target.

CLIMATE INSURANCE AND THE COSTS OF DOING NOTHING

What will happen if we do not succeed in stabilizing the climate? MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel offered the following perspectives in his 2012 book What We Know About Climate Change: ■ “There will be more frequent and more intense heat waves … previously fertile areas in the subtropics may become barren, and blights may seriously affect both natural vegetation and crops.”

■ “Comparatively small shifts in precipitation and temperature can exert considerable pressure

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 47

More recently, the November 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment of the U.S. federal government, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was equally emphatic in describing the likely consequences of failing to control climate change. This report, focusing only on impacts within the United States, begins with the following overview: More frequent and intense extreme weather and climaterelated events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are

48 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG BONUS ISSUE 2019

Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic damage in Texas and Louisiana in August 2017. It is tied with Hurricane Katrina as the costliest tropical storm on record.

expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities.

Future climate change is expected to further disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality.

At the same time, as all serious studies on the impact of climate change fully recognize, every projection as to the impacts of climate change must be understood in terms of probabilities and degrees of confidence, not certainties. In fact, we need to take decisive action now on climate change, not based on 100 percent certainty as to its consequences, but rather through estimating reasonable probabilities. Indeed, we should think of a U.S. clean-energy project as the equivalent of an insurance policy to protect ourselves and the planet against the serious prospect—though not the certainty—that the types of consequences described

Robert Pollin is Distinguished University Professor of Economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at University of Massachusetts Amherst.

e r i c g ay / a p i m a g e s

on government and social systems whose failures to respond could lead to famine, disease, mass emigrations, and political instability.”

■ “Were the entire Greenland ice cap to melt, sea level would increase by around 22 feet, flooding many coastal regions including much of southern Florida and lower Manhattan. Eleven of the fifteen largest cities in the world are located on coastal estuaries, and all would be affected.”

by Emanuel and NOAA could result.

We purchase insurance to protect ourselves against many other contingencies, such as house fires, automobile accidents, or serious illnesses.

We do this even though we have no idea whether our house may ever burn down or our car will get totaled in an accident. From this perspective, the only major issue in dispute is how much we should be willing to pay to purchase an adequate amount of climate insurance. This is the equivalent of deciding not whether to purchase automobile insurance but, rather, how much to spend and how much coverage we need.

In addressing this question, it is critical to recall the point I emphasized at the outset, that the net costs of the clean-energy investment project will be zero over time. That is, the program will pay for itself over time because (1) the energy efficiency investments will enable all energy consumers to spend less money to obtain the energy services they want; and (2) the costs of clean renewable energy are already at cost parity with fossil fuels, and those costs will be falling further through additional innovations. We will need to invest something like $18 trillion over a 30-year period to build a 100 percent clean-energy infrastructure in the U.S. But these investments will come back to us through lowering the costs of consuming the energy we need for all our various purposes.

After accounting for the full range of factors at play with a U.S. cleanenergy project, we can conclude that, on balance, the costs of purchasing global climate change insurance will be modest. It is an insurance policy we can unquestionably afford to pay for, even if, in the unlikely event, the prevailing scientific consensus on climate change does turn out to be wrong. The alternative to not purchasing this insurance policy is, effectively, to play Russian roulette with the fate of the Earth.

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

Cities on the Front Lines

Cities can promote green energy and local deliberations — what they need is more federal resources.

BY J O A N F I T Z G E R A L D

C

ities cover about 3 percent of the land on Earth, yet they produce about 70 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Given their enormous environmental footprint, cities must lead in devising solutions to the climate crisis. But can they? Cities are, of course, creatures of state and national governments, and their ability to develop policies for drastic reductions in climate-destroying greenhouse gases varies widely with constitutional arrangements, fiscal resources, national politics, and the ingenuity of local governments, businesses, and citizens. Yet my decade-long exploration of cities and the climate crisis suggests that urban leadership is pivotal to both reducing greenhouse gas emissions within municipalities and devising the policy innovations that are necessary at all levels of government to bring about further, more geographically expansive reductions. But ultimately, they need support from the federal government to scale up.

Two areas where cities are in a position to lead is in reducing the dirty energy produced to supply buildings and transportation, which together account for about 73 percent of all carbon emissions. Cities are essential to delivering on both fronts, but the nation’s cities are at very different places with respect to climate action and have limited power and cash to scale up their efforts quickly.

While at least 100 cities have established 100 percent clean-electricity goals or committed to reducing emissions by 80 percent by 2050, few have acted at a scale that will get them there. Buildings and transportation are the top targets for achieving these goals. The ultimate step on both fronts will be eliminating fossil fuels in buildings, transit vehicles, and cars. While electrifying, we will have

to move to renewable sources of energy, which in turn require massive federal investment in updating the grid and gridscale energy storage. China’s industrial policy is already moving quickly in this direction, and as in the case of solar, we are in danger of being a laggard in the green technologies of the future.

Three cities—New York, Boulder, and Seattle—show what’s possible, as well as the challenges still to be surmounted.

NEW YORK: THE LONG PATH TO EFFICIENCY AND ELECTRIFICATION

New York City came out with a Green New Deal plan this spring, but the city has been a leader on climate change since Michael Bloomberg became mayor in 2001. Buildings, which comprise about 71 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions and 95 percent of its electricity usage, have been a key focus of climate action. Getting to one of the nation’s most rigorous approaches to reducing building energy use has been a ten-year process. Hopefully, other cities can learn something from New York’s experience and expedite the path to both reducing building energy use and expanding renewable energy.

One key area is energy efficiency.

New York City was a pioneer on serious efficiency requirements with its 2009 Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, comprising a local law that enabled New York City to adopt its own Energy Conservation Code and three laws that apply to buildings of 50,000 or more square feet.

The local Energy Conservation Code requires building owners doing renovations to upgrade affected systems to meet the city’s standards.

Local Law 84 benchmarking requires

Cities can lead in converting to 100 percent clean energy in heating and cooling buildings, and in transportation.

GREEN NEW DEAL

building owners to submit energy and water use data annually through the U.S. EPA’s Portfolio Manager software.

Nonresidential tenants are required to install high-efficiency lighting and electrical sub-meters for individual spaces so tenants are informed of their individual usage. The Local Law 87 energy audits requirement identifies pathways for achieving deep energy savings in large buildings. The stick is a fine of $3,000 for the first year of nonreporting and $5,000 for every subsequent year of noncompliance. NYC expanded the benchmarking law to include smaller buildings (25,000 to 50,000 square feet), which covers 5,000 more buildings.

Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the NYC Retrofit Accelerator to provide free technical assistance to building owners in installing and financing energy and water efficiency upgrades and incorporating renewable energy. By supporting retrofits in up to 1,000 properties per year, the program is projected to reduce another million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. In addition to its own financial incentives, the city draws on the state’s energy efficiency financing programs, administered through the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the local electricity and gas utilities.

Two laws passed in January 2018 continue the momentum. Local Law 32 upgrades the city’s Energy Conservation Code consistent with the state’s model energy code. Local Law 33 requires that buildings larger than 25,000 square feet display an energy efficiency grade (A to F) based on their annual benchmarking results.

New York City’s Climate Mobilization Act, released in April, establishes emissions caps for different building types larger than 25,000 square feet and fines for landlords who don’t comply. Beginning in 2024, landlords will be required to retrofit buildings to reduce their emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and 80 percent by 2050.

According to Mark Chambers,

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50 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG BONUS ISSUE 2019

the requirements. There is a different compliance path for affordable housing, and mechanisms are in place to ensure that building owners don’t pass off costs onto tenants. For the time being, rent-regulated buildings must meet delayed timelines, or implement a list of prescriptive energy conservation measures by 2024. Operational improvements should lead to lower operating costs that can free up capital to make further investments in the city’s housing stock. Chambers says that as the policy is implemented, city officials and building owners will have to negotiate how to achieve the goals without reducing affordable housing.

All the while, the city is leading by example—the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability conducts an annual emissions inventory of its own operations and posts it on its website. The Climate Mobilization Act commits the city to reduce emissions from its own buildings by 40 percent by 2030.

The goal of the aggressive standards for public and commercial buildings, Chambers says, is to create a giant load shift in energy for the city.

To transition away from burning fossil fuels for space heating and hot water, New York is one of eight cities participating in a pilot called the Building Electrification Initiative

Above: 3,152 solar panels installed by ConEdison Solutions on a rooftop at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, New York City. They generate 1.1 million kilowatt hours of energy per year.

Opposite: A Sound Transit light-rail train at an underground station in downtown Seattle

BOULDER: PROGRESS IN A CITY OF SINGLE-FAMILY HOMES

Boulder, Colorado, is a city of about 108,000 with 40,000 single-family homes, most of which use natural gas for heating. KenCairn says scaling up to achieve the city’s 100 percent renewable goal will require electrifying space heating and hot water.

Electrifying heating systems by 2050 would mean that from 2030 on, every furnace and hot-water tank replaced would have to be electric.

The conversion process has started.

A city official contacts residents when they pull a permit for a renovation or replacing heating and/or cooling systems to inform them about replacing their gas space and hotwater heating systems with electric heat pumps. Then the house’s hourly energy use is monitored to determine the best range of options. Implementation starts with energy efficiency upgrades, including appliances, and for most houses, upgrading their

mark lennihan / ap images

director of the Mayor’s Office of Sustainability, an essential piece of the law is the city council’s approval of Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing with no upfront costs, which covers up to 100 percent of energy efficiency and renewable-energy projects. The program works through prequalified private lenders that offer low-interest, long-term PACE loans, which are repaid through the property tax bill and remain with the building upon sale. The administering agent of the loans measures and verifies the installation and performance of the improvements. The idea is that the utility savings from the upgrades cover the cost of the debt payments.

The city mandates the performance standards, but does not dictate a pathway for achieving them. Building owners can invest heavily in the building envelope or mechanical systems, or focus on occupant behavior. Still, such an aggressive mandate runs into predictable political opposition. The realestate industry is opposed, with many expressing skepticism that the targets can be achieved based on the payoff of previous investments in energy efficiency. Further, they maintain that costs will require rent increases.

But Chambers says affordability is front and center in implementing

(BEI), which started in October 2017 (Washington, D.C.; Boulder; and Burlington, Vermont, are the other cities).

The technology in play is heat pumps.

But electrification isn’t just a matter of transitioning to a different technology. Brett KenCairn, senior policy adviser for Boulder Climate Initiatives, explains there’s a chickenand-egg problem with reaching widespread adoption. If the city incentives increase customer demand, there need to be enough local contractors to install the systems. The city’s role is to work with the private sector to transform the market—by training contractors to install heat pumps while undertaking other efficiency upgrades; by developing local supply chains; and working with manufacturers, utilities, and state agencies to help cities facilitate rapid adoption.

Cities can coordinate these activities while expanding existing energy efficiency programs and upgrading local codes and standards.

But in many of the nation’s cities, single-family homes dominate and we will need a different path to efficiency and electrification. As one of the BEI pilot cities, Boulder illustrates a pathway for these cities.

el aine thompson / ap images

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

electrical systems to support electric water heating and space heating and cooling, plus a vehicle charger.

Cost is a barrier. A heat pump system costs about $12,500 versus about $3,600 for a natural-gas furnace.

Depending on electric service, and addition of vehicle charging and solar panels, the total cost of electrifying one house can be between $30,000 and $50,000, which is a tough sell given that Colorado has one of the nation’s lowest natural-gas rates.

Other than a few well-off first movers, most residents cannot afford the transition. This is one of several areas where federal funding under the auspices of a Green New Deal combined with local implementation could make a major difference.

Another barrier Boulder is addressing is the resistance of landlords to invest in energy efficiency when tenants are paying the utility bills (referred to as the “split incentive” problem). To address this, in 2011 Boulder became the first city to require that rental properties meet energy efficiency standards by 2018. This goal has been met and the task ahead is to stimulate heat pump adoption.

Financing is a problem, and federal subsidies of a $300 Energy Star tax credit toward appliances and Boulder County’s $250 rebate aren’t enough.

A case could be made for a business model that would have utilities lead the transition, but the state legislature would have to ask the Colorado Public Utilities Commission to require it.

In this case, the utilities would manage the energy efficiency and electricity conversion process. In exchange for locking in a customer who will use more electricity going forward, the utility manages upgrades and even purchases efficient appliances. It’s like the PACE financing mentioned above—only the cost is assessed on the utility rather than the tax bill.

While this is a totally different model than utilities currently employ, there are other potential cost savings. Utilities have to be able to supply all the power demanded, which means that they need contracts with providers for spikes in demand.

That power is usually expensive and often not needed. By purchasing

Seattle is one of two cities in the country in which transit ridership is increasing, the result of many years of infrastructure investment.

demand-enabled appliances, the utility would be able to use them to control demand spikes by changing temperature set points and hours of operation.

Hot-water heaters could be charged so the utility could store their energy and use it when needed in peak demand times—usually when customers are out for the day. Likewise, other appliances could be programmed to run at night. Customers, of course, would be able to override settings to use appliances when needed. And if solar systems with storage capability were installed as well, the utility would have a controllable energy asset—its customers’ storage—that allows it to shave peaks, thus not having to buy as much reserve energy.

While the idea of utilities controlling appliances has not been met with enthusiasm in the past, the difference is that customers would be more willing if the utility was purchasing the appliances for them. The costs would be paid back via the utility bill, but would be offset by energy savings and passed on to future occupants of the home. Under a Green New Deal, the Department of Energy could identify the geographic and political settings around the country to experiment in and establish one or more templates for localities to replicate across the

GREEN NEW DEAL

country. Areas in the Southeast with high heat pump adoption are a good place to start. As companies see high levels of adoption, more facilities to produce heat pump systems will come on board. Already, Daikin, a leading Japanese manufacturer, has opened a manufacturing facility in Texas.

The path to electrification plays out differently among cities. The BEI pilot will inform other cities on how to proceed. Nils Moe, executive director of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, one of its funders, says electrification is a priority issue for its 215 city members.

SEATTLE: ELECTRIFYING HOME HEATING AND TRANSPORTATION

Seattle is also transitioning home heating away from fossil fuels, in this case from oil to electric. And because most of Seattle’s electricity is supplied by hydro power, it is already free of greenhouse gas emissions. In September, the city council passed an ordinance that taxes heating-oil providers and requires heating-oil tank owners to decommission or upgrade all existing underground oil tanks by 2028. The tax revenue will be used for rebates to Seattle homeowners to convert to electric heat pumps, with low-income households eligible for

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 51

How States Are Leading on Climate Action In the face of a federal default on climate, the initiative passes to governors. BY GOVERNOR JAY INSLEE ment—one that every other country on earth is participating in—I joined Governor Andrew Cuomo and former Governor Jerry Brown to form the U.S. Climate Alliance. Two years later, the Climate Alliance is 25 governors strong and represents close to 60 percent of the U.S. population.

This bipartisan group of governors is setting ambitious state goals, backed by science and research, to build sustainable, low-carbon economies across the country.

All USCA states commit to achieving Paris targets by 2028, work in collaboration, and advocate for federal action.

USCA states collaborate on a variety of shared priorities, including phasing out short-lived super pollutants (HFCs), accelerating the uptake of clean-transportation technologies, increasing carbon sequestration on working lands, adopting common energy efficiency standards for a wide range of appliances and commercial equipment, and expanding access to clean-energy finance.

In my state, we are showing that clean energy is an economic catalyst.

It is possible to grow jobs and protect the environ-

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Governor Inslee signed a measure that makes his state the fourth in the nation that has established a mandate to provide carbon-free electricity by a targeted date.

ment at the same time.

Earlier this year, I signed into law the most aggressive package of clean-energy legislation in Washington state history.

It includes provisions that eliminate fossil fuels from our electricity system, phase down climate super pollutants, and adapt a number of efficiency standards that will reduce building emissions while lowering energy bills.

We’ve also started our transition to clean transportation. We recently secured $140 million in funding for hybridelectric ferry building and conversions. And we’re building infrastructure to support the move to electric vehicles.

In September, we reached our 2020 goal of putting 50,000 electric

vehicles on our roads.

We are also purchasing electricity from wind and solar projects built around Washington.

Washington has a Clean Energy Fund program; through it we have invested more than $120 million in research and development to create utility-scale battery technology. This will bring renewable energy onto our grid and expand energy services to low-income communities.

While this crucial work is happening in Washington and many other states, the Trump administration continues to roll back environmental protections nationwide and even try to prevent states from working toward cleaner air, water, and transportation.

Let me be clear: The Trump administration cannot stop the states on about 80 percent of what we are trying to do around climate change.

And the other 20 percent we address through litigation. The federal government is not able to stop the states from taking action.

Fighting climate change and protecting our children and grandchildren from its ravages is a monumental task. But it is not insurmountable.

Leadership may be lacking in the U.S. federal government, but when the world thinks of the U.S. on climate action, they should think of the states.

Jay Inslee is the governor of Washington state.

el aine thompson / ap images

W

e are living through an unprecedented climate crisis.

Climate change is already affecting the smallest corners and largest cities across the globe. And it is going to get worse unless immediate and coordinated action is taken.

Despite all this, the Trump administration has failed to look out for the interests of Americans by abdicating its responsibilities to lead and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

All current climate leadership is happening in the states. Statewide action is the only way that the U.S. can make any progress in the fight against climate change.

In Washington and many other states, we are using innovation and cooperation to grow jobs and protect the planet.

As Washington’s governor, I know firsthand the obstacles states face when they respond to increasingly devastating floods, wildfires, and earthquakes, and other catastrophes made worse by a changing climate.

When the Trump administration indicated its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agree-

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

grants to subsidize the entire cost.

We look to Seattle as a model for electrifying mass-transit vehicles, cars, and trucks. With 66 percent of its emissions from transportation, this has been a key focus of Seattle’s climate action.

Seattle is one of two cities in the country in which transit ridership is increasing, the result of many years of infrastructure investment funded by taxes approved through ballot initiatives and integrated planning with carrots and sticks to motivate people to use it. And it’s a story of integrated city, county, and state planning with federal dollars to support it. That’s the essence of what the Green New Deal will need to be.

The city broke ground on its first light-rail project in 2006 and has been expanding ever since. But buses are the workhorses of Seattle’s transit system.

Investing in more-frequent service on all 200-plus bus lines and changing routes to connect with two light-rail stations has paid off. The percentage of residents near a high-frequency bus route (every 15 minutes) has increased from 25 percent to 64 percent since 2015. According to the Federal Transit Administration, Seattle bus and rail ridership increased by 60 percent between 2003 and 2017, while it has decreased in most U.S. cities.

How does Seattle do it? Everyone I talked with told me of Seattle’s virtuous cycle of building and improving transit based on rider input and incentivizing ridership by providing transit access as a job benefit. Much of Seattle’s new transit infrastructure has been funded by taxes raised through citizen-approved ballot initiatives.

Further, Seattle companies offer their employees transit discounts and price parking high enough to discourage car commuting. Under the state’s 1991 Commute Trip Reduction Law, employers are given quite a bit of leeway in figuring out how to reduce car commuting. Subsidizing transit and vanpooling while charging more for parking is typical.

Electrification is at the core of the Green New Deal that the city council passed in August. Among its elements are a complete overhaul of transit and infrastructure to reach climate

neutrality by 2030—20 years ahead of the previous goal. Specifically, a key goal is to electrify the municipal fleet and achieve 30 percent adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) among residents by 2040. King County Metro, which operates the regional transit system, plans on electrifying its entire fleet of 1,400-plus buses by 2030.

Having sufficient charging infrastructure to avoid “range anxiety” is key. Both the Seattle and Washington Departments of Transportation are investing heavily in EV charging stations. To motivate EV sales, particularly for middle-income earners, the state eliminated the sales tax for new EVs costing $45,000 or less, and used EVs worth $30,000 or less.

The city incentivizes apartment and office buildings to install chargers and invests in charging infrastructure for ride-hailing services.

Seattle City Light, the municipally owned utility, has invested in charging infrastructure and has been examining how to accommodate increasing demand for electricity for vehicle charging since 2015. The utility is conducting pilot projects that examine different charging technology and pricing mechanisms. One pilot has installed utility-owned fast chargers in areas lacking private chargers, and another is leasing chargers installed in the homes of customers. Seattle City Light is also experimenting with transportation-specific electricity rates to motivate customers to install home chargers.

Where the money will come from as needs expand hasn’t been determined.

So far, most of the $1 million to $1.4 million cost of all-electric buses is covered by federal grants—and in the context of a Green New Deal, longterm federal funding could accelerate the pace of city-led change.

But funding for transit additions and charging infrastructure is a contested issue. In 2008, Seattle voters approved a sales tax increase to fund transit expansion in 1996, 2008, and 2016. And in 2014, Seattle voters have approved sales tax increases several times to fund transit expansion. In September of this year, the state legislature passed an annual $75 registration fee on hybrid and electric cars to

China has industrial policy to create the battery storage capacity and grid modernization needed to support high levels of renewable energy.

GREEN NEW DEAL

expand the statewide charging network, which will generate about $9.9 million annually. But in November, voters across the state voted to reduce overall taxes on vehicle registration, which will reduce state and local revenue by $4 billion over the next six years. Rural voters don’t want to pay taxes to fund transit and EV infrastructure from which they don’t see themselves benefiting. (And there is resistance to taxes for climate change generally—Washington voters voted down a carbon tax in 2016 and again in 2018 despite support from Governor Jay Inslee.)

THE FEDERAL ROLE

Electrification, of course, only makes a difference if it draws on clean energy. While cities are on the front lines, they don’t have the revenue to get the job done. We need considerable federal revenue for cities, as well as investment in grid modernization and storage. Microgrid development will be key.

In contrast, China has industrial policy to create the battery storage capacity and grid modernization needed to support high levels of renewableenergy adoption, and to develop both of these industries of the future. China’s 2017 plan for the battery industry details a research and deployment strategy for becoming the world leader in both batteries and electric vehicles.

To follow up in 2018, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released guidelines in five key technologies needed to support advancements in batteries and the grid. Government agencies are working on all aspects of technology development—including pricing and market reforms, technology standards, and recycling the batteries at end of use.

Cities are where local ingenuity blends with citizen participation.

But only the federal government can provide the long-term financing for research and widescale deployment.

Joan Fitzgerald is professor of urban and public policy at Northeastern University. She is the author of Emerald Cities: Urban Sustainability and Economic Development, and has just completed a new book, Greenovation.

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 53

The Technical Path to Zero Carbon It’s a lot closer than many skeptics think.

SOLAR ENERGY

BY M A R A PR EN T I S S

Q

uite apart from our goals for a rapid green-energy transition, any discussion of the rate at which we should convert to 100 percent renewable energy requires that the laws of nature and invented technology cooperate. Here, the news is hopeful. In scientific fact, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that the United States could transition to a 100 percent clean-energy, zeroemissions economy within 30 years or less, thanks to technologies that are already available.

In my estimation of the renewable energy that we must harvest, I will assume that total U.S. energy consumption will remain flat. I base that prediction on U.S. energy consumption patterns over the last 30 years as well as the prospect for achieving major gains in energy efficiency moving forward.

RAISING ENERGY EFFICIENCY

To begin, we need to distinguish “energy efficiency” from “energy conservation.” Energy conservation entails making do with less—for example, maintaining room temperature during winter at 65 degrees Fahrenheit rather than 70 degrees, or cutting back on average automobile travel from the current figure of 13,000 miles per year to, say, 8,000 miles. By contrast, improvements in energy efficiency lower the amount of energy that we use without reducing our quality of life.

Realistically, the opportunity to level off our future energy consumption levels rests far more with raising energy efficiency standards than assuming people will make major sacrifices in their living standards.

For example, switching from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs makes lighting more efficient, but does not reduce the amount of light that we use. Air conditioner efficiencies have dramatically improved

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since the 1990s and are continuing to improve. Improvements in building insulation decrease the energy required to maintain comfortable indoor temperatures. The number of miles that one can drive on a gallon of gas has increased dramatically and is continuing to increase. Hybrid cars consume less energy than fossil fuel–based cars, partly because fossil fuel–powered cars waste energy when they brake, whereas when hybrid cars brake, part of the energy is returned to the car battery. The energy stored in the car battery can then be used to drive the car forward again. Electric cars are even more energy-efficient than hybrid cars, with equivalent mileage efficiencies that can exceed 100 miles per gallon.

Amazingly, heat pumps can be more than 100 percent energyefficient because they transfer heat energy from cold places to hot places.

The energy required to operate heat pumps is the energy equivalent of a shipping and handling charge. That charge can be much lower than the value of the energy transported. When the temperature difference between the cold and hot places is small, the heat energy delivered can be much larger than the electrical energy. In contrast, the heat energy delivered by fossil fuel burning cannot exceed the energy contained in the fossil fuel.

Since the heat delivered is typically three times the electricity used, using heat pumps instead of burning fossil fuels can dramatically reduce energy consumption without requiring any change in indoor temperatures.

Given all of these demonstrated and projected increases in energy efficiency, it might be justifiable to assume that we can maintain our current lifestyle while our energy use is able to decline in absolute amounts over time. However, I will assume, conservatively, that gains in energy

efficiency will allow us to stabilize overall energy demand at approximately our current level.

Reducing our future energy consumption levels rests far more with raising energy efficiency standards than assuming people will make major sacrifices in their living standards.

Energy flows from the sun to the Earth, just as rain falls from the sky to the Earth. We often say that one inch of rain fell in the last hour. If we collect water in a bucket, after one hour that bucket would contain one inch of water at the bottom. If there were two identical buckets side by side, each bucket would have an inch of water.

The story is equivalent with solar panels. That is, for a solar panel of a particular size, the total amount of solar energy delivered per hour is given by the flow of energy per hour times the area of the solar panel. In standard units, the energy per hour delivered to one square meter is expressed in watts per square meter (approximately three feet by three feet). The total power delivered to any particular solar panel is therefore exactly the wattage of sunlight per area reaching the Earth’s surface times the size of the solar panel. The average amount of solar power per unit area that reaches the Earth’s surface varies somewhat with location, with sunnier places obviously receiving more solar power than cloudier locations. For example, in Phoenix, New Orleans, and Miami, the average solar power per unit area is about 200 watts per square meter. In Boston, Seattle, and Chicago, it is about 145 watts per square meter.

Solar panels are not 100 percent efficient, so the solar energy delivered to the panel is greater than the electrical power produced by the solar panel.

The best solar cells available today approach a 50 percent rate of converting solar energy to electricity. But the typical units that are commercially available today operate at between 15 percent and 18 percent conversion rates. Thus, on average, a square meter solar panel in Phoenix, Miami, or New Orleans would deliver 30 to 36 watts of electrical power, whereas, on average, the same solar panel in Boston, Seattle, or Chicago would deliver 22 to 26 watts.

How this general solar energy delivery system will play out in practice

russ dillingham / sun journal via ap images

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

will then depend on the specific setting, for example, whether we are considering individual family homes, apartment buildings, or business operations. On average, American households, both in their own homes and in apartment buildings, consume about 1,250 watts of electricity per hour. Therefore, providing all of the electrical energy for an average household would require about 40 square meters in Miami or about 60 square meters in Boston. For people living in a detached house, providing all of the household’s energy would also require replacing fossil fuel heating and gasoline-powered vehicles.

On average in the U.S., about half of the total energy consumed by single-family homes is used for heating. Fortunately, since the heat energy delivered by a heat pump is on average about three times larger than heat delivered by electricity, supplying the same amount of heat to homes through heat pumps would only require increasing the home’s solar panel area by about 16 percent.

If one adds two electric cars, each of which is driven 35 miles per day (i.e., about 13,000 miles per year), that adds an additional 1,000 watts (1 kilowatt) to overall electricity demand.

Overall, providing 100 percent of this

Replacing incandescent streetlights with more energy-efficient LED bulbs

household’s energy using solar panels would require, roughly, 40 times 20 feet of solar panel area in Miami or 50 times 25 feet in Boston.

The discussion above is only directly relevant for the population living in single-family detached houses.

For the U.S. population that dwells in apartments, mobile homes, or multifamily homes, the solar power delivered to the roof of the apartment building, for example, could not provide 100 percent of daily use.

Densely packed urban populations would therefore have to use solar or wind energy that is harvested by large commercial farms and then delivered to cities. Those sources would also be needed to supply the energy for industrial use, commercial transportation, and commercial applications other than big-box stores.

WIND ENERGY

Wind delivers about two watts of energy per square meter, on average, i.e., only about one-tenth of what an average solar panel on a rooftop in Chicago can produce. In addition, wind power varies with location much more strongly than solar because the wind energy delivered depends on the cube of the wind speed. The average wind speeds in the central United

GREEN NEW DEAL

States are approximately twice as large as the average wind speeds in the mid-Atlantic region. As a result, a wind turbine in Iowa delivers more than eight times as much electrical power as the same wind turbine would deliver if it were located in Virginia.

This allows Iowa to generate more than 35 percent of its electrical power from wind while the wind turbines also provide farmers with a significant additional stable income that augments income from raising crops and animals. However, since wind power varies so strongly with location, most inland wind power is and will continue to be generated in regions that are sparsely populated and do not consume much electrical power.

Wind speeds off the coasts of the United States can be quite high, but there has been great political resistance to building wind farms that are visible from coastal properties, and at present offshore wind power is much more expensive than onshore wind.

As a result, in the near future, exploiting wind power will require the transport of electricity from rural regions in the central United States to urban regions with high population densities, most of which are located near the coasts.

Importantly, the entire U.S. average energy consumption could be provided through siting wind turbines on about 7 percent of U.S. land area, or one-sixth of existing agricultural land. However, if all Americans who live in single-family homes got 100 percent of their energy from solar panels on their roofs, the total remaining land area requirements from large-scale solar and wind farms would obviously fall dramatically.

Most of this land use requirement could be met, for example, by placing solar panels on rooftops and parking lots, then operating wind turbines on about 7 percent of current agricultural land. The remaining supplemental energy needs could then be supplied by geothermal, hydro, and low-emissions bioenergy. Recent work also suggests that under some circumstances solar power can enhance crop growth, so there may be benefits to siting solar panels on some agricultural land.

This scenario includes no further

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contributions from solar farms in desert areas, solar panels mounted on highways, or offshore wind projects, among other supplemental renewable-energy sources, though all of these options are viable possibilities, if handled responsibly.

REMAINING LIQUID ENERGY NEEDS FOR AIRPLANES AND BOATS

Rotating propellers move boats and small airplanes, including drones.

Many propellers are already powered by electric motors. For short trips batteries of a reasonable size can store enough energy to complete the trip; however, for long-haul ocean transport and rapid high-altitude air transport, batteries of a reasonable size cannot store enough energy for the voyage. Thus, in the foreseeable future these systems will continue to be powered by liquid hydrocarbons.

Fortunately, it has already been demonstrated that liquid hydrocarbons can be generated using entirely renewable resources. Biofuels already provide a liquid hydrocarbon (ethanol) that is combined with gasoline and fed into all of the cars in the U.S. There are also non-biofuel sources of liquid hydrocarbons. For example, the Fischer-Tropsch process uses chemical interactions to convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen into liquid hydrocarbons. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be harvested to provide the carbon monoxide, and renewable electrical energy can free hydrogen from water. Burning of such liquid hydrocarbons would be carbon-neutral since the carbon originally came from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Importantly, if the liquid hydrocarbon is buried in the ground instead of burned, then the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be decreased. So, certainly within a 30-year time frame, even these last remaining liquid energy requirements can be met without burning fossil fuels.

INTERMITTENCY, STORAGE, AND TRANSMISSION

Meeting instantaneous local demand for energy is different from meeting average aggregate demand. A system designed to meet peak power demand will usually provide much

56 WWW.PROSPECT.ORG BONUS ISSUE 2019

Science and technology are not preventing us from achieving a 100 percent renewableenergy economy in the United States.

more electric power than is required, whereas a system that is designed to provide the average required power will not be able to deliver when demand peaks. Even without renewables, during peak demand times, it has been necessary to fire up fossil fuel plants that are rarely used. The cost of electricity from such plants is very high because they usually sit idle.

Geothermal energy and hydropower are renewable-energy sources that do not fluctuate with time. They can help stabilize renewable-energy systems.

But in the U.S., hydropower cannot be significantly increased, and geothermal power is limited to certain favorable locations. Matching fluctuating demand to supply can be difficult as well as wasteful.

Importantly, in some cases fluctuations in renewable energy actually correlate with fluctuations in demand.

For example, air conditioning demand is high during times when solar power delivery is also high. Thus, solar power can already deliver energy during peak air conditioning times without firing up rarely used fossil fuel resources.

In general, in the morning electricity use and solar power show similar fractional increases with time, so in the morning changing to solar power can reduce costly mismatches between the supply and the demand for electrical power. Of course, in the late afternoon solar power begins to decrease before electrical power use does.

These problems can be greatly reduced through energy storage.

Charging electric cars offers one example. During the night, of course, solar power delivers no power; while during the day, the power delivered is more than the household consumes.

Electric cars with 100 kilowatt-hour (100,000 watt-hour) batteries can be bought today. Thus, a household could completely disconnect from the grid if the two car batteries stored excess solar energy generated during the day.

In reality, households will probably remain tied to the grid, so that the cars can be driven during the day and charged wherever the car happens to be parked.

At the same time, it is not clear this approach to storage, relying on lithiumion battery technology, is optimal at

a large scale. One issue with lithiumion batteries is their limited lifetime, which is typically a few years and less than 1,000 charge cycles. Considerable research is being devoted to other battery storage systems.

Excess renewable energy can pump water uphill efficiently as a large-scale energy storage system. But siting options are limited and generally are not located near population centers. Excess electrical energy can also perform hydrolysis that separates water into oxygen and hydrogen. Burning the hydrogen produces energy and water, so hydrogen storage is possible. However, to date, large-scale hydrogen storage systems that are safe and economical do not yet exist. We already have an extremely well-developed system for storing and transporting liquid hydrocarbon fuels, so liquid hydrocarbon fuels created using renewable-energy resources could provide safe large-scale energy storage; however, this process is not yet economically viable.

An alternate strategy for addressing mismatches in energy supply and demand is to build enough renewable energy to meet peak demand, and then re-allocate energy during lowerdemand periods. For example, during periods of low demand, renewable energy can create reservoirs of hot or cold liquids. Some thermal solar power systems already generate molten salt that can generate electricity when there is no sunlight. Other systems use stored hot or cold liquids to provide cooling or heating. For example, Austin’s municipally owned power company uses excess electricity generated by nighttime wind power to create an ice-water slurry that is then pumped under city streets to provide district air conditioning of much of downtown. During periods of low demand, the excess electricity could also be used to generate liquid hydrocarbon fuels that store energy for later use. Similarly, if electricity prices during such periods were low, it might be economical for energyintensive processes such as aluminum smelting or water desalination to run only during times when electricity supply exceeds demand.

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

Local variations in the supply of wind and solar power can be reduced by transporting energy between regions of the U.S. Also, solar power peaks during the summer, whereas wind power in most of the U.S. is lowest during the summer. Thus, combining wind and solar can reduce the seasonal fluctuations associated with each power source separately.

As noted, the technical challenges in transmitting renewable energy over long distances are not large, but long-distance transport differs from local energy delivery in significant ways. For local electric-power delivery, the flow of electrical current alternates with time, so this type of electricity is called AC (alternating current) power. Those changes with time result in a leakage of power from the electric-power lines. Over short distances, that leakage is not very significant, but over long distances over land the leakage becomes important.

The leakage is even more rapid if the electricity travels in power lines that run underwater.

Fortunately, if the direction of the current does not change with time (DC current), the loss for long-distance transport is greatly reduced.

In addition, increasing the voltage at which the electricity flows lowers the fraction of the electrical power that leaks from the power lines. As a result, the United States already has highvoltage DC power lines that transport electricity over long distances; however, converting to 100 percent renewable energy would require many more lines, and these power lines are not particularly attractive. If many detached houses generated most of the energy that they use, then requirements for energy transport would be greatly reduced.

In sum, science and technology are not preventing us from achieving a 100 percent U.S. renewable-energy economy. All of the barriers are political, economic, and social. These will need to be solved if the renewableenergy future is to be realized.

Mara Prentiss is professor of physics at Harvard University and author of Energy Revolution: The Physics and the Promise of Efficient Technology.

GREEN NEW DEAL

The Tantalizing Nuclear Mirage

Many see nuclear power as a necessary part of any carbon-neutral mix. The reality isn’t so simple.

BY A L E X A NDE R S A MM O N

I

t took seven months on the campaign trail for Cory Booker to emerge as the Democratic Party’s foremost champion of nuclear power. In September, after he unveiled a signature climate plan replete with “$20 billion dedicated to research, development and demonstration of next-generation advanced nuclear energy,” he embraced the technology with unprecedented ardor.

“I didn’t come to the United States Senate as a big nuclear guy,” Booker told Grist in an interview. “But when I started looking at the urgency of climate change … nuclear has to be a part of the blend.”

To hear Booker tell it, his evolution on the subject was the product of scientific rigor and anti-ideological clarity on decarbonization. He related this narrative during a media blitz, comparing anti-nuclear Democrats to Republican climate deniers over their rejection of an incontrovertible science, while pledging to usher in a nuclear future that no right-minded person could deny. “Where the science is going, to me, at first sounded like science fiction … new nuclear actually portends of exciting things where you have no risk of the kinds of meltdowns we’re seeing,” he proclaimed at CNN’s climate town hall.

Grandiosity aside, Booker isn’t alone in his nuclear embrace. He’s part of an unlikely pro-nuclear political alliance, an emergent accord that spans the centrist think tank Third Way, Andrew Yang, Jay Inslee, environmental activists, and progressive commentators alike. “The left should stop worrying and learn to love existing nuclear power plants,” wrote New York’s Eric Levitz in a subsequent send-up of Bernie Sanders’s and

Elizabeth Warren’s twin commitments to phase out the technology.

In a world where the rapid deployment of zero-carbon energy production is urgent, nuclear power, the argument goes, represents the only proven bet. As it stands, nuclear is currently the largest single source of near-zero-carbon energy generation in the United States, providing 20 percent of our total energy mix. And while the waste may be dangerous, and the risks associated with meltdowns cinematically seared into our collective memory, the technology is actually safer than burning fossil fuels—one study found that per unit of electricity generated, oil is 263 times more deadly than nuclear, on account of air pollution alone. With 11 years, per the U.N.’s 2018 IPCC report, to overhaul our energy system, to be serious about decarbonization is to find a place at the table for nuclear.

It’s an alluring idea. Already, this logic has been embraced in states like Ohio and Booker’s New Jersey, which have been allocating green tax subsidies to nuclear projects. And while it’s largely played out in the background, the question of what to do about nuclear has vexed Green New Dealers since the rollout of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s framework in February. While plane travel and hamburgers raised hackles in the press, one of the first clauses to be deleted from the initial proposal pledged to phase out the technology altogether.

So does the Green New Deal need nuclear to achieve its lofty goals?

Does zero-carbon energy infrastructure necessitate a nuclear buildout, or at least an embrace of alreadyexisting nuclear as a bridge fuel, as countries like Sweden have done?

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Unfortunately, the case for nuclear as a green technology is not so simple—the technology faces a spate of environmental and economic challenges, while its track record as a bridge fuel shows it may be more rivalrous than concomitant with renewables. In fact, it may be the nuclear industry that needs the Green New Deal, not the other way around.

DESPITE THE NEWFOUND exigency

of overhauling the country’s energy mix, this is not the first time America’s energy system has arrived at a crossroads in the last ten years, nor is it the first time nuclear has been trotted out as its last, best hope. In the late aughts, with oil prices soaring and production stagnant, policymakers made a commitment to expanding American nuclear generation. An era of so-called “nuclear renaissance” began, with four next-generation reactors commissioned at two plants, one in Georgia and the other in South Carolina.

Now, over a decade later, that project managed to bankrupt its construction company, Westinghouse, nearly taking down the entire Toshiba conglomerate, Westinghouse’s parent company, with it. The two reactors in South Carolina were abandoned, while the Southern Nuclear and Georgia Power utility companies assumed control of the remaining two reactors in Georgia, the Vogtle 3 and 4. But even a cash infusion from Georgia ratepayers, who began subsidizing the completion of the project in 2011, was not enough to keep the project close to its budget or timeline. Initially expected to come online in 2016-2017, the Vogtle plant has run some $14 billion over budget. Its completion dates have been deferred to 20212022. There’s currently no other active nuclear development in the United States.

That timeline should be particularly alarming for nuclear enthusiasts. If it’s going to take 10 to 15 years to see a plant through

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to completion, even with massive financial backing, that’s seemingly impossible to square with the 11 years to decarbonize. At the very least, we’d need hundreds, if not thousands of plants already under construction just to make a dent.

Booker, Yang, and other advocates are betting that R&D might accelerate that process, but in a real sense it’s already too late.

So if new construction can’t be counted on, and the window for adding new nuclear to the fleet has already shut, what about the reactors we currently have? Has their environmental potential gotten short shrift?

While nuclear fission emits far less carbon dioxide than energy production by oil and gas, the process of getting to that energy generation complicates nuclear’s claim to zero-carbon status. Uranium mining, processing, and transport are all carbon-intensive procedures done by diesel-powered heavy machinery. Instead of carbon, the plants themselves emit heat, often in great quantities, which can warm nearby air and water dramatically, killing

fish and wildlife and afflicting neighboring habitats.

And while nuclear may maintain a cleaner sheet than fossil fuels when it comes to CO2, its record on H2O is less rosy.

An American nuclear plant can require between 19 million and 1.4 billion gallons of water a day, just for purposes of cooling. Because of that implacable thirst, it’s imperative that nuclear plants are constructed near major water sources.

Thus, nuclear plants dot our rivers and coastline, each of which carries with it its own climatespecific challenges. Plants built near abundant freshwater—rivers and lakes—have been forced to contend with the twin challenges of too much water and not enough.

In recent years, nuclear reactors, like those on the Great Lakes, have been forced to shut down when droughts have plagued rivers and lakes, reducing water levels to perilous lows. Meanwhile, in places like Nebraska, flood risks have necessitated shutdowns. And in France, which sports one of the most robust nuclear programs in the world, heat waves have caused

water temperatures to surge to the point of shutdowns multiple summers in a row.

In fact, a 2012 study published in Nature Climate Change forecasted a decrease in thermoelectric power generating capacity of up to 19 percent in Europe and 16 percent in the United States for the period 2031-2060, just due to lack of cooling water. Extant nuclear plants may not accelerate a rapidly warming climate, but it remains to be seen if they can functionally exist in one.

Coastal plants face climateinduced challenges of their own.

Hurricane Sandy, which laid siege to the Atlantic coast in 2012, forced seven nuclear plant shutdowns due to flooding, storm debris, and wind damage. Earlier this year, Bloomberg Businessweek identified 19 U.S. nuclear plants under threat from rising seas, and 54 facilities (out of a national total of 60) that “weren’t designed to handle the flood risk they face.” And that was before a November report found nearly four times as many people as previously thought are living on land that is likely to flood at least

m i c h a e l h o l a h a n / a u g u s ta c h r o n i c l e v i a a p i m a g e s

A dome is lowered onto a nuclear containment building at the Plant Vogtle nuclear energy facility in Waynesboro, Georgia.

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

once a year on average by mid-century.

Large-scale retreat from low-lying coastal cities is going to be a reality, and nuclear power plants can’t move with a shifting coastline. Even if they could, plants that draw on saltwater for cooling would suffer similarly diminished capacity as global ocean temperatures rise, as well.

Those rising sea levels are also a problem for the ever-perplexing, still unresolved issue of waste disposal.

Beyond the controversial Yucca Mountain disposal site in Nevada, which has failed to get off the ground, much nuclear waste is simply stored on site.

At the now-decommissioned San Onofre plant in Southern California and the Pilgrim plant in Cape Cod, the waste is buried beneath the sand at the water’s edge. “Four decades of radioactive waste being stored right there on the water line,” says Kate Brown, a professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. “It’s a short-term solution for a long-term problem.”

That also means that sea-level rise threatens waste disposal, and with no way to check for leaks, the impact of rising seas on that waste remains largely unknown. But in the Marshall Islands, the site of one of the largest American nuclear waste disposal venues, known as the Runit Dome, the effect of sea-level rise is certain: The concrete encasement is now at risk of collapsing as rising seas encroach.

If nuclear is too costly to factor in long-term, and too unstable to subsist in the present, the question remains of when to begin the transition away from it. The concern that an immediate shutdown of existing nuclear plants would lead to accelerating carbon emissions from either coal or natural gas as a substitute has led certain countries, like Sweden, to favor a slow phaseout of its nuclear fleet. France, too, despite heavy reliance on nuclear, has been discussing a slow, partial phaseout, in accordance with that rationale.

This was the fear when Germany, not long after the Fukushima meltdown, announced it would quickly shutter its entire nuclear power program. Initially, those concerns seemed vindicated.

Carbon emissions spiked, as reliance on coal production increased. The country was quickly branded as a cautionary

Since nuclear energy was first announced as a civilian project in 1953, its promises of worldwide abundance have far outpaced its production.

tale. But just a few short years after this campaign was waged, that analysis has changed dramatically. “Today renewables account for 40 percent of German energy production; 15 years ago it was in the single digits,” says Greg Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under Obama.

Not only have renewables taken over the energy share once produced by nuclear, “they’ve done enough of a build that they’re going to eat into coal.”

It’s the same story in Japan, where emissions spiked briefly after Fukushima caused a wide-scale shutdown. Even today, only a couple of the country’s nuclear reactors have been brought back online. But thanks to an aggressive build-out of renewables, emissions are below where they were with a fully operating nuclear fleet. Countries that have chosen to decommission slowly have seen their renewable build-outs stymied accordingly; dependence on nuclear has decelerated an inevitable process.

Sweden’s reliance on nuclear has been an impediment to renewable development, which is part of the reason the deadline for decommissioning keeps getting pushed. Bridge fuels have a way of making themselves permanent.

WHEN DID NUCLEAR get this environ-

mental rebrand? Until very recently, the industry hadn’t led with its environmental chops. In fact, for years, nuclear buddied up with the coal industry, courting the Trump administration for subsidies, while the Nuclear Energy Institute supported the Department of Energy’s failed coal and nuclear bailout, and lauded Ohio’s controversial coal and nuclear subsidy package earlier this year.

For as long as it’s existed, nuclear has been an aspirational technology as much as an extant one. Since Eisenhower first announced nuclear energy generation as a civilian project in 1953, its promises of worldwide abundance have far outpaced its production. Twenty years later, in 1973, Richard Nixon pledged to have 1,000 nuclear plants online by 1980, a goal that never approached realization.

Since then, the magical thinking of the nuclear industry has taken different forms. Over decades, breeder reactors,

GREEN NEW DEAL

salt reactors, large-scale fusion have all been the nuclear future just over the horizon. “The industry that people talk about is a theoretical industry,” says Jaczko. “The actual industry is not that.” Since the development of nuclear weapons, the non-military nuclear energy program has always been a PR charge as much as it was a serious proposal. “Historians have determined that the rollout of civilian nuclear power in the 1960s had as much to do with Cold War PR as the need for electricity,” says Brown.

Nuclear’s pivot to unlikely environmental champion and running mate of the Green New Deal is far from a happy accident. It’s a deliberate posture, informed as much by shrewd marketing as Booker’s data-driven rationale. With the rapid development of solar and wind, nuclear is now far more expensive to produce in terms of dollars per kilowatt hour. With the rapid growth of renewables, nuclear now finds itself on the wrong side of free-market forces, in dire need of public subsidy to stay afloat.

So the enthusiasm for the public investment of the Green New Deal is primarily a tactical one, with the promise of a massive outlay of public funds enticing an industry in need of a lifeline. “Of course the nuclear industry is trying new alliances; they are desperate.” says Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity. Cutting them in would be an unforced error for GND legislation— the money that would be spent making nuclear viable, shielding it from an array of climate disasters, and figuring out what to do with its waste would be much better spent figuring out battery storage or something else to stitch in the gaps in renewable generation.

Looking closer at Booker’s proposal, it’s not clear even he believes the sales pitch he’s making. Despite his lofty pronouncements, the climate plan, which sums to $3 trillion, allocates just two-thirds of 1 percent to nuclear development. The $20 billion is barely enough to cover the cost overruns of the two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle plant. The notion that such a paltry sum would finally put the industry over the top after decades of malaise, indeed, sounds like science fiction.

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Accelerating Equity in Electric Cars

Electric cars will eventually be all cars, but the speed by which they displace conventional cars will depend on making them affordable for low- and middle-income drivers.

BY G A BR I E L L E G U R L E Y

T

he transportation sector in the United States is the singlelargest emitter of planet-killing greenhouse gases, surpassing power plants for that deadly distinction. Public transit and private fleet electrification will be critical components in the clean-energy revolution.

But tackling the climate crisis means addressing a more urgent priority: reframing Americans’ century-plus-old relationship with the passenger vehicles that produce most of those gases.

People raised on the potent elixir of instant mobility—having the freedom to jump in a car or truck and go— aren’t about to give up rides or curtail usage as fast as the Earth needs them to. Being in charge of one’s transportation choices is central to personal identity in a country where the majority of people drive to work. Yet the U.S. still idles behind Europe and China in the electric-car transition.

This transition already risks leaving low- and moderate-income people behind at a time when the country should be accelerating this shift to meet the ambitious net-zero emission goals needed to save a habitable planet. These concerns have spurred the push for an equitable transition that avoids the apartheid that has characterized the country’s most significant economic and technological transitions, from the homeownership push that produced redlining of African American and Latino neighborhoods to the digital revolution that opened a still-gaping divide.

Once sought-after by wealthy early adopters amassing cool points, electric passenger vehicles must now be affordable for all. Local, state, and federal policymakers need to knock

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down the barriers that the market does not address.

“When it comes to making a transition to a clean energy technology, whether it’s with vehicles or with buildings, or with food, it’s going to be harder, more expensive, and more difficult for certain communities to get there if we’re not very, very intentional about them doing so,” says Alvaro Sanchez, the environmental equity director at the Oakland-based Greenlining Institute, a racial and economic justice research group.

IN DOWNTOWN WASHINGTON’S City-

CenterDC, a small Tesla showroom sits in an enclave of upscale restaurants and luxury boutiques. There are usually one or two cars on display, like the Model X, whose wing car doors that open upward sometimes attract more curious onlookers peering through the windows than potential customers for an electric car with a heart-stopping 2019 sticker price starting at $81,000. The image of Tesla as a sweet car for the rich reinforces the widely shared view that electric cars are not for the poor and middle-class. Even the less costly Tesla Model 3, with long waiting lists, costs $35,000.

Nearly twenty years ago, General Motors destroyed electric cars en masse. This year, GM announced that it is aiming to have 20 electric-car models available by 2023. But Tesla’s success and its veneer of exclusivity have spawned a slew of misperceptions that constitute significant barriers to electric-car adoption.

Today, the cheapest sticker price for a new electric car is about $23,900.

That’s the cost of the Smart EQ Fortwo,

The image of Tesla as a sweet car for the rich reinforces the widely shared view that electric cars are not for the poor and middle-class.

a two-seater. Even though an electric car would save on annual fuel costs, that $23,900 means car payments of about $500 a month, far beyond the reach of most working people, who seldom purchase new cars and make do with older, polluting vehicles.

In principle, the federal tax credit of up to $7,500 for purchase of a new electric vehicle dramatically lowers the purchase price. But nearly all working- and middle-class people owe nothing like $7,500 in federal income taxes. So that credit is mainly a subsidy for rich people. President Trump has attacked tax subsidies for purchase of electric cars, saying that he would like to see the entire program phased out.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York gave a sense of what a Green New Deal could look like with an October trial balloon.

Schumer’s “Clean Cars for America” is designed to encourage middle- and low-income drivers to give up older, dirtier cars; to facilitate building a charging infrastructure accessible to underserved drivers regardless of where they live; and to establish a manufacturing sector to build vehicles and component parts. (The fate of autoworkers displaced in the EV revolution was a major point of contention in the recent GM strike.)

Envisioned as part of a broader climate package, the ten-year, $454 billion plan includes special rebates for low-income people and incentives for used-vehicle purchases. It would direct $45 billion to charginginfrastructure construction focusing on underserved neighborhoods, with a goal to install one charging station for every vehicle purchased using program incentives.

In the absence of programs such as Schumer’s, the federal disarray leaves the bulk of electric-car incentive programs for new and used cars to states, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Oregon, and Texas. Electric utilities in Florida, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania also offer rebates and credits and other financial assistance.

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

California has a diverse slate of state, regional, and local rebates for low- and moderate-income people designed to encourage drivers to purchase or lease new and used battery-powered vehicles and hybrids. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District in metro San Francisco has linked environmental justice concerns to EV adoption, providing “Clean Cars for All” grants of up to $9,500 to low-income drivers in communities that have been disproportionally affected by air pollution to give up gasoline-powered cars for new or used hybrid or electric vehicles or a public-transit pass.

A hypothetical East San Jose resident in need of a new car living near the Reid-Hillview Airport (a major lead emissions polluter that residents want closed) in a two-person household with an annual household income of $65,900 could be eligible for a maximum Air District grant of $9,500 when she turns in her 1995 Ford Taurus for a $23,900 Smart EQ Fortwo Pure.

If Schumer’s Clean Cars for America program was in effect, she could receive another $3,000, bringing the cost down to $10,500. Since she doesn’t want to apply for a loan, and may not qualify for it, that’s still too much. But after a few searches, up pops a used 2016 Smart EQ Fortwo Pure with less than 10,000 miles on it available at a San Francisco car dealer for $12,980.

The Air District grant would bring the cost down to a manageable $3,480 before taxes and other charges.

d av i d z a lu b o w s k i / a p i m a g e s

ACCORDING TO SCOTT WILSON, vice

president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington, D.C., a regional club of electric-car enthusiasts, many prospective car buyers do not realize that the electric cars that have only become widely available in the past few years already come in a wide variety of price points. “A lot of what’s happening with electric cars is not Tesla,” says Wilson.

As prices fall, the lower maintenance costs make electric cars even more attractive to low- and middleincome consumers. Battery-powered cars do not have the number of moving parts that gasoline-powered cars do, and maintenance issues like oil

A selection of Tesla 2018 Model 3 sedans are displayed outside a Tesla showroom.

changes are things of the past. Yet fears about outrageous electric bills plague electric cars.

Costs to fully charge an electric car will vary by make, model, and local kilowatt hour charges, but fueling costs are considerably cheaper than for gasoline-powered cars, According to Plug In America, a nonprofit EV advocacy group, an average U.S. cost of electricity at 12 cents per kilowatt hour means a person driving the average EV 15,000 miles annually will spend roughly, at current prices, $540 per year, or $45 per month, to charge the car—a savings of about $860 per year over gasoline-powered cars.

In many communities, however, few people know someone who owns an electric car, so electric-vehicle awareness is notoriously poor, despite potential saving in fuel costs and air quality—an issue for both rural and urban communities in states like California that are plagued by pollution.

Electric cars are also hard to find. A new 2019 Sierra Club “Rev Up Electric Vehicles” report that studied shopping for electric vehicles across the country found that nearly 75 percent of car dealers do not have a single electric vehicle available on their lots. (The figure is closer to 80 percent in states

GREEN NEW DEAL

that do not adhere to Zero Emission Vehicle [ZEV] standards that mandate that auto manufacturers sell a specific number of hybrid and battery electric vehicles based on the total number of all vehicles sold.)

Even in the 11 ZEV states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Vermont—nearly 60 percent of car dealers did not have EVs available. The study also found that car salespeople are not up to speed on EV technology, nor are they able to provide basic information about the federal credit or local and state electric-car rebate programs and incentives, charging infrastructure, or battery ranges. These experiences are compounded for buyers of color who have traditionally been discriminated against by some car dealers.

In this environment, consumer education is a word-of-mouth phenomenon that means meeting potential buyers where they are. In California, Sanchez of the Greenlining Institute works with partners to bring customized low-rider electric cars to events like Day of the Dead festivals. Groups like Maryland EV attend local Diwali, Caribbean Food and Wine Festival, and Festival

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 61

Latino de Maryland gatherings. EVHybridNoire, a national group that recently visited historically black colleges and universities like Morehouse in Atlanta, links diverse drivers, especially in underserved areas, with EV resources and forums to exchange ideas on issues from charging-location strategies to confronting misperceptions about minority EV owners.

While fuel and maintenance cost savings resonate with low-income consumers, once they know about them, other charges like the high registration fees may be difficult to overcome. Every driver pays federal and state gas taxes at the pump; drivers don’t budget for them, they just pay up. But some states like Ohio and Arkansas have imposed exorbitant $200 annual EV registration fees that far exceed what owners of gasolinepowered cars pay—and can’t simply be ascribed to the need to replace declining gas taxes. A 2019 Consumer Reports EV fee analysis found that by 2025, 18 states will charge higher EV fees than drivers of new gasolinepowered cars pay in gas taxes.

“If we make electric vehicle owners pay taxes in these lump sums that internal combustion vehicle owners pay when they buy gas, that could create another barrier,” says Asha Weinstein Agrawal, director of the Mineta Transportation Institute’s National Transportation Finance Center at San José State University.

Yet a 2019 Union of Concerned Scientists-Consumer Reports survey found that 42 percent of people of color are more likely to consider buying a plug-in electric vehicle for their next car—implying that cost considerations may be at work. Not every consumer will necessarily buy a car, however; some poor rural areas like Huron in central California have already turned to ridesharing as an alternative to ownership, while car-sharing rentals may find a place in urban settings like apartment buildings and condo developments. In fact, clean-energy entrepreneur Tony Seba, an instructor at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program, argues that EVs, ride-hailing, and autonomous vehicles will drastically cut transportation costs and render individual car

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Carbon Dividends and the Green New Deal A carbon tax can work if we fairly distribute the proceeds.

BY JAMES K. BOYCE

P

roponents of a Green New Deal often are silent or ambivalent on the policy most widely recommended by economists: a price on carbon emissions to spur greater investment in renewables and energy efficiency.

One reason for reticence is the fact that carbon pricing on its own would impose real financial hardships on low-income and middleclass consumers, especially if the price were steep enough to make a difference in deterring use of carbon fuels. This seems to run counter to the goal of building an economy that works for working people.

What’s more, a carbon price might spark a public backlash like the “yellow vest” movement that has roiled France since the Macron government announced an increase in fuel taxes last November. “Macron worries about the end of the world,” explained one protester. “We worry about the end of the month.” Many American households share the same worry, and for good reason.

There is a way, however, to make carbon pricing a good fit with the Green New Deal: Return the money to the people as equal dividends for all. Economically, carbon dividends would reduce inequality, and at the same time provide everyone with an incentive to reduce their own carbon footprint. Politically, they would help to win broad and durable public support for a robust climate policy. Ethically, they would give concrete expression to the principle that the gifts of nature—in this case, the atmosphere’s limited capacity to absorb carbon safely—belong to each person in common and equal measure.

The Green New Deal will not be limited to a single policy or a single piece of legislation. Like its namesake of the 1930s, it will comprise a set of programs that together advance the goal of building a greener and more inclusive economy. The proponents of Social Security did not discount the need for the Civilian Conservation Corps or the National Labor Relations Board. In the

same way, today’s proponents of strong environmental regulations, public investments in clean energy, and robust carbon pricing should see each other as allies, not rivals.

THE CLIMATE POLICY LITMUS TEST

The litmus test for effective climate policy is whether it keeps enough fossil fuel in the ground to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above their pre-industrial level. Many policies can contribute to this, but the only way to be absolutely certain that we achieve it is to put a hard ceiling on the amount of fossil carbon we allow to enter our economy and then ratchet it down steadily over time.

The most straightforward way to do this is to issue carbon permits up to the level set by the ceiling. If the target is to cut emissions by 85 percent in 30 years, for example, this means cutting emissions by 6 percent each year. At every tanker port, pipeline terminal, and coal

mine head, fossil fuel corporations would be required to surrender one permit for each ton of carbon they bring into the economy.

When these permits are auctioned—as now happens quarterly under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative for power plants in the Northeastern states—firms will bid what they expect to recoup from higher prices paid by consumers. The carbon price is the result of this limit on supply.

How high the price will go cannot be known in advance. It will depend on, among other things, how quickly and how far renewable-energy costs continue to fall and on how much governments invest in alternative transportation.

Extrapolating from past experience, however, we would expect a 6 percent per year reduction in the supply of fossil fuels to translate into roughly a 10 percent per year increase in their price. If so, the price of gasoline and other fossil fuels would double in about seven years and quadruple in fifteen.

PART II TOWARD A CARBON-FREE ECONOMY

c h a r t d ata s o u r c e : n at u r a l r e s o u r c e s d e f e n s e c o u n c i l

If other Green New Deal policies dramatically lower consumer demand for fossil fuels, the price increase will be smaller.

Indeed, if these other policies are so successful that they achieve the targeted emissions reduction on their own, the supply limit will be redundant and the permit price will fall to zero. Like fire insurance, in this case a carbon price would turn out to be unnecessary—but optimism is not a good reason to forgo insurance.

To guarantee that we meet the target, it is crucial that the Green

We know these things will help, but we cannot know exactly how much.

Today, we’re past the stage where just hoping for the best is good enough. We need to make absolutely certain that we cut emissions decisively in the coming years. And we need to face up to the reality that comes with this objective: higher prices on fossil fuels.

excess demand and congestion. To prevent this, a parking fee is charged that limits demand to fit the lot’s capacity. Every month, the proceeds from the fee are distributed in equal payments to everyone who works in the building. Those who take public transport or bicycle to work come out well ahead: They pay nothing and get their share of the revenue. Those who carTHE CARBON DIVIDEND pool to work more or less The carbon dividend— break even. And those returning revenue from who commute daily in a carbon permit auctions single-occupancy vehicle or carbon taxes to the pay more into the revenue people—provides a way pot than they get back.

Carbon dividends apply the same Exceeding Our Clean-Energy Targets logic to parking 2006 U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY’S 10-YEAR PREDICTIONS MADE IN 2006 COMPARED WITH ACTUAL 2016 RESULTS fossil carbon in the difference atmosphere.

6.79 CO2 Emissions –24% 5.17 (billion tons) Everyone gets Total energy 115.6 the same divi–17% 96.5 consumption (quads) dend, regardless 2,235 Coal power – 45% 1,240 generation (TWh) of their own car769 Natural gas power bon footprint, +79% 1,380 generation (TWh) so everyone has 58 Wind & solar power +383% 280 generation (TWh) an incentive to Installed solar 0.8 reduce their use +4,813% 39.3 capacity (GW) of fossil fuels.

17.8 Installed wind 82.0 +361% capacity (GW) Those who fly often in airplanes, to mesh carbon pricing New Deal include a hard heat and cool bigger with the goal of building trajectory for reduchomes, and so on, will pay an economy that is more ing emissions. Just setmore in higher fuel prices equitable as well as more ting a carbon price and than they receive in divisustainable. hoping it will do the job dends. But the majority The idea can be illusisn’t enough: It must be of households consume trated with an analogy. anchored to the trajeclower-than-average tory. Likewise, just invest- Imagine that 1,000 people amounts of fossil fuels, work in an office building ing in mass transit and because the average is whose parking lot has only pulled up by the outsize hoping for the best, or 300 spaces. If everyone passing fuel economy carbon footprints of the could park for free, the standards and hoping for top 1 percent. As a result, result would be chronic the best, isn’t enough. they come out ahead in

sheer pocketbook terms, without even counting the environmental benefits of reducing emissions.

A recent study that analyzed the net impact of carbon dividends in the U.S. with a price of $50 per ton of carbon dioxide found that average incomes in the poorest tenth of the population would go up by about 5 percent; in the richest tenth, they would go down by about 1 percent.

Carbon dividends alone would not be enough to reverse the nation’s enormous income inequality, but they would be a step in the right direction.

Some revenue from carbon pricing could be used for public investment, too. Spending by local, state, and federal governments accounts for roughly one-quarter of fossil fuel use. Recycling a comparable fraction of the revenue to them would keep government whole. By earmarking a fair share of public investment for communities that have suffered disproportionate environmental harm from the fossil-fueled economy—from the polluted neighborhoods in urban areas to coalcountry communities afflicted by mountaintop mining and leaking piles of coal ash—this, too, would advance the goal of building a more inclusive economy.

GREEN NEW DEAL

BEYOND “EAT YOUR BROCCOLI”

Too often, climate change has been framed exclusively as a threat that requires the present generation to make sacrifices for the sake of future generations. The result is to give climate policy an “eat your broccoli” flavor: You need to swallow it even if you don’t like it.

A key breakthrough of the Green New Deal is to reframe the clean-energy transition as something that will benefit working people here and now, too.

The clean-energy transition will create millions of new jobs here and now.

It will bring us cleaner air and public-health improvements here and now. With carbon dividends in the policy mix, it will lift net incomes for the majority of people while trimming them for the top 1 percent with their outsize carbon footprints.

These here-and-now benefits can change the climate policy narrative.

A Green New Deal can taste so good that even Americans who are still not sure about the longterm impacts of climate destabilization will welcome it.

James K. Boyce is a senior fellow at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Case for Carbon Dividends.

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A public charging station for electric vehicles at a parking lot in Bismarck, North Dakota

ownership and government subsidies obsolete—thereby revolutionizing mobility for the working poor, elderly, disabled, and everyone else.

THE AVAILABILITY OF charging infra-

structure presents another equity challenge. Early electric-vehicle adopters typically live in single-family homes where they can plug the car into a 120volt outlet overnight or install faster chargers. But people who live in apartment buildings or other multifamily units are at a distinct disadvantage.

Drivers of color who lack home charging must rely on mapping out charging stations using mobile apps to circumnavigate charging deserts—minority neighborhoods in and around many major cities as well as rural areas where no charging facilities exist. Some municipalities like Seattle have mandated that developers of new commercial and residential buildings incorporate EVs into their plans, but resistance continues from groups like the National Association of Home Builders that do not support building codes that would facilitate wiring new homes and rental units for charging, arguing that doing so would increase housing prices.

Living in charging deserts amplifies “range anxiety,” how far a car runs before needing a charge. Supermarkets like Whole Foods or big-box stores like Walmart that often have charging stations aren’t usually found in most communities of color—unless they are gentrifying. Despite these barriers, the Union of Concerned Scientists survey

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found that nearly 60 percent of prospective buyers who are people of color considering a plug-in electric vehicle would consider it “highly convenient” to use a fast charging station nearby for 10 minutes twice a week.

Rural areas also lack reliable charging infrastructure, and long-distance treks must be mapped out well in advance, as Wilson of the EVADC club did on a recent trip to Vermont: He had to modify his route once he crossed the Green Mountain State border. The lack of public chargers combined with absence of light trucks from the EV model roster has produced a cohort of city-dwelling EV drivers. But the rural driving landscape may be disrupted when Tesla unveils its first-ever electric pickup truck in mid-November, with Ford and General Motors expected to follow suit.

As part of its multibillion-dollar federally imposed penalties for falsifying diesel emissions data, Volkswagen established Electrify America, a $2 billion nationwide charging project.

Roughly 3,000 new chargers will be available by the end of 2019. Charging prices vary based on minutes at the charger and other factors. (Other private companies are in the charging infrastructure mix along with Tesla, which has deployed charging stations only available to Tesla owners.)

During this transition period, municipalities and electric utility companies must work on deploying a public charging infrastructure that eradicates charging deserts and avoids the mistakes of the digital revolution.

Early adopters typically live in single-family homes where they can plug an electric car in overnight.

But people who live in apartments or other multifamily units are at a disadvantage —unless the system provides more chargers.

“When we talk about the EV divide, that’s the risk,” says Tracey Woods, vice president of operations for the American Association of Blacks in Energy. “We have two or three rounds [of development] and, you know what, we’ve left this community out! By then we’ve moved on: We’ve seen that in other technology breakthroughs and paradigm shifts that occur such as 5G—we don’t have fiber everywhere.”

Meanwhile, Trump is firmly yoked to the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and oil industry groups like the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Western States Petroleum Association that are fighting charging, ZEV mandates, and utility charging plans in Arizona, California, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, and Massachusetts. ALEC, another Kochfunded enterprise, is behind the spate of astronomical EV fee increases.

Big Oil, however, may have met its match in Big Electric, which is mostly happy to countenance a transition (its distaste for solar notwithstanding) that gives it newfound relevance in the clean-energy revolution and reels in environmental and public-sector allies in this particular fight against fossil fuels. Yet federalism means that 50 states each get to go their own way.

Trying to beat powerful adversaries in a fight with global ramifications demands much more than a Green New Deal and Democratic control of the White House and Congress.

With roughly one million cars on the road, electric cars are now a permanent fixture in the mobility firmament. Some minds have indeed shifted, and car-crushing exercises are unlikely to reoccur. The question that few can answer at this juncture is whether electric cars are a niche phenomenon coveted by a few as a cheaper means of commuting and traveling or whether the U.S. moves decisively to include low- and moderate-income people of all races in the next phase of the clean-energy revolution that is vital to the survival of every species.

MOBILITY

This article is a part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

Will Americans Support a Big Green Government?

What will it take to restore the popular faith in government that a green transition requires?

BY JE F F FAU X

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lunar landing, trust in government was at about 75 percent. And it was even higher when Lyndon Johnson launched the Great Society.

Creating distrust in government was a bipartisan project, made politically fashionable by Ronald Reagan and further promoted by the Wall Street–infected Democrats who succeeded him. It was Bill Clinton who pronounced the original New Deal dead: “The era of big government is over.”

It wasn’t over, of course. It was hidden behind a smoke screen of outsourcing to private profit-making contractors—further attenuating the connection between the taxes people pay and the services they get. A Cornell University study in 2012—the midst of Democrat Barack Obama’s presidency—found that 40 percent of Americans on Medicare, 53 percent of those with student loans, and

Most Registered Voters Think Global Warming Is Happening

A Majority Think Global Warming Should be a High Priority for Congress

98%

92%

85% 74%

72%

70% 57% 42%

36%

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LIBERAL DEMS

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17% ALL REG VOTERS

T

he Green New Deal is a big complex idea. Pulling it off requires a big competent government.

Yes, the bulk of the new jobs and opportunities will be in the private sector, and much of the work will be done through states and localities. But getting even close to where scientists say we need to be over the next three decades will require a vastly expanded federal workforce of scientists, engineers, managers, planners, technicians, and skilled bureaucrats armed with ample budgets and the authority to regulate more of our lives.

We do not lack either talent or precedents. FDR’s New Deal, JFK’s man on the moon, LBJ’s War on Poverty inspired large numbers of Americans to enter government service. Today, we have an ample pool of educated, energetic people discontent with their prospects in a marketplace culture where the wealth and opportunities are hogged by fewer and fewer people at the top.

But they will need strong public support through a long, politically painful process of trial and error.

And unfortunately, decades of relentless corporate-financed propaganda aimed at delegitimating the very idea of government has left us with a civilian public sector that is diminished, demoralized, and discredited.

Trust in government is at an alltime low. In April, a Pew poll reported that only 17 percent of Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time, just slightly less than the 19 percent toward the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. When John Kennedy proposed the much less politically difficult eight-year project for a

polls from december 2018. base: registered american voters

25 percent receiving food stamps believed that they did not receive any government benefits.

Democrats’ eyes roll as they mock the man who famously shouted at his Democratic senator, “Keep your government’s hands off my Medicare.”

Typically left out of the story is that the senator responded that he certainly would.

Most Americans recognize that global warming is a problem. But despite the roughly 40 years of scientific research grown to a virtual consensus, forecasts of catastrophic change that will wreck their own lives strike some skeptics as just that—forecasts by experts who cannot predict tomorrow’s weather with 100 percent accuracy.

Those old enough might also remember the near-consensus of 1970s experts that the world was running out of oil.

For most of us, who cannot by ourselves evaluate the science, it is a matter of weighing probabilities. So far, given the natural inclination of humans to discount the future, asking Americans who live paycheck to paycheck to make major changes in their lives today in order to reduce the risk that the Maldives or even Miami Beach will be underwater by 2050 has not been an easy sell.

A majority say they are willing to see their taxes raised by a dollar or two—but not much more. Indeed, the Green New Deal itself is in part a way of getting around the resistance to high carbon taxes by promising that public investments and regulation can do better with less apparent costs to voters’ pocketbooks.

“You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose,” famously said the late Mario Cuomo. The campaign for the Green New Deal correctly understands that it needs both: the stark prose of doomsday science and the poetic vision of building a better world.

Government’s leadership in molding the future is firmly in our democracy’s 200-year economic-development tradition, which includes visionary infrastructure projects, subsidies for critical technologies, and land grants to settle the West.

More recently, before Reagan pushed his party down the rightwing rathole, Republican Dwight

GREEN

c h a r t d ata s o u r c e : ya l e p r o g r a m o n c l i m at e c h a n g e c o m m u n i c at i o n ; c e n t e r f o r c l i m at e c h a n g e c o m m u n i c at i o n at g e o r g e m a s o n u n i v e r s i t y

NEW DEAL

Eisenhower launched big longterm investments in higher education, low-income housing, and transportation, and promoted a National Goals Commission. The Environmental Protection Agency was established and the Clean Air Act made law under Republican Richard Nixon. In the late 1970s, coalitions from business, labor, and the Congress proposed industrial policies to arrest the slide in America’s international competitiveness—a forerunner of the Green New Deal’s call for making the U.S. a leader in alternative-fuel technologies.

The Ocasio-Cortez/Markey Green New Deal resolution calls for a “national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.” But the Green New Deal is an even tougher test of our democracy’s capacity for collective action. Like all wars, World War II required the blood sacrifice of those who fought. But for most Americans, who had been mired in ten years of economic depression, the war brought prosperity. Nor did FDR’s case for the New Deal ask the people to accept less of the American dream of material abundance. He promised more.

When today’s voters ask where the Green New Deal will take them, the answer is not so clear. Some advocates assure them life would be pretty much the same but with more electric cars, solar panels, and windmills. Others insist that it will require a radical change in lifestyles and values—but what that means remains murky.

Naomi Klein, whose book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal is a popular text for the movement, tells us we need a radical change in where we live, where we go, and what we eat. Not to worry, she assures us, this will require sacrifices only for shareholders of polluting corporations and “the wealthiest 10-20 percent of humanity.” She glosses over the reality that in a world of almost eight billion humans, the richest 20 percent certainly includes almost all Americans.

Green economists have credibly

made the case that a sustainable-energy future could create new jobs and opportunities. But the typical voter will want to know: What is the plan for me when on Friday I lose my job that is directly or indirectly dependent on our current wasteful system? Will I have a better-paying green one on Monday?

WE ARE RACING TIME, so the Green

Creating distrust in government was a bipartisan project, begun

by Ronald Reagan and furthered by Wall Street Democrats like Bill Clinton, who declared, “The era of big government is over.”

New Deal needs to become operational fast. Speed is also necessary to establish credibility that democratic government and national planning can deliver.

It should therefore be front-loaded with easy-to-understand projects that deliver tangible benefits in the form of jobs and services, such as retrofitting homes, improving mass transit, and building smart energy grids. It should also end counterproductive costly programs, such as the federal insurance subsidies for people who keep rebuilding their homes in flood-prone coastal areas.

Investments in new technology take time to produce results, so they also have to be started early. And they have to be big enough to spread the risks and transparent enough to avoid charges of cronyism. Done properly, a Green New Deal can operate cumulatively to rebuild the trust in government on which it depends.

The good news is that the ideological space is opening. As economic stress has spread into the middle class, the Reagan/Clinton deification of the free market certainly has lost credibility, particularly among the young, who are no longer spooked by the word “socialism.” Large majorities favor government-guaranteed access to health care and more federal investment in education and infrastructure and regulation of guns.

Moreover, according to a September Pew poll, 64 percent of Americans agree that distrust of government makes it harder to solve the country’s problems. And 84 percent think it’s possible to reverse it.

Like the original New Deal, the green one is primarily a project of the Democratic Party. So there is no way forward unless Democrats stop dancing around the need for big government for fear of being charged

with being big spenders. The Republican claim to be the party of fiscal responsibility has been a sham since the Reagan years. The shameless tax giveaways by nominally conservative Republicans should finally embolden Democrats to pursue fiscal policies that strengthen the country and not the country club.

But the country is more than the Democratic base. Acceptance of a federal civilian government with increased power will not float on rhetorical crosscurrents of identity politics that divide rather than unite.

Certainly, social justice and equity needs to be built into the design of a post-carbon society. The poor and disadvantaged, who will be most affected by global warming, need special help.

But they themselves may not be all that enthusiastic about transition— even if it is labeled as “just”—because they have less ability to sacrifice shortterm financial security for long-term goals. Moreover, when the dominoes fall from the dismantling of carboncontaminating industries (which go far beyond coal and oil), the number and types of people who feel unjustly treated will surely rise.

THREE YEARS INTO Donald Trump’s

vile kleptocracy, this might seem like the worst of times to make the case for policies that depend on honest, capable government. On the other hand, the Trump scandals and outrages have helped create the conditions for much stronger campaign finance and conflict-of-interest laws, which are absolutely essential to rebuilding the credibility of the public sector.

Moreover, the willingness of some medium-rank deep-state officials to risk blowing the whistle on Trump has demonstrated the value of smart, dedicated bureaucrats.

The Green New Deal will not make its public servants rich. So the rewards will come from the respect of the country for the job they do.

One of John Kennedy’s first goals as president was to make the government’s treatment of its workers a model for the private sector.

In a famous episode, he publicly celebrated Frances Kelsey, a midlevel analyst with the Food and Drug

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The typical voter will want to know: What is the plan for me when on Friday I lose my job that is dependent on our current system?

Will I have a better-paying green one on Monday?

The process took another step forward in the mid-1970s. In part inspired by the bicentennial of the American Revolution, citizens and officials all over the country held public dialogues over their collective future. Many produced specific plans—visions of what California or Maine or Atlanta could be like in the year 2000. Some addressed the questions of energy use and environmental sustainability; others, land use planning. Some, the more difficult questions of race and gender relations.

But all that stopped dead with the election of 1980. What was the point of a collective plan for the future in an era of radical individualism? As Reagan’s ideological partner Margaret Thatcher famously lectured the Anglo-American world: “There is no such thing as society.”

The conservative conceit is that progress cannot be made by government, only by individuals voluntarily cooperating in their own self-interest, which often turns out to create a vacuum filled by corporations. But as the Pew poll also reports, the decline in trust in government has been associated with a low level of individuals’ trust in each other. Underneath the distrust of democratic government is a distrust of democracy.

Eventually, climate change—

bringing floods, fires, dislocated migrants, and the need for unprecedented global cooperation—will force more power into the hands of central government. If history is any guide, the dangers of authoritarianism are real. Polls over the last several years report that 25 to 30 percent of Americans say they would support a military coup. The persistent 35 to 40 percent who remain in Trump’s camp no matter what tells us that fascist sentiment is now closer to the surface of our politics than many of us had thought.

Like the Green New Deal, the restoration of our citizens’ faith in our democracy—and themselves as citizens—is a project full of unknowns.

But it is essential. Designing ways for national climate change strategies to be informed by local priorities, rather than by a tussle between conservative corporate lobbyists and elite liberal experts, would be a start.

Assuring citizens that they will be dealt into planning for the goals of the Green New Deal may be the last chance to salvage both our planet and our democracy.

Jeff Faux was the founder, and is now distinguished fellow, of the Economic Policy Institute. His latest book is The Servant Economy.

reed sa xon / ap images

Administration who resisted enormous pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to approve the drug Thalidomide, which turned out to cause deformed babies.

Still, however dedicated and smart a new generation of green public servants may be, the prospect that a major redirection of voters’ lives will be guided by the “experts” in Washington or Silicon Valley is unnerving.

After all, “the best and the brightest” Kennedy brought into the government eventually gave us the Vietnam War. We should also remember that World War II—like all wars—brought with it the curtailment of civil liberties.

So as the debate over the Green New Deal widens, so will the question of whether we can mobilize for climate change without further undercutting our already fragile democracy—and even strengthen it. One answer might lie in returning to the models of democratic planning that were evolving until they were aborted by Reagan’s right-wing revolution.

The politics of the 1960s helped establish the right of ordinary citizens to participate in public decisions that were previously made behind closed doors. Later, the Nixon administration made many federal transfers to state and local government contingent upon long-term, locally approved plans.

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

A Green New Deal for Oakland How a progressive climate vision might help my hometown

BY J U L I A N BR AV E N O I SE C AT

O

n a mid-October afternoon, Colin Miller and I sat at a picnic table outside the Rainbow Recreation Center on the corner of Seminary Avenue and International Boulevard in Oakland, California, to discuss how a Green New Deal might transform these asphalt plains in my hometown.

Miller, 35, who lives up the block, is the coordinator of the Oakland Climate Action Coalition, a 35-organization alliance working to influence a citywide plan to reduce emissions 56 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.

Their goal is to make that plan as equitable as possible by prioritizing investments in the poorest and most polluted neighborhoods, like this one in East Oakland.

In his rectangular glasses, cargo pants, hiking boots, and red teacher strike T-shirt, Miller, who is originally from Eugene, Oregon, has a real down-to-the-urban-farms vibe. He is a revolutionary, in a 21st-century sense. “Our mission is to build the resilience of frontline communities for a just transition away from extractive industries and towards a regenerative economy,” he said.

The climate crisis, perhaps more than any other issue, demands an economy-wide transformation.

The power of the Green New Deal is, quite simply, that it is the first national platform to take the scale, breadth, and speed of that transformation seriously. But while the national movement for an FDR-style environmental program has mostly unfolded in the halls of Congress, on cable television, and across our Twitter feeds, Miller has been organizing for a real-life green transition that doesn’t have to wait for the outcome of the 2020 election. In November, Oakland Climate Action will host one of its last neighborhood meetings in the gymnasium of the Rainbow

Rec Center so that the community can vote on what it actually wants to see in what is effectively a local Green New Deal. And in early 2020, Oakland will learn if it has won a coveted multimillion-dollar Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) implementation grant from the state—a down payment that would enable the city to become one of the first to break ground on a vision that remains, for most of the country, contingent on the political fortune and legislative will of Democrats.

The place where Miller and I sat, the corner of International and Seminary, is smack-dab in the heart of the concrete gridiron of East Oakland, a rectangular swath of the city about a dozen square miles in size bordered by Interstate 880 to the west, Interstate 580 to the east, Lake Merritt to the north, and the City of San Leandro to the south. East Oakland is home to about a fifth of the city’s residents—mostly black, Latino, and low-income. Hemmed in by freeways, dotted with polluting industries, littered with the skeletons of old factories, redlined into real-estate oblivion, and policed like a conflict zone, East Oakland is what environmental justice advocates describe as a “frontline community” owing to its position on the hazardous edge of poverty and contamination.

But it wasn’t always this way. Oakland, a port city, was once called the “Detroit of the West.” In prior decades, residents—many, black families on the Great Migration out of the Jim Crow South—found jobs on the docks, at the railyards, and in the assembly lines that were once the economic engines of the region. But in the 1970s, in a story that has become all too familiar, those jobs started to leave. Gangs, heroin, and crack cocaine filled the void. In the 1990s, the San Francisco Examiner took to calling Oakland

The Green New Deal is a national platform for economy-wide transformation.

Meanwhile, communities have been organizing for a reallife green transition that doesn’t have to wait for the outcome of the 2020 election.

GREEN NEW DEAL

“Murderville.” (A few years back, I knew personally three people on the city’s homicide list.) Although violent crime is now declining, the city is still regularly cited as one of the most dangerous places in America.

But while violence made Oakland notorious, pollution is what actually makes it dangerous to the largest number of residents. As Miller and I talked, a northeast breeze off the bay carried the sour metal smell of a foundry up International Boulevard. An after-school group, their superhero-themed backpacks larger than their adolescent torsos, filed into a local rec center, guided by a chaperone. The science says that particulates in the air—from the foundry as well as from the smoke produced by a local crematorium, the largest on the West Coast, combined with the exhaust spewed from the tailpipes of cars zipping along freeways—are responsible for higher rates of asthma, heart failure, stroke, and cancer. East Oakland has the lowest life expectancy of any neighborhood in Alameda County. A black child born in these flatlands will live, on average, about 15 years less than a white child born in the more affluent hills, according to the Alameda County Public Health Department.

IN THEIR LIFETIME, assuming they stay

in Oakland, that child and their family will likely pay a lot more money to be here than anyone else—at least as a proportion of their income. Nearly half of Oakland renters are housing cost burdened, according to Policy Link, which means they spend more than 30 percent of their paychecks on rent. People of color and the poor are disproportionately represented among this tenant class, with 63 percent of black households, 58 percent of Latino households, and 76 percent of very low-income households paying unsustainable proportions of their take to keep a roof over their head.

The city has talked a big game when it comes to affordable housing, according to Miller, but it has largely failed to deliver. Since 2016, when Mayor Libby Schaaf set an ambitious goal to build 17,000 new homes by 2024, Oakland has issued

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incubate black-run enterprises; and cooperative grocery stores that sell locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Something green and new for a community that has gotten a raw deal for far too long.

Miller speaks with urgency, purpose, and a hint of frustration. “People want to see change but people are also really tired of planning processes,” he told me. “Planning processes have happened before and promises have been made by the city and they haven’t been kept. A lot of folks are really cynical and skeptical.”

AS THE HOUSING crisis reaches a break-

ing point, the climate crisis also appears to be reaching some tipping points, at least regionally. A week after Miller and I hung out, dry gale force winds led Pacific Gas & Electric, the private utility monopoly, to shut off power to nearly two million Californians, including some residents of Oakland, like my mom, out of fear that downed power lines could spark wildfires. The inferno came regardless. Nearly 200,000 residents of the North Bay were forced to evacuate their homes. Ash rained down upon them as they departed cities like Santa Rosa and Lafayette. Some packed up belongings and said goodbye to structures abandoned or rebuilt after last year’s fire season. When I called from Washington, D.C., to check in, my mom described the Bay as having “an apocalyptic feeling.”

During the fires, Mom and her boyfriend took a little trip to visit a relative incarcerated at a nearby

Organizations including the Oakland Climate Action Coalition host monthly community volunteer work days as an opportunity for feedback on the City of Oakland’s development of its climate action plan.

penitentiary. They drove through one blacked-out community after another, in a brown soupy haze that engulfed parched lands as far as the eye could see, all the way to the Sierra Nevada mountain range. “The smell can be reminiscent of a fireplace, but you realize, as you breathe in, that that positive reference point is deceptive, and what you’re smelling is something that’s toxic and choking and polluting,” Mom told me over the phone. “The air in the Bay was thick and particulate enough that it made you feel like breathing was a chore, and I felt fatigued.”

As I write, the air in Oakland is unsafe, the power is off, the homes are unaffordable, and the fires are coming. People are living in shacks on streets built and run on the blueprint of American apartheid. The soon-tobe Atlantises of Miami, New Orleans, and Houston are often positioned as ground zero for the climate crisis— and justly so—but in Oakland, the imperative to act is just as strong. In our current market, the public purse, which is, at least in theory, more concerned with people than profit, is likely the only way to bend the boom toward justice. Oakland needs to win one of the few TCC implementation grants, worth up to $30 million and funded by revenues raised from the state’s cap-and-trade program, to get started down that road. (The coalition won a planning grant worth $170,000 last year, so things are looking up, but in a world of scarcity and competition, nothing is a sure bet.)

The TCC grants, which prioritize

c r o s s p o l l i n at o r s

construction permits for more than 10,000 new units. But just 7 percent of that construction will produce homes for low-income families—far less than the 28 percent Schaaf promised.

As a consequence, Oakland’s fastest-growing population might actually be its homeless. A one-night count in 2019 enumerated the city’s street population at 4,071—up from 2,761 just two years earlier. Homeless encampments and shantytowns have risen in parks, under freeway overpasses, and in the shadows of BART tracks across the city.

With companies outgrowing Silicon Valley and San Francisco, the Oakland housing market has reached unprecedented highs, turning historically disinvested areas into targets for speculators. Fortress condominiums plated with floor-to-ceiling glass windows and filled with tech bros and millennials are sprouting up in neighborhoods where, not so long ago, you would be hard-pressed to find a vegetable, let alone an oat milk latte. With market-rate rent rising at more than four times the rate of inflation, according to RentCafé, longtime Oaklanders are departing for distant suburbs over the hills in Concord, Modesto, and Stockton. Some commute as long as two hours each way daily to maintain blue-collar and service jobs, and gigs in the proliferating app economy of their hometown.

There is an overwhelming sense that the city is in the throes of reconstruction—just not for the people who already live here. “So often more bike lanes and more trees are only going to benefit people who are going to move here afterwards and not people already here in the community,” Miller told me. “We’re aiming for urban greening without displacement.”

Although the community has yet to vote on its final priorities, Miller and the Oakland Climate Action Coalition envision an unprecedented build-out of green and affordable housing near BART stations; bus stops serviced by electric vehicles; parks linked by bike lanes on streets lined with trees that stretch from the hills to the shore; community-owned and -installed solar panels on roofs and in public spaces; a distinct “Cultural Zone” to

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

equity and anti-displacement alongside emissions reductions, could be a model for a federal Green New Deal and for similar climate programs in states across the country. Adrien Salazar, an organizer with the NY Renews coalition that recently won passage of the New York state Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, says his colleagues based their own equitable-investment targets on California law, which mandates that at least 25 percent of climate funds go to frontline communities. “The California climate investments program has really set the standard for the rest of the country to mobilize massive amounts of funding for greenhouse gas reductions in the communities that most need it,” he said. “It definitely serves as a model for other states and for something similar at a national Green New Deal level.”

IRONICALLY, WHAT LOOKS like a nation-

al model was, for California’s environmental justice communities, actually an inadequate compromise. The TCC grants are but one piece of the state’s Rube Goldberg-ed cap-and-trade regime. Over the last 13 years, California has developed its own emissions reductions policies through a series of bills whose alphabet soup names—AB & SB 32, AB & SB 535, AB & SB 398, etc.—are about as mystifying as their contents. In broad strokes, though, these laws developed carbon-trading programs that put a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental justice advocates, however, criticize this approach for allowing big corporations to actually increase hot spots of pollution in communities on the fence lines of industrial sites. “Here’s how it’s fucked up,” said Mari Rose Taruc, former cochair of the California Environmental Justice Advisory Committee. “The largest polluters and richest polluters can get away with polluting more because they can just pay for it.”

Environmental justice groups were originally opposed to cap-and-trade on these grounds—and the research appears to justify their position. But when implementation of a market mechanism appeared inevitable, they decided to pivot, going along with

California is greening concrete jungles like Oakland, and subsidizing next-generation transportation infrastructure in the most polluted hightraffic areas.

cap-and-trade while arguing that revenues raised from carbon credits should help clean up the harms in communities. Cap-and-trade revenue now goes into the California Air Resources Board Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The state legislature votes on how to allocate those funds, which are administered through 20 state agencies that control programs like the TCC grants. Environmental justice groups wrote the principles governing how those funds are spent.

It all sounds a bit dull and bureaucratic (and it is), but it also genuinely transformed how environmental programs function in California, said Taruc.

Now, the state isn’t just planting trees in suburban parks, it’s also greening concrete jungles like Oakland. And instead of only building electric-car charging stations in affluent neighborhoods where families can afford to buy Teslas, California is now subsidizing next-generation transportation infrastructure in the most polluted high-traffic areas. Advocates and policymakers are now working on a region-by-region and sector-by-sector strategy to maximize job creation in a clean-energy transition built from the ground up.

Lessons learned in this grand California experiment could reach all the way to the Beltway. “I’d like to see California keep pushing the left edge of the conversation so that the federal bill can be as good as it can be at that stage,” said Katie Valenzuela, the policy and political director of the California Environmental Justice Alliance. “California has an important role to play in setting that vision and in showing what’s possible in an economy as large as ours.”

Which brings us back to Miller.

After about an hour of conversation, Miller and I got up from that picnic table and started walking back up Seminary. When I was a kid, my mom would hang a left right here at International on our drive to baseball practice. I haven’t lived in Oakland since I graduated high school. But despite all the changes this decade, the city—perpetually rattling to the bass of hip-hop streaming out of rolled-down car windows; nourished by corner stores, mercados, and street vendors; patrolled by cops,

GREEN NEW DEAL

gangs, and preachers; and inhabited by tough, big-hearted, and slicktongued folk who often refer to their burgh simply as “The Town”—still feels like home. With the invisible hand of gentrification caught in a boxing match with the defiant fist of a Green New Deal, I wonder how long that familiarity will last. A warming world makes change both inevitable and imperative. The question is what that change will look like.

Businesses, members of Congress, and the next president will have some say over all of this—but it’s also going to be people like Miller, fighting to make sure our city remembers the community when it takes on the climate, who shape that future.

After a few minutes’ walk, we reached Miller’s place, a townhouse that doubles as the coalition office, a few blocks up from the rec center. The property, which Miller shares with a few roommates, has a half-acre backyard somewhere between a garden and urban farm planted with 30 fruit trees: persimmons, pears, apples, plums, peaches, mulberries, and nectarines. Miller and his roommates maintain a coop with four chickens (there used to be six, but raccoons nabbed two unlucky ones), and a beehive. One of the housemates sleeps in a yurt out back. A friendly fluffy cat named Gandalf the Orange patrols the plot. Miller told me he hopes to someday hand this little green oasis over to the Sogorea Te Land Trust, which is run by a local Ohlone Indigenous woman—his own share of reparative justice. But first, Miller needs to win a Green New Deal for his neighbors. Although the pieces are falling into place, Miller is weary.

“I don’t want to waste the community’s time,” he said when we parted ways at his front porch. “We don’t have time to waste.”

Julian Brave NoiseCat (@jnoisecat) is vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, a think tank, and narrative change director for The Natural History Museum, an artist and activist collective. He is also a correspondent for Real America With Jorge Ramos and contributing editor with Canadian Geographic.

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Toxic Injustices

Priority for abused communities must pervade every aspect of a Green New Deal.

BY DE R R I C K Z . JA C K S O N

A

sobering afternoon in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago with Antonio Lopez showed what any Green New Deal must undo, let alone do.

Five miles southwest of the glittering downtown Loop, this gutsy neighborhood of some 74,000 people, 85 percent of whom are Latino, is a crowning citadel of organizing on behalf of environmental justice—that currently remains under toxic assaults that no privileged white district puts up with.

We drove by a mayonnaise factory with a multitude of tractor-trailer containers in its distribution lot. The facility was next to an elementary school and right across the street from a tree-lined row of brick homes. “This is where we first realized we needed to talk about diesel fumes in our community,” said Lopez, senior adviser to the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO). “Kids should not arrive and leave school hit with noise and pollution from trucks rolling in all day.”

We then swung by the site of a oncebellowing coal plant that was shuttered in 2012 by community protest.

It sits on 70 acres of land, a footprint that could handle five Superdome football stadiums. But the celebration is now over as new developers, aided by a nearly $20 million tax break, are in the process of tearing the plant down to build a one-million-squarefoot e-commerce distribution facility.

The developers promise 360 construction jobs and 178 permanent jobs.

But with a projected 188 truck loading berths, activists fear a nullification of their work, with coal soot being supplanted by the belching of yet more diesel exhaust and the rumble of hundreds more trucks a day on streets where traffic already crawls painfully at rush hour. Studies have shown a strong link between traffic pollution and asthma.

A 2011 editorial in the British medical

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journal Thorax warned, “Diesel exhaust is somewhat akin to tobacco smoke.”

Next was La Villita Park, which by itself is a 21-acre urban paradise for play and picnics. It was developed over a remediated Superfund site polluted by the manufacture and storage of coal tar, asphalt, and roofing products from 1911 to 1982. The contamination bedeviled nearby residents in rain runoff onto their sidewalks and lawns.

Complaints to state and federal regulators led to both cleanup and community engagement as to its next use.

Yet, like the coal plant, the job of restoration is hardly done. Directly across the street from La Villita is a fenced-off area blocking access to a canal contaminated with heavy metals. A City of Chicago sign reads in both Spanish and English: “Discharges may contain bacteria that can cause illness.”

Lopez shook his head when he pointed out the sign. “We had to fight for even that sign to be put up to keep our kids safe,” he said. “The water is so bad it sometimes bubbles up [with methane].”

We drove on, by Little Village’s high school. Completed in 2005, it was built in response to a hunger strike by residents seeking better education facilities. But it also sits across from a packaging plant. Lopez said there have long been complaints about the smells from the plant, which sometimes force the school’s sports teams to alter the location of their practices or cancel them altogether.

That night, LVEJO held a community-organizing meeting to prepare for a hearing with state environmental protection officials on the packaging company’s operating permit. LVEJO Executive Director Kim Wasserman, the 2013 North American recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize for accomplishments including the shutdown of the coal plant, informed the audience that she is often asked why

While African Americans make up 12.6 percent of the population, they account for 24.2 percent of people who live within a half-mile of a brownfield site.

can’t the community demand that the plant be shut down. She said, “Shutting plants is hard to do, but we can try to control what is covered in their permit so they can continue to function safely.”

After the meeting, Wasserman and Lopez talked of other victories, such as the restoration of a bus line to fill in a huge gap in service. One analysis found that while Little Village was similar in population to the wealthy and 79 percent white neighborhood of Lincoln Park north of downtown, Little Village had just seven intersecting bus lines, compared to 22 for Lincoln Park. Little Village is also an economic engine. It has a twomile-long collection of restaurants, bakeries, clothiers, and barbershops that Crain’s Chicago Business says does $900 million of business a year, making it the city’s second-highestgrossing shopping district after the Magnificent Mile downtown.

“We did a survey of residents for their priorities,” Wasserman said.

“They said: air quality, public transportation, open space, and rats. I can’t do anything about the rats, but we’re working on the rest.”

THAT’S WHAT AMERICA should work on

too. A key statement in the Green New Deal, introduced last February in the House by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and in the Senate by Ed Markey of Massachusetts, is that along with climate change, “pollution and environmental destruction have exacerbated systemic racial, regional, social, environmental and economic injustices.”

Acknowledging that destruction and giving full attention to the neighborhoods suffering from it is a core challenge in a Green New Deal. At the federal level, the commitment to places like Little Village had faded even before the rapacious Trump administration filled the leadership positions of environmental protection with former coal and chemical lobbyists. For instance, in a bipartisan failure of Congress, the $2 billion in annual federal funding for Superfund cleanups that existed in 1999 has gradually been cut nearly in half.

Trump’s overall attacks on science and massive rollbacks on environmental regulations and enforcement have made things much worse. A new

derrick z. jack son

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

report by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) details how Trump’s policies subject marginalized lowincome communities and communities of color to yet deeper levels of disproportionate neglect. Many studies show that such communities are far more likely than wealthier, white neighborhoods to live in close proximity to incinerators, heavy traffic zones, and industries handling toxic chemicals, spewing asthma-triggering and brain-damaging fumes.

For instance, while African Americans make up 12.6 percent of the population, they account for 24.2 percent of people who live within a half-mile of a brownfield site, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Brownfields, as defined by the EPA , are “a property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant.”

Latinos, who make up 18.1 percent of the population, make up 26.1 percent of people who live within a mile of a Superfund site. The EPA defines Superfund sites as places where hazardous waste is being “dumped, left out in the open, or otherwise improperly managed.”

Despite this disproportionate horror, the UCS report says the Trump administration has launched the fewest number of criminal cases against polluters since the Clinton administration. In a staggering comparison, the number of EPA criminal enforcement cases concluded under Trump in his third fiscal year was less than half the number done under fellow

Shipping containers are stacked high in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago.

Republican President George W. Bush, no environmental hero himself. The Trump EPA finished only 60 criminal enforcement cases, while the Bush EPA concluded 138 in its third fiscal year.

A CITY THAT FEELS left out because of

this federal abdication is Waukegan, 42 miles north of Chicago. Residents there are fighting for much tighter emissions controls on a medical-sterilizing plant because of its use of carcinogenic ethylene oxide (EtO). They are particularly angry because protests in the Chicago suburb of Willowbrook forced the closing of another sterilizing facility.

But Willowbrook is mostly white and Asian American. Waukegan is much more heavily Latino and African American. A bill to ban EtO use in densely populated areas recently passed the Illinois House but has so far stalled in the Senate. The Chicago Tribune reported that a bipartisan coalition forced the shuttering of the Willowbrook plant, but there has been no kumbaya encore for Waukegan residents, who say both the state and federal departments of environmental protection are moving too slowly on their toxic pollution.

Residents like Diana Burdette, who believes she was badly sickened by EtO when she used to live closer to the facility, said their fight is ground zero for a Green New Deal. “This is proof that environmental justice is not just about plants and sun,” she said. “It’s about all kinds of socioeconomic reforms and racial equity. Why are we being asked to be home to this toxic employer when Willowbrook isn’t? We could be a tech or research hub for green energy. We’re

GREEN NEW DEAL

screaming at the top of our lungs and we’re barely being heard. It feels like we’re being targeted.”

Activist Edgar Sandoval drove me around Waukegan to show me other sites of pollution and former pollution.

We went past a still-operating coal plant, which state regulators this year said has been polluting groundwater with coal ash. We went by a Superfund site left behind by an asbestos plant.

Waukegan’s waterfront is plagued with four Superfund sites from a history of heavy manufacturing and energy production involving asbestos, coke, solvents, and PCBs. “This shows you that a Green New Deal can’t be about any one thing,” Sandoval said. “But we have to change the vision so history doesn’t repeat itself.

We’ve got to figure out a way to make these places usable for clean energy and help people get into the green economy in ways that matter to them.

“Take public transportation. Lowincome people are driving old beaters around that can’t possibly get any gas mileage. They’re not going to run out to buy electric cars. They need transportation for their second and third shifts.”

OTHER THAN BESIEGED communities, no one feels the sting of ineffectiveness more than the legion of frustrated scientists and program administrators at the EPA . In a feature for the Prospect last winter, I wrote about how the agency’s Region 5, which covers Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota and contains more Superfund sites than any other region, had seen its ranks slashed from 1,250 staffers in 2010 to 987.

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Trump EPA, after lobbying by the Veolia energy and waste management company, canceled an Obama-era EPA monitoring program on an incinerator that East St. Louis–area residents said was making them sick with possible lead, arsenic, and mercury emissions.

All this matters greatly if there is to be a socially just Green New Deal. Even in the agency’s diminished state, vigilant EPA scientists keep demonstrating how they can be at the heart of a just transition for marginalized commuA Superfund site on the left, and the Waukegan nities to pinpoint pollution coal plant that has been polluting groundwater with coal ash and get rid of it to enjoy greener neighborhoods. In one particular neighborhood I’ve during the Obama years when EPA save industry (i.e., polluters). visited in southeast Chicago near funding largely stagnated under “I see my work as a form of envithe heavily industrialized CaluRepublican control of Congress. ronmental justice,” Targos said. met River, EPA scientists armed In an awards ceremony this sum“So many communities are not just with air monitors and soil sample mer where her team was personally fighting to get rid of coal plants, kits are seen as allies in a ceaseless honored by Wheeler for a lead and they are trying to think about what battle against mountains of petropetroleum cleanup in a Muskegon, will replace them. By cleaning leum coke and soil poisoned with Michigan, wetland contaminated up places, we can help them feel neurotoxins like manganese dust by a former oil refinery, Targos used ownership of their spaces … if we and lead. her time onstage to unfurl a banner can connect people by cleaning But a Region 5 that has lost a asking for a “fair contract to address up places for everyone, not just for quarter of its employees in the last public health and climate change.” downtown development, that will decade cannot be everywhere.

Her union reported last spring be a start.”

Cantello said its former roster of that the number of requests issued five Superfund investigators is by the EPA’s Great Lakes office to IN LITTLE VILLAGE, part of the anger now down to two. companies for environmental test- is that activists have long been “We would not be able to impleing dropped from an average of planning what could replace polment a Green New Deal with the 43 a year by the Obama adminisluted sites. Three years ago, they EPA we have now,” Cantello said. tration to just four in a particular commissioned a study with the “We’re going to need more employeight-month period under Trump. nonprofit Delta Institute to enviees as so many are retiring.” Half Targos said she is trying to train sion the transformation of the of the remaining national staff is herself to be an environmental jus- area’s many remaining brownfield reportedly eligible for retirement tice (EJ) resource within the EPA , sites. The study said the contamiover the next four years, which since it is clear that the Trump nated areas could ultimately be could plunge the number of staffers administration has no interest in it repurposed as indoor urban farms, under 8,000, the lowest number other than for occasional show. composting facilities, commercial since the very first two years of the The UCS report found that the kitchens, street vendor sanitizing EPA , which was founded in 1970. number of small community EJ and storage, more green space, a Loreen Targos, a 33-year-old grants, which averaged about 80 water taxi dock, light retail plazas, Great Lakes remediation program a year in the first two years of the and recreation fields specifically for officer whose department cleans George W. Bush administration, people with physical challenges. up wetlands and urban rivers, is fell to less than 20 a year under Yet, city politicians green-lightprecisely the kind of young staffer Trump. The administration did this ed the massive distribution center the agency needs, embodying both year announce 50 small grants, but with a $19.7 million tax break, a commitment to science and the the total amount, $1.5 million, is even though a Natural Resources anger many of her colleagues feel choked by the $3.7 billion Wheeler Defense Council mapping of Chiin not just the Trump era but even claims his regulatory rollbacks will cago last year found that Little

derrick z. jack son

That number is now 945. A year ago, the entire EPA was down to 13,758 employees, the lowest since the Reagan era. Trump and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, propose to eliminate another 1,350 positions during the current fiscal year.

In a recent return to Region 5’s Chicago headquarters, Nicole Cantello, the head of the local union for EPA employees, said the agency is engaged in a transparent effort to demoralize and control workers even more by unilaterally rolling back family-friendly telework policies, placing new restrictions on the time union officials can spend representing their members, and limiting worker data previously shared with the union. “They no longer have to tell me who’s left,” Cantello said, referring to top EPA officials. “We’re flying blind.”

Workers who agreed to be interviewed as union members said the EPA is further attempting to discourage them by disbanding teams of experienced pollution scientists and making some inspectors cut back on enforcement—which polluters hate—and focus only on permitting—which polluters want.

“We’re not able to fulfill our mission,” said geologist Felicia Chase.

“I feel like a glamorized customer service worker—for industry.”

Greg Chomycia, who was on a now-defunct accident inspection team that had a combined 75 years of experience, said, “Our purpose is to prevent the next Bhopal here at home [referring to the 1984 Union Carbide poison gas disaster that killed thousands of people in India]. This is a field where there should be no shortcuts.”

As another stunning example of the shortcuts the Trump administration is taking with our air and water, the Better Government Association (BGA), a nonpartisan Illinois watchdog group, issued a report this fall that found that the number of EPA inspections in Region 5 plummeted from 4,706 in 2012 during the Obama administration to 840 in the last year. The BGA report documented how the

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

Village already shoulders the highest burden of bad air quality in the city.

LVEJO fellow José Acosta-Córdova, who received his master’s degree in urban planning from the University of Illinois–Chicago and has extensively studied the Little Village area, said, “To me, a just transition is not more metal shredders and anything that will make our air worse. We need to be thinking holistically about training workers for solar energy and green manufacturing. We have to talk about food sovereignty. We have so many restaurants, but can we locally source their produce? The bottom line is getting control of our land.”

Getting control of at least a say in land use is a tremendous part of a Green New Deal in environmentally aggrieved neighborhoods. Robert Bullard, a distinguished professor of urban planning at Texas Southern University, considered the “father” of environmental justice for his decades of work and books documenting racism in toxic dumping, said it is time to look at how marginalized communities are zoned.

Besides pollution, Bullard pointed out that the continued locating of industry in areas already oversaturated with it only widens the wealth divide, as homeowners in such areas do not enjoy the same rise in home values as communities without such industry.

“We have to adopt the same commonsense attitudes toward frontline communities that we have everywhere else,” Bullard said. “Common sense would say that it makes no sense to have schools across from landfills, refineries, any kind of polluting industry. We have to have a new concept of the built environment that links to community health.”

Bullard and others said that while some of the Democratic candidates are beginning to talk openly about reparations to African Americans, environmental justice offers a major chance to put talk into action for the disadvantaged in general. For instance, Bullard said that the federal formulas for funds to repair homes after catastrophic hurricanes, floods, and tornados, all being intensified by climate change, has to change from one that clearly gets wealthy homeowners on their feet before working-class communities.

“It makes no sense to have schools across from landfills, refineries, any kind of polluting industry. We have to have a new concept of the built environment that links to community health.”

“Environmental justice means restore and repair, to make sure we don’t build on inequality,” Bullard said.

Ana Baptista, director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center of New York’s New School, a leading research think tank on sustainability and environmental justice policy, is concerned that the understandable rhetoric to declare climate change a planetary emergency, such as was exhibited at this year’s United Nations climate summit, may downplay community remediation in favor of a more narrow, headlong rush to green energy. For instance, many EJ groups dismiss cap-and-trade programs that allow polluters to buy offsets while still polluting in frontline communities.

“Everyone wants to get to zero carbon emissions, but can we agree on how to do this while addressing inequality?” Baptista asked. “In the expediency to deal with a climate emergency, do we create unintended consequences, like gentrification, or put so much money into individual electric vehicles that we forget about public transportation?

“It’s not enough to say we’re going to train people for green jobs. Can we also, instead of hiring big firms, create cooperatively owned groups to train residents to themselves clean up Superfund sites and repair lead service lines? We should be thinking about scaling companies to a regional and local level to train and employ local workers. Actually having to sort and compost waste creates jobs.”

THE HOLISTIC THINKING of the environ-

mental justice community has been embodied in the Equitable & Just National Climate Platform, signed by more than 200 organizations and EJ leaders. The platform says that any meaningful climate agenda must “result in real benefits at the local and community level, including pollution reduction, affordable and quality housing, good jobs, sustainable livelihoods, and community infrastructure.”

Much of that thinking is going on in places like Providence, Rhode Island.

The city is home to innumerable former and current polluting industries.

So Providence proactively worked with its Racial and Environmental Justice

GREEN NEW DEAL

Committee to put out a climate justice plan. It is thought by many EJ leaders to be a breakthrough document resulting from collaboration at the outset, as compared to top-down models of officials devising a plan and asking for community input after the fact.

The plan calls for “green justice zones,” to explore neighborhood measures to prevent displacement when neighborhoods become more attractive to gentrification; prioritize energy efficiency, green energy, and green jobs in underserved communities; reduce diesel traffic; and increase low-carbon transit options in overburdened neighborhoods.

“What gives me hope is the process,” said Vatic Kuumba, an artist and project team member in the climate justice plan. “We know the mayor is still going to be pushed by polluters, but he is also going to be pushed by the people. Whether it’s green justice zones or creating land trusts to own land, this has the potential to be an ownership model.”

Fellow project team manager Pol Tavarez and the city’s director of sustainability, Leah Bamberger, added that there was healthy pushing in creating the process, with city officials, including those not directly involved in the climate justice plan, undergoing intense anti-racism training.

They said there already has been one major tangible result. An ordinance to charge consumers for plastic bags was vetoed by the mayor after the community and the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee said the 10-cent fee was an unfair burden on the poor.

“That told me we’re a central part of this process,” Tavarez said.

That will be the measure of success of a Green New Deal. If the community is central to the process, it has a chance to deliver a greener day.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a Pulitzerfinalist journalist, a Union of Concerned Scientists fellow, and an environmental consultant. He is author of “Environmental Justice? Unjust Coverage of the Flint Water Crisis,” a 2017 paper for the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He is a member of the Prospect’s board of directors.

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 75

The Global Challenge of Decarbonization

From Kenya to Sweden, from Britain to China, countries have made progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

BY BR I T TA N Y G I B S O N

W

e are failing the planet when it comes to climate change. Scientists have long warned that human actions will drive irreparable, longterm change to the world’s natural order, but no microphone has been loud enough to spark change equal to the size of the challenge. Nations of the world have underpowered emissions goals with relatively modest commitments like the Paris Agreement and have failed to even live up to them.

Among the world’s largest and most advanced countries, not a single one will achieve the mission of the Paris Agreement to prevent more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, under their current trajectory. Even if Canada, Japan, and the European Union met the goals they set under Paris, it would translate to temperature rises of nearly double that threshold or more. The U.S. has pulled out of the agreement, and has no goals to even meet.

These are the countries that have benefited most thus far from greenhouse gas emissions, and it should also be on them to make the largest concessions, especially when they expect credit for their green diplomatic initiatives.

But mostly thanks to the global youth-powered climate movement, the conversation around the importance of the climate crisis has intensified.

This rhetorical shift can’t be confused with action, but there are righteous initiatives in several countries around the world, and some could become widely adopted solutions.

The biggest problem to tackle remains lowering emissions levels and shifting to “cleaner” sources of energy.

As the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries develop, they

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rely on the cheapest sources of energy to sustain their growth, mostly in the form of coal. Meanwhile, the OPEC nations and their fossil fuel–dependent economies are invested in keeping the world’s second-most-valuable commodity, oil, as the world’s mostused energy source.

The world can’t quit coal or fossil fuels overnight. If every coal-fired power plant closed tomorrow, people would die as food and medicine transport would stop and most office buildings, hospitals, and homes lost power—not to mention how this would disproportionately affect poorer countries. But with deliberate investment in alternatives, countries can find their power in the form of renewable sources.

WEALTHIER COUNTRIES like France and

the U.K. have increased their share of renewable energy sources, while also implementing comparatively aggressive coal phaseout plans, according to a Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) report. However, it may be surprising to note that Kenya leads the world in clean-energy use. The East African country gets about 85 percent of all of its energy from renewable geothermal energy.

Kenya’s geothermal power project has been developing for decades, harnessing just 45 megawatts of power in 1985 and 630 megawatts today, according to The New York Times. The country of 48 million has committed to getting all power from renewable sources by 2020 with a combination of geothermal, solar, wind, and small hydro power. “We, as a country, have committed ourselves to attain 100 per cent green sufficiency by 2020 and we are on the right path towards realizing

Sweden is on a path for total net-zero emissions by 2050.

Per capita emissions there are at roughly the same level they were in the 1950s.

that target,” said President Uhuru Kenyatta, in a press release. Since President Kenyatta took over in 2013, his electricity program has gone from just 2.2 million connected households to 6.9 million, and almost every public primary school.

Kenya’s renewable-energy program creates a model for developing countries working to increase energy access while also prioritizing sustainability. The alternative is increasing access to energy using carbon-emitting sources. India, for example, followed the paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, and it is now heavily reliant on coal-fired power plants, accounting for about 70 percent of its energy generation. Although India is on track for 2 degrees Celsius of warming with its current policies, its renewable-energy transition goals will be challenging.

CHINA USES THE MOST COAL in the

world but also manufactures the most solar energy technology as well as having installed the most solar capacity. By 2018, it had already surpassed its 2020 solar energy goals. This was achievable because the Chinese Communist Party prioritized the climate crisis. The People’s Republic announced it would invest $361 billion by 2020 and create 13 million jobs in the green-energy sector. It has also implemented successful regulations on emissions and an emissions trading scheme, according to the Climate Change Performance Index’s most recent report.

China’s current policies remain, despite these investments, “highly insufficient,” according to the Climate Action Tracker. If every country made goals like China’s, the Earth would warm to between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

But its clear and directed transition to renewable resources for its highly industrial and factory-focused economy indicates the immense possibilities for improvement and change in a way that benefits the planet and provides economic stimulus with job opportunities within a growing sector of the global economy.

Additionally, China’s climate plan provides greener options for consumers, most notably with electric

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

b r i t ta p e d e r s e n / a p i m a g e s

vehicles. The People’s Republic sold more than 1.1 million electric vehicles in 2018, more than any other country.

One out of every ten vehicles sold in China this year is also expected to be electric, with that number increasing again in 2020, according to the Climate Action Tracker. The synthesis of setting strict quotas for manufacturers on fuel standards and providing subsidies for consumers to buy electric cars has bolstered China’s electric-car market unlike any other country.

China has mirrored Kenya with the goal of 100 percent renewable energy throughout the country. This means quitting coal altogether. But the fuel that powered the world’s industrial transition is easier for some countries to give up than others. Phasing out coal has rightly fallen to those countries that enjoyed fossil fuel energy on the way up.

THE U.K. WAS THE FIRST national gov-

ernment to commit to a coal phaseout.

London’s fog is today thought of as coming from the city’s rainy microclimate, but it was actually a very British way of referring to the smog and air pollution from the city’s coal-power factories. In 1960, coal powered 80 percent of Britain, but accounted for just 5 percent of energy generated in

Wind turbines on the Baltic Sea in an offshore wind farm in Sweden

2018. The phaseout, which began in 2015, will be completed by 2025. Following suit in Europe, France also has implemented a coal phaseout plan for 2022; joined by Italy and Ireland, who will be phased out by 2025; and then Denmark, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Finland in 2030. Germany, the EU’s most powerful economy, has not yet set a date for a coal phaseout, but just this year legislation was proposed to eliminate coal by 2038. The Paris Agreement insists on a 2030 coal deadline for EU member states, but even Germany’s goal surpasses other more coal-dependent EU countries, such as Poland, which has not yet made any commitments.

Outside of Europe, Canada also has implemented a coal phaseout plan, called the Powering Past Coal Alliance.

However, all other G20 countries, especially the highest coal exporters and users, don’t have long-term strategies for phasing out coal. Exporters like Australia, Indonesia, and Russia are being hit hard by declining coal demand, but this has yet to lead to transitioning away from the industry.

ONE OF THE MOST successful decarbon-

ization projects among developed countries has been in Sweden, which has reduced emissions threefold

GREEN NEW DEAL

since the 1970s. Per capita emissions in the country are at roughly the same level they were in the 1950s.

This has come at a time when median income in the country has doubled, contrary to the impression that transitioning away from fossil fuels must come at the cost of economic growth.

Sweden is on a path for total net-zero emissions by 2050.

Though the Nordic states are recognized for their social democratic framework, Sweden’s decarbonization plan took a managed-market approach. Sweden introduced a carbon tax of $110 per ton in 1991, partially offsetting it with the elimination of most other energy taxes. The carbon tax is now up to $500 per ton, with tax breaks for industry to prevent outsourcing to less carbon-restrictive countries (though they have been gradually rolled back).

Residential and commercial energy use is almost entirely carbon-neutral, despite the cold climate, aided by substantial retrofitting as well as mandates for new building stock. District heating that draws energy from multiple sources—including biofuels, geothermal, and even garbage combustion—produces enough warmth for homes and businesses. Electrified public transit keeps transportation emissions to a minimum. And nine nuclear power plants produce about 40 percent of the used and exported energy in the country. Several of these are scheduled for closure next year as renewable sources come online, making it a true bridge fuel.

While the very worst predictions for an Earth ravaged by global warming may be years off, it is impossible to ignore the small-scale apocalyptic disasters already happening. From this summer’s water crisis in Chennai, India, and Central Europe’s deadly heat waves to unseasonably long wildfire seasons in California, the world’s climate is changing because of man-made decisions. But that also means we have some control over how we respond. We can follow the bold initiatives of the few countries taking the climate challenge seriously, or we can all succumb to the status quo and it will remain a catastrophic crisis.

BONUS ISSUE 2019 THE AMERICAN PROSPECT 77

An Outcry for Action

Extinction Rebellion’s solution to climate stalemate involves a radical change to how government works.

BY M A RC I A BRO W N

I

n college, Nathan Hopkins studied biology and chemistry. He learned about coral reefs and their importance to marine ecosystems and healthy oceans. He traveled to San Salvador in the Bahamas, where there are just a few hundred permanent residents. There he saw hundreds of coral reefs overgrown with seaweed and algae—with no sign of the polyps that keep reefs alive. At this stage, it is impossible for coral to recover. “It was a radicalizing moment for me,” he said in an interview. In short, coral reefs brought Hopkins to Extinction Rebellion, where he leads the Washington, D.C., chapter’s outreach and membership work.

I met Hopkins in October in Fairfax, Virginia, during a monthly onboarding meeting the group holds for new members. The meeting was supposed to be held in the public library, but the power was out. After several location changes communicated via Signal, an encrypted messaging app, Nathan confirmed the location at a Panera Bread down the block. With its warmly lit aura and faux-homey color scheme, the Panera is bustling when I find the table of new Extinction Rebellion members.

Ten people, nearly all white, are squeezed around the table. Most are young, but several look to be in their fifties or sixties. One young woman wearing a chenille sweater has blue hair, and several others boast tattoos. There’s even a guy I went to college with.

Nathan goes over the group’s goals, its non-hierarchical organizational structure, its philosophy, the risks involved with arrest, the potential for government monitoring (they only communicate on encrypted platforms), and the dire science that motivates it all.

That much is true—the science is calamitous, showing that there’s no longer enough time to act incrementally.

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Coastal cities will drown under rising seas, more forest fires will incinerate towns, and some places will become just too hot to live in, displacing millions in the process. And so XR is pushing a sclerotic American political system for drastic steps right now.

Most environmental groups might find such insistence impractical. But most environmental groups aren’t Extinction Rebellion. Founded just over a year ago in the United Kingdom, XR’s governing philosophy goes beyond the green movement of the last 40 years. The group has three demands in the U.K. and four in the U.S., including demanding governments tell the truth and act immediately. But the guiding conviction of their demands is their belief that no matter who is in power, nothing has changed. So the answer to environmental devastation is a political restructuring of government. The problems of environmentalists are entirely political.

“Some of the big green groups have hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal,” said Nick Brana, an XR spokesperson in D.C. “So why hasn’t it happened already? If there’s public support and there’s been an environmental movement … it’s because the analysis wasn’t going deep enough. It wasn’t going to the fact that we have a broken political system.”

XR’s alternative is called a citizens’ assembly. The idea stems from a system already codified in the United Kingdom, which has been used in Ireland to find solutions to particularly challenging issues such as gay marriage and abortion. Under these countries’ constitutions, a citizens’ assembly can be formed to draft policy solutions. Those chosen at random for selection to the jury-style assembly take advice from experts to create policy, allow for public input, and then present their findings to parliament.

Extinction Rebellion is an activist group that has repeatedly pulled off big, eye-popping acts of civil disobedience to showcase the desperate need for action on climate change.

Members of parliament then use the policy findings to make laws.

For particularly gnarly or controversial issues, the assembly actually protects elected officials from backlash. “It actually grants the legislature the political freedom to do what the system does not,” Brana said. In fact, members of D.C.’s chapter told me, the current system of government isn’t truly democratic anyway. “We don’t have a representative government right now. We don’t have democracy.

We have an auction basically,” Brana said. “The election goes to the highest bidder … Congress is way older and way whiter than the average American so it’s not representative as is.”

The assembly may seem like pie in the sky, but the group’s members see this alternative as the only option. The group’s D.C. spokesperson told me that they are trying to clarify exactly how an assembly would work in the U.S., where it’s not already codified in the system. “Governments are failing us. Leaders are failing us,” said the spokesperson. Decades of letter writing, lobby meetings, and petitioning have done nothing to change the situation. “Things are only getting worse and worse,” he said.

The group exhibits its radical nature through nonviolent direct action. This is their creed—and it’s reflective of how the group believes that routine channels used to pressure lawmakers to make change are dead. XR has repeatedly pulled off big, eye-popping acts of disobedience that showcase the desperate need for action. In November, activists in London sailed a model of a sinking house down the River Thames, to illustrate flood threats. In Washington this summer, 17 people were arrested in July for supergluing themselves inside Congress, delaying a vote on the House floor. A medic at the onboarding meeting in October explained how, as a safety precaution, he had tested the glue prior to the action by gluing his hand to his floor.

Sara Sokolinski, an “arrestable” for the group who glued herself to Congress this past July, told me that she got involved because of the organization’s reputation. “It’s kind of an act of desperation,” she told me. “We have

cover images via ap images

PART III THE POLITICS OF THE GREEN NEW DEAL

nothing else because nothing else we’ve done has worked … What’s paved the way for Extinction Rebellion has been government inaction.”

Sokolinski, who also coordinates the D.C. chapter’s finances, said she’s aware of the complicated identity of being an arrestable. “Being an arrestable is a privilege, and so I personally am an arrestable because I work as an environmental researcher so my boss thinks it’s cool,” she said. She added that there are a lot of roles in the organization that don’t require risking arrest.

XR’s actions have received wide notice. Even some green philanthropists have identified XR and other direct-action organizations as critical to moving the political leadership to act, seeding them with millions of dollars in startup funding.

On November 12, XR announced an international hunger strike, with the D.C. chapter vowing to extend it “until Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi sits down to discuss the climate emergency.” In interviews, members of the group told me that they hoped it would have a big impact. “Why is she holding everything up?” they wondered. Not just the Green New Deal, but even refusing to bring a resolution determining a climate emergency to the floor, something XR members tell me is their simplest demand. In London, the group was able to force their government to declare a climate emergency only after shutting down city streets for 11 days.

XR members launched a hunger strike, occupying Pelosi’s office in the Capitol on November 18.

With the Senate and the White House in Republican hands, pressuring Democrats like Pelosi may seem wrongheaded to casual observers, or access-hungry green groups. But that access has failed to deliver, and XR, reflective of the youth climate movement in general, refuses to trade good relationships for lip service.

In an informational flyer organizers distributed at the October meeting, the stated long-term goal was to shut down D.C., but they would need 500 people willing to risk arrest.

This style—using “arrestables”—is controversial. As UK Youth Parliament member Athian Akec wrote in The Guardian, the “glamorisation of arrest” is off-putting to black and brown people who may want to be involved in the more radical side of the environmental movement but view this risk as too great, given welldocumented evidence of police brutality. “The short, frank answer is that the tactics of Extinction Rebellion are designed by and for middle-class, white Britain. Their central rhetoric about a dystopian future fails to cut through for those of us already faced with a nightmarish present, surrounded by poverty and austerity.”

Akec pointed out that the impacts of colonialism and neocolonialism remain main drivers of the climate

In November, Extinction Rebellion activists floated a ‘Sinking House’ down the River Thames in central London to highlight rising sea levels.

GREEN NEW DEAL

crisis. His indictment: “The west may save itself at the cost of others.”

Perhaps because of the focus on arrestable actions, the group is largely white. The problem exists in the U.K. and the U.S., though both groups are attempting to address the issue.

The fourth of XR’s demands in the U.S. is that “the transition to net-zero must be a just transition that benefits the most vulnerable people first and eliminates structural inequality.” XR’s goals are not just a radical restructuring of energy and humanity’s environmental impact on the world, but a restructuring of the social order through environmental justice.

“The government should be led on [the just transition] by a citizens’ assembly,” said the D.C. spokesperson in an interview. “This is really genuine democracy in action. It’s not the so-called democracy that led us into this crisis in the first place.” In short, the group doesn’t see the assembly as radical, but as a purely democratic and necessary change for government to take action.

Brana says that it’s important “to have the correct frame of reference” to understand Extinction Rebellion’s goals and urgent style. “Every big change in human history has been unprecedented,” Brana said. “Before democracy, there was no democracy.

Before women’s suffrage, it didn’t exist.

And so big changes have been made and they’re always thought of as impossible before they’re made.”

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Bill McKibben: The Case for Hope A short Q&A with the environmentalist and founder of 350.org

BY ROBERT KUTTNER ROBERT KUTTNER: Bill, so

ing effect means that

Of course, some

■ Restore and raise

much of the debate about even if we did everything patients still die, even vehicle emissions stanclimate change has oscilright now the temperaafter those antiboddards. lated between denial and ture will continue to rise. ies appear. We don’t ■ Restore the Clean despair. Scientists and citiThe question is, how know for sure how the Power Plan, and underzens who take the climate much—can we stop that Earth is going to do, stand that replacing science seriously keep heating short of the point only that there is going coal with natural gas is painting an ever bleaker where it completely cuts to be a fight. not a viable strategy for picture, as the cumulative civilization off at the change.

With the best possible interaction of complex sysknees?

(Worth remem■ Stop the government scenario, and the election tems worsens outcomes of a progressive president from procuring anything and catastrophes are arriv- bering that the U.N. estiing ahead of schedule. mate for climate refugees in 2020 with a working that isn’t efficient and majority in Congress, what Yet you, who were by 2050 reaches one bilgreen. are the most urgent things among the first to issue lion.) If we have a chance With the best-case scethat the new administraprophetic warnings, manat doing that, it’s down nario, what will the world tion needs to get done in age to keep hope alive— and human civilization look to two things: The engithe first year? hope that there is yet like in 2040 and 2050, and neers have done their job time to avert the worst, In the best possible what kinds of adaptations as well as the politicians and hope that the planet scenario, something that will we have to make? have done theirs badly, may yet be habitable for looks like the Green New The world in 2040 and coming up with the innohumans and other forms Deal: an all-out commit2050 is going to be, at vations that have cut the of life—if we make fundament to change on the the very least, strained. price of solar and wind mental changes and if we timescale that physics actThe in time.

Climate change is by far power by up to 90 perGreen New Deal offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to replace corporate-driven trade and now requires, with the What gives you hope the biggest thing human cent in the last decade or industrial policies with ones that put people and the planet first.

BY ADAM S. HERSH Warren, are full of such funding and the larger that the fundamental beings have ever done. so. Technology is no lonchanges that are needed social programs to make it ideas—there’s a ton of But if we move right now ger a barrier. can be done politically and work on things like autopossible to carry out this with everything we’ve And perhaps we can can be done in time? And mobile emissions that sweeping change. got, we may limit the remove the remaining what urgent first steps can be done without Con- damage sufficiently that On day one, a presibarrier too—the lack must be taken? gress. dent could, by her- or

Trading Places

BILL MCKIBBEN: At this

point, we clearly can’t “stop climate change.”

We’ve already warmed the planet a degree Celsius, and with huge consequences: The Arctic is in full melt mode, and California’s fire season never ends. And we’re going to warm it some more: The lag time between carbon emissions and their full heat-

of political will is now up against the remarkable burgeoning climate movement. Those of us who’ve been at this awhile are overjoyed to see the school climate strikes, Extinction Rebellion, and everyone else who is showing up to make a difference. On a feverish planet, these are the antibodies kicking in.

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himself, shut down a lot of drilling and mining on public land, and end the easy permitting of new fossil fuel infrastructure.

What else might a new president do via executive power that doesn’t require substantial outlay by Congress, recognizing that both things are necessary?

The climate plans of the leading candidates, especially Bernie and

But it’s going to take real money too: It was good to see Chuck Schumer’s plan for a quick electric-car buildout, a plan that has the support of the UAW. ■ Reinstate the methane pollution bill.

■ Get us back in Paris (and have a full-court diplomatic press to make the Paris accord much stronger).

our kids and grandkids have a fighting chance— and in the process we could reduce as well some of the inequality that plagues the planet.

A side benefit of solar and wind power is that they’re everywhere—it’s much harder for people like the Kochs to corner the sun.

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Ku Klux Klan on parade, September 13, 1926

Reckoning With White Supremacy After the Civil War, equality meant different things for blacks and whites. BY RICHARD R. JOHN B

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he past is never dead. It’s not even past.” William Faulkner’s mordant reflection on the intransigence of racial bigotry in a country dedicated to equal rights has easily been forgotten at moments of liberal optimism when the arc of the moral universe seems to be bending toward justice. Three years into the Trump administration,

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however, Faulkner’s admonition seems all too relevant. Despite the toppling of some Confederate monuments, we are once again facing the kind of Southern revanchism that killed off the achievements of Reconstruction after 1876 and that reversed many of the gains of the civil rights movement after the 1960s.

“Who could have predicted,”

muses Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his new book Stony the Road, “that the election of the first black president would become a focal point for triggering a dramatic rise in the public expression of some of the oldest, nastiest, and most vulgar white supremacist animus about black people?”

Perhaps nobody predicted that Obama would be a trigger

point, but Gates’s book is all about the white supremacist reaction to black progress and political power. A highly informative and readable companion to his PBS documentary, Stony the Road chronicles the heroic determination of a small and influential group of elite black activists—lawmakers, scholars, writers, artists, and musicians—to confront the obstacles white Americans had strewn in their path. Another new history, Charles Postel’s Equality, covers egalitarian politics in the same period as Stony the Road, but from a different angle. Postel tells the story of three white, or mostly white, organizations: the Grange, the Women’s Christian

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Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor.

No obstacle to equality in the post–Civil War era was greater than “redemption”—the white supremacist, reactionary countermovement of exConfederates against Reconstruction.

Redemption began with the removal of federal troops from the South in 1877 and was finally completed in North Carolina in 1898, when white supremacists decisively smashed a fragile white-black political alliance.

The malevolent power of white supremacy is a familiar theme in historical writing on the post–Civil War South, one of the darkest chapters in all of American history. Gates provides us with a salutary reminder of some of its more notorious features. After the Civil War, anti-black white activists mounted a “rhetorical and martial terrorist campaign to reestablish white supremacy as the unofficial law of the land.” Fearful that the ex-slaves would attack their former masters, white mobs organized immediately after the war to brutalize countless black men and women in an orgy of extralegal violence spearheaded by a new terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan.

In the decades to come, white lawmakers whittled away the black civil rights guaranteed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, culminating in the Supreme Court’s promulgation of the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. In 1915, white filmmaker D.W. Griffith riveted audiences with the country’s first cinematic blockbuster, Birth of a Nation, an effusive paean to the Ku Klux Klan, complete with historical commentary by then-President Woodrow Wilson. Gates doubts the authenticity of the oft-repeated story that, after a private viewing in the White House, Wilson praised the film as “history written with lightning.” Later, after the U.S. entry into the First World War, Wilson expressed misgivings about the screening, especially to black audiences.

Yet the damage had been done.

The failure of Reconstruction was at once political, economic, and legal. If the federal government had stripped secessionist planters of their land and used it to compensate the freedmen

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EQUALITY: AN AMERICAN DILEMMA, 1866-1896

BY CHARLES POSTEL

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

STONY THE ROAD: RECONSTRUCTION, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND THE RISE OF JIM CROW

BY HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.

Penguin Press

for their lives of unpaid labor, this would have been the “single most dramatic change conceivable” for the defeated South. But the early plans for land redistribution to former slaves were crushed.

In explaining this tragic denouement, Gates puts special emphasis on the deleterious consequences of new kinds of visual iconography, which included photography and multicolor chromolithography as well as film.

Gates’s book features four multipage inserts of expertly chosen images that illustrate both the achievement of blacks and their visual denigration.

Technical advances in printing, Gates observes, made it possible for the first time to “produce vivid visual imagery that could literalize the metaphorical imagery of novels and scientific tracts of black people as less than human.”

Those images are an important part of the story of American racism.

In his final chapter, Gates shows how a rising generation of black activists responded to this relentlessly demeaning media barrage. Among the most imaginative of their counterthrusts was the creation of an oppositional culture structured around the “New Negro,” a cultural archetype that Gates traces to an essay published by a white missionary in 1894. Though the New Negro was originally envisioned to be narrowly preoccupied only with his material betterment, black public intellectuals reimagined him in the decades to come as a source of inspiration.

Postel’s argument follows a similar trajectory, though it is more original, and, in certain respects, even more unsettling. The “great social movements” of the age did not revolve, as is often assumed, around the pursuit of liberty. On the contrary, they “reflected an understanding” that “without equality there could be no freedom, and without solidarity there could be no equality.”

To make his argument, Postel reexamines the three most influential post–Civil War movement organizations. The Grange was long the country’s most powerful farmers’ lobby.

The WCTU, though remembered mainly for its opposition to alcohol, was the leading women’s advocacy

group of its time. The Knights of Labor was the largest workers’ federation in the country, if not the world.

All three organizations supported progressive causes. Yet, as Postel argues, the “dynamics” of reform posed an “inescapable dilemma”: “Mighty farmer, labor, and women’s rights movements undertaken in the name of equality were accompanied by the destruction of political, economic, and civil rights for African Americans and other racial minorities.” Among the era’s conspicuous losers were not only blacks, but also Indians, Mexicans, and Chinese.

The Grange, the WCTU, and the Knights were all large, sophisticated, and influential. Of the three, the largest and “most impactful” was the Grange. Founded in 1867, it originated, improbably enough for a farm lobby, in the bowels of the federal bureaucracy: All but one of its founders held high government positions in Washington, D.C. To expand its reach, Grange leader Oliver Kelley struck out for the South, where he quickly built a coalition between Northern and Southern white farmers that included many plantation owners, effectively ensuring that the organization would privilege the interests of whites over blacks.

Although land distribution was a pressing issue for ex-slaves, the Grange studiously avoided it. U.S. history textbooks typically characterize the Grange as a bottom-up social movement that pitted yeoman farmers against plutocratic railroad barons. Postel demurs. Not farmer solidarity, but sectional reconciliation was its leaders’ highest priority.

They preached equality and solidarity between the Northern and Southern states, not between white and black farmers. In fact, the recruitment

by Grange leaders of violent white supremacist ex-Confederates significantly impeded the Grant administration’s pro-black Reconstruction efforts. By championing the equality of the states, the Grange rested its appeal on “white solidarity” and a “disregard for the equal rights claims of the former slaves.”

Though the Grange was ostensibly nonpartisan, it engaged in an “impressive array of political activism” to

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reorder the political economy in accordance with a “rational and egalitarian nationalism” (egalitarian, that is, except for racial minorities). Cooperative stores and crop insurance were high on its agenda, as was the enactment of state laws to regulate the rates that railroads could charge to haul their produce to market and the fees warehouses could demand to store their produce while awaiting shipment.

Though the Grange supported the resurgent post–Civil War antimonopoly movement, it was relatively late to the cause. Contrary to what many might assume, it faulted railroads not for being too large, but for being too small. Neither the Grange nor the antimonopolists objected to the impersonal rationalization of the economy.

On the contrary, they tried to bring “rational system and bureaucratic order out of the real and perceived turmoil of the increasingly corporate economy.” Grange leaders, in short, pursued “egalitarian goals” through “bureaucratic and centralized means” in a search for order to tame “corporate chaos,” and, in particular, alleviate the “speculative disorder and mayhem that the corporate owners of railroads, banks, coal mines, and other industries imposed on the post– Civil War economy.” Not until the 20th century would a new generation of anti-monopolists, led by the lawyerturned-jurist Louis Brandeis, reject the big-is-beautiful mantra.

The WCTU is a hard sell for 21stcentury progressives. Prohibition, its greatest achievement, is today better remembered as a prelude to the carceral state than as the culmination of a decades-long crusade against the ravages of substance abuse. Even so, the WCTU was by far the country’s

Frank Farrell, a black delegate, introduces Terence Powderly, the head of the Knights of Labor, at its 1886 convention (Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper). The biggest labor organization of its time, the Knights were relatively open to black participation.

largest women’s organization and, under the leadership of the redoubtable Frances Willard, championed causes dear to the heart of present-day feminists, including women’s suffrage, gender equality, and governmentfunded early education. In addition, and to a much greater extent than the Grange, it sporadically reached out to like-minded blacks.

The Knights of Labor proved even more successful at bridging the racial divide. This was partly a matter of necessity: Employers hired blacks as strikebreakers, obliging labor leaders to make common cause, lest their members lose their jobs. But the “cooperative alternatives” to existing institutional arrangements that the Knights championed could do little in the long run to relieve what they called the “monstrous evils of competition” and the failure of the

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government to “fulfill its primary functions of protecting equal rights and enforcing justice.”

Neither Gates nor Postel writes in a triumphalist vein. Yet the stories they tell do not lack for heroes. Gates’s heroes are mostly luminaries in the black pantheon: Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston. Postel’s are organizationbuilders who bridged the color line: for the WCTU, the black activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; for the Knights, the white organizer of black field hands Hiram Hover. Neither author sentimentalizes the people.

Progressives today confront a dilemma not unlike the challenge that confronted Gates’s black activists and Postel’s organization-builders. White supremacy had its appeal to many whites then, and it has its appeal to some whites now. The menace of redemption may be forgotten, but it has not disappeared. Gates is hopeful that we may finally be able to “come to terms” with the “original sin” of slavery. Yet cultural uplift is not enough.

“No people, in all of human history,” Gates wryly observes, “has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.”

The challenge of our age—like the challenge of Reconstruction—is, at bottom, rooted neither in culture, nor even in economics, but in politics.

Postel pins his hopes on the resurgence of a multipronged quest for equality and solidarity—“the multiple struggles of women and men to realize their visions of a just and equal society.”

Gates looks instead to the emancipatory potential of an adversary culture: “If the Redeemed South could magically transform itself into a ‘New South,’ despite looking suspiciously like the Old South of slavery times, then why shouldn’t—or couldn’t—the African American middle class reinvent itself as well?” Hard times can prepare people for new movements for change. These two fine books leave us with the hope that, out of the darkness of the present, a new day might just be aborning.

Richard R. John, professor of history at Columbia University, is currently working on a history of the anti-monopoly tradition in the United States.

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Is Our Economists Learning?

The economics profession has a lot to answer for, but even its sharpest thinkers seem too wedded to a disproven pre–financial crisis mindset. BY RYAN COOPER B

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ince the 2008 financial crisis, the once-stellar reputation of the economics profession has fallen into disgrace. Not only had the discipline’s heavy hitters mostly failed to foresee the crash—indeed, in 2002 Ben Bernanke famously said such things were no longer possible—many subsequently backed a policy of austerity (that is, spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the budget deficit), which dramatically slowed the post-crisis recovery in both Europe and the United States. It turns out that the hegemonic belief within economics that markets generally work best when “left to themselves” was catastrophically mistaken.

Since then, there has been a gradual reconsideration of attitudes within economics, with insurgents like Thomas Piketty contesting the pre-crisis hegemonic view. A pair of books—one by a critical outsider, one by a practicing insider—makes for a nice window into the profession’s brain, to see how far the process has gone. The former is The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society, by New York Times economics reporter Binyamin Appelbaum; the latter is The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, by NYU professor Thomas Philippon.

They reveal that, while economics has come a great distance since 2008, the bankrupt pre-crisis ideology still holds too much sway.

Appelbaum’s excellent book covers much history of economic policy, but at bottom it is about politics and ideology. It’s a truism today to recognize that after the Great Depression and the shattering world war it spawned, classical liberalism and traditional laissez-faire economics were profoundly discredited. Political leaders the world over took it for granted that the economy could not be left to its own devices, lest it implode and bring another Hitler to power. The result, under the heavy domestic regulation

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of the New Deal state, the close international trade control of the Bretton Woods system, and the vast subsidies of the Marshall Plan, was the greatest economic boom in world history.

The Economists’ Hour is about what came next: how a new generation of free-market ideologues (often called neoliberals) wormed their way into power and influence, drove out the postwar belief in a controlled economy, and replaced it with an updated version of the old 1920s free-market dogma. Appelbaum takes readers through several case studies: the end of the military draft, the end of antitrust enforcement, the rollback of the regulatory state, the rise of so-called “costbenefit analysis,” the end of controls on international trade, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and so on.

The key political strategy—as often as not carried out unconsciously—was controlling the terms of debate and the subjects of discussion. Rather than argue whether or not ordinary citizens should be forced to take part in America’s wars, or if a professional military was a threat to democracy, economist Walter Oi changed the subject to efficiency, arguing that a volunteer army “would be good for the economy.” The draft was subsequently abolished.

Similar political jujitsu brought down one pillar after another of the New Deal state. Predictions of faster, cheaper service from economist Alfred Kahn obliterated regulations on airlines and trucking, thereby evading discussions of whether all American communities should be connected to the same transport network. Preposterous revisionist history from Robert Bork recast antitrust law as solely about protecting the consumer, instead of protecting society as a whole from concentrated economic power. This allowed merging corporations to claim they would reduce prices through economies of scale, and all but ended antitrust

THE ECONOMISTS’ HOUR: FALSE PROPHETS, FREE MARKETS, AND THE FRACTURE OF SOCIETY

BY BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Little, Brown

THE GREAT REVERSAL: HOW AMERICA GAVE UP ON FREE MARKETS

BY THOMAS PHILIPPON

Harvard University Press

enforcement. Predictions of skyrocketing growth from “comparative advantage” brought down restrictions on international trade. The absolutely crack-brained “efficient market hypothesis”—featured in loony theories like economist Eugene Fama’s 1965 paper arguing that stock prices “fully reflected all available information,” and thus ruling out financial bubbles by definition—led to repeated rounds of financial deregulation.

Nearly all of these moves led to disaster. Ending the draft was arguably morally defensible, but also enabled the succeeding generation of gruesome military adventurism by placing no broad sacrifice upon the public. Ending antitrust enforcement led to a quick roll-up of American markets into monopolies and oligopolies.

Ending trade controls, especially with China, devastated America’s industrial base and threw millions out of work.

And pretending that financial crises are impossible didn’t stop them from happening like clockwork—culminating in the global disaster of 2008.

Even airline deregulation has been heavily overrated. As Matt Stoller argues, data showing post-deregulation price declines fail to note that the trend line followed the pre-deregulation price decline almost exactly. Today, detailed regulation decisions are made by oligopolist executives instead of democratically accountable state authorities.

Appelbaum is rightly scornful about all this. As he points out, it is rather ironic that most of these freemarket dogmatists lived through the Depression, and some of the most prominent ones—like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan—worked for the government. Only truly evidence-proof zealots (“a minority of ultra-liberal economic theologians,” as historian Eric Hobsbawm called them) could both live through the greatest imaginable failure of laissezfaire economics and spend time living off state employment, and still conclude that government can do almost nothing to help its citizens.

Appelbaum gets considerable wry amusement from Friedman’s extraordinarily arrogant, brittle mind in particular. At one point during the Second World War, he worked at a state-funded

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think tank “testing alloys for the blades of jet engine turbines.” Despite the fact that he had no special training in metallurgy, Friedman came up with his own alloy, which, by his calculations, should have lasted 200 hours. In testing, it lasted two.

“Friedman later said the experience shaped his lifelong skepticism of complicated formulas and forecasting,” Appelbaum notes. I’ll bet it did.

Philippon’s book, meanwhile, has a jarringly twofold character. In the Dr. Jekyll half of the book, he has several technical and rigorous explorations of empirical economic questions that are masterpieces of careful reasoning. For instance, he examines money in politics, and carefully knocks down tendentious arguments that such behavior does not simply reflect the rich purchasing policy outcomes that benefit themselves.

Europe, by contrast, has maintained some reasonable controls on the amount of money the rich are allowed to dump into the political system, and thus avoided a lot of awful policy. Some of Philippon’s findings are eye-popping: For example, in America, “[t]he top 0.01 percent of donors contribute an astounding 40 percent of all contributions,” he writes, while after adjusting for the economic size, total “contributions in the US are fifty times larger than those in most European countries.”

Philippon also provides conclusive proof that American business has become more concentrated, and its markets more dominated by a few enormous firms. He digs deep into data revealing declining American business investment and slow productivity growth, and provides a strong argument that declining competition—leading to stagnant monopolists who rake in easy profits without having to invest further—is at least partly to blame.

On the other hand, Philippon shows that Europe has maintained a semblance of effective antitrust regulation, preventing the same level of market domination as in the U.S. The result is much cheaper prices for things like airlines, internet, and cellphone service. Americans are being radically overcharged for those and many other things because our markets are significantly more monopolized. Thus,

Milton Friedman

Alan Greenspan

Only truly evidenceproof zealots could both live through the greatest failure of laissezfaire (the Depression) and spend time living off state employment, and still conclude that government can do almost nothing to help its citizens.

he comes to the surprising conclusion that Europe is more free-markety than the United States.

But that leads me to the Mr. Hyde half of the book, in which Philippon displays an unthinking, knee-jerk faith in the exhausted free-market nostrums Appelbaum destroys— a faith that is sharply inconsistent with many of the results Philippon derives. One rather contrarian point of the book is that many of the problems afflicting America are the result of abandoning free-market policies.

But to start with, antitrust regulation is just that—regulation, where meddling government bureaucrats decide whether firms have amassed too much power, whether or not two companies can merge, or if so what compensatory steps they should take. While the goal is to allow free-market competition, it is not exactly a free-market policy by the traditional meaning of the term.

In his discussion of the financial sector, Philippon is comically trusting toward traditional market-based explanations of what banks do.

“Financial intermediation arises from the need for expertise in channeling capital from savers to borrows,” he asserts—a definition straight out of a Milton Friedman–style Econ 101 textbook. He then spends the rest of the chapter mystified at the gigantic profits in the financial sector. Intermediation “costs around 200 basis points [0.2 percent]—about the same as a century ago. The more you think about it, the more puzzling it becomes.”

This is only confusing if you accept the ideological presupposition about what finance is for. It very obviously has other functions than intermediation—most notably controlling nonfinancial businesses so as to extract money from them. Indeed, earlier in the book Philippon notes that the corporate profit rate has soared in the United States, and firms are spending that money on payments to shareholders. “The payout rate has increased substantially, primarily driven by share buybacks.”

That, in turn, is mostly the result of pressure from finance—most clearly in the form of shareholder tyranny, where big investors demand companies “disgorge the cash.” As Barry

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Lynn writes in his book Cornered, market concentration has often been directly orchestrated by Wall Street buccaneers, who use vast sums of borrowed money to conduct roll-up operations on whole sectors, reducing competition and raking in easy profits.

Just as notable are the absences from Philippon’s book. He barely discusses the crash of 2008 or the ensuing binge of austerity across the developed world, which led directly to a lost decade of weak growth. This would seem to be important when talking about finance! In line with neoliberal arguments from Larry Summers, he celebrates the political independence of the European Central Bank—but does not mention how it deliberately caused a bank run in Greece when its government tried to escape the economically backward austerity straitjacket. And in his discussions of how Europe has maintained a reasonable labor share of national income (a metric which has fallen sharply in the United States), he does not mention the continent’s heavy unionization.

Labor unions, of course, are directly anti-market, with one of their primary objectives being to set wages higher than they would be in a “free” market.

So while there is a lot of good work in The Great Reversal, the economics profession as a whole has a great deal to learn from outsiders like Appelbaum. “My generation of economists is less interested in ideology,” Philippon writes. This book shows that such a position is not only impossible, but dangerous. Answering any question about economics or politics worth asking will inherently require some kind of normative moral framework. Data alone cannot tell you whether it is good or bad for the labor share of income to go down, for instance. But moreover, if you try to avoid ideology, you end up making assumptions based on status quo thinking, and then grow confused about stone obvious things like why Jamie Dimon is so rich. A mind requires structure to operate clearly, or it will get lost in space.

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent for The Week. His work has also appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, and Current Affairs.

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Can We Fix the College Inequality Problem?

Two new books focus on the struggles of low-income students not just to get into college but to get through it. BY STEVEN BRINT B

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s growing numbers of young people have entered college over the last two decades, the racial and social-class gaps in completing a degree have widened. The completion gap between the bottom fourth and top fourth of students grew from about 30 percentage points for those who attended college in the 1970s to about 45 percentage points for those who attended college in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The gap is likely even wider now.

The sources of the gap are clear. Students from families in the top income group have usually attended better high schools, have the economic resources to finish college in four years, feel more comfortable in the college environment, and can depend on parental and peer support. They also attend institutions where graduation and academic accomplishments are the norm rather than the exception. Strikingly, according to Georgetown University researchers, 75 percent of the students attending the 450-plus best-funded and most selective four-year colleges are white, while enrollment in the 3,250 least well-funded two- and four-year colleges is 43 percent black and Hispanic.

About half of students who enter college complete a degree within six years, a shockingly low figure, given much of the country’s belief in education as a social and economic cure-all.

Political leaders and foundation heads who are concerned about inequality have been pushing for more than a decade for colleges to graduate more students from families with incomes below the median. They argue that the United States has fallen behind other countries in graduation rates and that a college education provides the surest way to gain the skills and knowledge that lead to stable, well-paying jobs.

They also see the wider social benefits of a college education. Graduates are more likely to do well economically,

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provide security for their children, volunteer in their communities, and stay informed about public affairs.

This emphasis on lower-income students reflects an inescapable reality. If U.S. colleges are going to raise college graduation rates, they have to improve their record with students from lessaffluent families. The ones in the top quartile are already completing college at nearly an 80 percent rate.

To be sure, some of the statistics used in these debates are a bit misleading. Many of the countries with higher college graduation rates than ours offer three-year, rather than four-year, baccalaureates. And a fair number of American college graduates are working in jobs that do not require a college degree. We might also wonder whether the one-quarter or more of college students who engage in only token study really gain all that much in skills from college.

Even so, the larger point holds: Where college was once considered the great equalizer, it seems now to have become just another feature of the increasingly unequal institutional environment facing young people.

The question is: What, if anything, can be done about it?

Two new books offer contrasting solutions—one focusing much of its fire on the testing industry and the other extolling college interventions that can help keep students on track to graduation.

Paul Tough’s book, The Years That Matter Most, draws compelling portraits of upwardly mobile workingclass students trying to make it in a higher-education system whose definitions of merit tend to privilege whites and Asians with high test scores.

These portraits show the misalignment between institutions designed for the affluent and students who have grown up in unstable families

THE YEARS THAT MATTER MOST: HOW COLLEGE MAKES OR BREAKS US

BY PAUL TOUGH

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

THE COLLEGE DROPOUT SCANDAL

BY DAVID KIRP

Oxford University Press

and have had little opportunity to develop their talents fully. Their drive has kept them moving forward; the college environment keeps them forever uneasy. One African American student at Princeton bounced from town to town as her mother looked for work as a songwriter. Tough recounts her thinking prior to the beginning of her first Humanities Sequence course freshman year: “Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she couldn’t get it to stop. She was anxious, consumed by doubt. It wasn’t that she doubted herself, exactly. It was that she felt certain that everyone else doubted her, that all the other students taking their seats around the table didn’t believe she belonged in this room with them.”

Tough’s book includes a scorching critique of the testing industry and its role in perpetuating inequalities in access to elite higher education.

In most cases, SAT results are highly correlated with students’ high school grades, but there are two discrepant groups: those whose SAT scores are higher than would be expected given their grades and those whose SAT scores are lower than would be expected. The first group is disproportionately white and Asian and from higher-income families. These students contribute greatly to the party culture on campus but only rarely to the academic intensity of the classroom. The second group is disproportionately black and Latino and from lower-income families. Contrary to the common critique of elite college admissions as consumed by affirmative action goals, it is the first group that tends to be preferred. They have two commodities that elite colleges covet: enough money to pay high tuitions and test scores that contribute to the campus profile in rankings systems.

In our era of heightened concern about inequality, established institutions have an interest in being seen as doing something about the inequalities of American society. The College Board, the organization responsible for the SAT, has argued that the SAT helps to equalize college admissions because high school grades are now so compressed that they provide limited information about the probable performance of students admitted to

pete hendley / istock by get t y

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elite colleges. Tough contends that the College Board disseminated what it knew to be misinformation—in fact, the SAT contributes to making admissions more unequal. And, he shows, elite colleges also game the system.

Princeton gained national attention a few years back for increasing the proportion of Pell grant students in its freshmen classes. But Tough provides evidence that Princeton admissions disproportionately picked students at the high end of Pell grant eligibility.

Because of the complicated formulas used to determine Pell grant eligibility, a sizable proportion of these students were middle-class rather than poor.

Readers will be moved by the stories of struggle and resilience Tough tells and perhaps infuriated by the chicanery of some of the institutions that have won plaudits for addressing the problem of inequality in college admissions.

I am more skeptical than Tough, however, about the influence of elite colleges on social inequality. Majoring in engineering is more important than attending a selective college as a predictor of midcareer incomes for those who do not pursue graduate degrees.

Once the great equalizer, college seems now to have become just another feature of the increasingly unequal institutional environment facing young people.

And graduate degrees from the leading business, law, medical, and engineering schools are more important than attendance at an elite college for students who do pursue advanced degrees. A similar pattern holds at the top of the occupational structure.

My own research has shown that less than one-fifth of business and political leaders attended one of the top 39 undergraduate colleges, while about half of the leaders who received graduate degrees attended either a topranked business or law school.

For all the storytelling power Tough brings to the issues, his book focuses too much attention on a few elite colleges and a smallish sliver of talented low-income students. Elite colleges could do a much better job of recruiting low-income students and helping them to be successful, yet they would still barely scratch the surface of the college inequality problem. Tough does not entirely ignore the remaining 90 percent of college students who would not be admitted to elite colleges under any plausible scenario, but the book compresses their stories into three of nine chapters.

In this respect, David Kirp’s book, The College Dropout Scandal, is potentially the more important work for readers who want to reduce college inequality. Kirp is right to focus on improving the graduation rates of students who are enrolled at the lower end of the system, not at the top. He’s interested in interventions that he believes can raise graduation rates for the group he calls “new-gen” students wherever they’re enrolled.

One such intervention is predictive analytics. These are computer algorithms that provide up-to-the-minute feedback on students who are in danger of falling off-track to on-time graduation due to taking the wrong courses or achieving grades indicative of future trouble. His model institution is Georgia State University, which adopted predictive analytics in 2012 and has seen a steady rise in graduation rates among “new-gen” students. The Georgia State effort turned not only on predictive analytics but also on the employment of dozens of additional undergraduate advisers to help students find pathways in which they can succeed.

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Skill- and confidence-building programs are another of the interventions Kirp touts. The University of Texas’s University Leadership Network is the model here. The program enrolls 500 students a year who are predicted to have a low chance of on-time graduation. It provides weekly professionaldevelopment seminars, opportunities for community engagement, and $5,000 scholarships for those who keep their grades up. UT has also pioneered work on helping students see themselves as competent and capable through the development of an understanding of intelligence as in process of continuous development rather than fixed at birth.

Kirp also highlights other efforts to help new-gen students. The City University of New York has rethought remedial mathematics by focusing on the everyday uses of math and by organizing the curriculum around questions rather than lectures. In central Florida, community colleges and universities have created stronger links between their programs to help students moving from two- to four-year institutions.

Georgia State has offered completion grants to enable low-income students to worry less about expenses and concentrate on their schoolwork during their last two college years.

Each of these programs works, according to Kirp, because, in addition to their practical assistance, they convey to students a “we-have-your-back” attitude: “They enable students to recognize that they are full-fledged members of a community that takes them seriously, as individuals, rather than members of an impersonal bureaucracy.”

If only it was so easy! The ideas highlighted by Kirp can stimulate new thinking about how to reduce college dropout rates, but the actual record of scaling “proven interventions” is not as impressive as he suggests. I know this from having participated as a university leader in University Innovation Alliance (UIA), an organization that has attempted to reproduce and expand interventions like those Kirp highlights. The alliance includes several of Kirp’s model institutions: Georgia State, the University of Texas, and the University of Central Florida, together with eight others. Scaling predictive

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analytics did not work at the other institutions that adopted the same method that worked so successfully at Georgia State. Nor did adding advisers for at-risk students show a measurable change at institutions other than Georgia State. Moreover, researchers have discovered that the promising outcomes of freshman-year interventions to build “growth mindsets” fade over time as performance evidence accumulates. Kirp also underplays the expense of some of these interventions.

Not every institution has the extra $2.5 million it takes for the University of Texas to incentivize 500 at-risk students to keep their grades up.

Based on my experience with the University Innovation Alliance, I’ve come to believe that we should not expect “off-the-shelf” interventions to have the same results wherever they are tried. If advisers are stuck in their ways or overworked, they will not use predictive analytics appropriately. If evidence of weak performance accumulates, growth mindsets will not solve the problem. If students’ financial problems go beyond the $1,000 level set by Georgia State, they will not be sufficient to relieve students’ anxieties. Every campus has its own set of issues that only deeply engaged insiders know, and each one employs staff members who have different strengths and weaknesses.

Moreover, even the most promising interventions face the recalcitrant reality of students’ difficult lives and easily shaken feelings of belonging.

Here Tough’s engagement with the lives of the students he profiles offers a valuable cautionary note: “The effort to help more college students graduate is always going to be something of an asymmetrical battle. Yes, on the one side you’ve got predictive algorithms … and experimentally designed belonging interventions. But on the other, there is the psychological minefield of being an American eighteen-year-old, and the particular strengths and burdens and complexities each one brings to campus. Any science that tries to steer college students in one direction or another is

To make college free is to make it totally dependent on taxpayers, and that has its risks, as is evident in the many states that have sharply cut back spending on higher education.

inevitably going to be an inexact one.”

The best way to improve graduation rates is to bring a committed group of administrators and faculty members together to analyze weaknesses at the campus level and then to carry out policies tailored to addressing those weaknesses. Some universities like my own have greatly improved their fourand six-year graduation rates simply by offering enough of the right kinds of courses with enough seats at the right times of the year; by leveraging summer to add classes that are in high demand; by adding outstanding teachers in introductory math courses; and by launching well-funded “finish-infour” campaigns. None of these actions are in the “silver-bullet” category of interventions discussed by Kirp.

Liberal politicians and their constituents are in search of more ambitious solutions to the college inequality issue. In a concluding chapter, Tough endorses the most ambitious of these solutions: tuition-free college. Tough argues that U.S. policymakers should treat college in the same light that reformers saw high school in the early 20th century—as a requirement for citizenship rather than as a luxury for those who can afford it.

Maybe so, but there are other considerations. “Free college” is not actually free. Someone has to pay for it, and those people are called taxpayers. To make college free is to make it totally dependent on taxpayers, and that has its risks, as both faculty and students can testify in the many states that have sharply cut back their spending on higher education. When budgets are tight, it is hard to make the case that college is more important than health care or many other urgent needs.

Nationally, as the climate emergency grows, it’s going to be difficult to argue for all the funding that free college would require. So we can’t be sure that making college free is compatible with achieving high quality. If quality deteriorates, we may see public colleges following along the same path that public high schools have taken— stagnating teaching salaries, poorly maintained facilities, and a climate of

low expectations in a larger number of classrooms. Before reformers use early20th-century high schools as a model for a new approach to citizenship, it would be a good idea to investigate how well high schools performed that job.

“Free tuition” plans are not the only way to help students finance their college educations. A better approach would be to combine a substantial raise in Pell grants with the institution of an income-contingent loan repayment system similar to the ones found in Australia and England. Pell grants have not kept up with rising tuitions and that has been a major factor in the declining proportion of low-income students who have the financial resources to attend the best public universities in their states.

Fixing the student loan system is equally necessary to address the problems of students who are ineligible for Pell grants. It is a myth that most student borrowers accumulate unmanageable debt; the average graduate spends about as much each month eating out as she does repaying student loans. But the timing of loan repayment is a major problem.

Most student borrowers begin repaying their loans as soon as they leave college, at a time when their earnings are at their lowest and most variable from year to year. Higher-education economists like Sandy Baum and Susan Dynarski have proposed a sliding scale for loan repayments based on income. They have also recommended that monthly payments be automatically deducted from paychecks in a manner parallel to that used for Social Security contributions.

At least eight countries are currently employing income-contingent repayment programs for student borrowers.

It’s a more practical and sustainable approach, and one that is likely to have more progressive effects on income inequality than free college.

Steven Brint, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside, is the author, most recently, of Two Cheers for Higher Education.

VOLUME 30, NUMBER 5. The American Prospect (ISSN 1049-7285) is published quarterly by The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 Eye Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20005. Periodicals-class postage paid at Washington, DC, and additional mailing offices. Copyright © 2019 by The American Prospect, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced without the consent of The American Prospect, Inc. The American Prospect ® is a registered trademark of The American Prospect, Inc. Postmaster: Please send address changes to The American Prospect, P.O. Box 421087, Palm Coast, FL 32142. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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A Beacon of Hope on Climate Change

By Randi Weingarten, President AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS

tudents and educators are involved in many of the mass movements of our time—from calling for sensible policies to combat climate change and gun violence, to protesting the inhumane treatment of immigrants and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. In the fight for environmental justice, much of the leadership is coming from students—and their teachers couldn’t be prouder.

One of the foremost purposes of education is to prepare young people for the possibilities and responsibilities of citizenship. This goes way beyond the memorization and regurgitation of facts. Teachers guide their students to develop judgment and discernment to be engaged and empowered participants in society.

This is why the American Federation of Teachers fights for the freedom to teach so classrooms are freed from the tyranny of high-stakes testing and test prep, to allow time for project-based learning—so students can analyze problems in their communities, figure out potential solutions, and advocate for change. It’s why we reject lockstep pacing calendars, so we can have extended classroom discussions and debates. Teachers need this latitude to help their students develop the confidence to make their voices heard, the courage to challenge injustice, and knowledge of the levers that can bring about change.

All this is necessary to prepare this and future generations to address the enormous crises of our age—extreme economic inequality; dangerous assaults on our democracy; polarization, bigotry, bullying and divisiveness; and existential climate change.

In one of the largest youth-led demonstrations in history, the Global Climate Strike in September galvanized millions of activists worldwide to take to the streets for climate action. It was started by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, led by thousands of students, and supported by hundreds of organizations, including the AFT. Students across the United States walked out of school to participate. Educators, including AFT members, didn’t just show up, they helped

navigate an array of policies in various districts regarding student absences, logistical support, and participation in student-led actions—as well as teaching classroom lessons on climate change.

Young Americans have grown up in an age of the earth warming, seas rising, devastating wildfires and frequent “once in a century” storms.

They are taking their future into their own hands. They understand their power to bring about change. But they need people already in power to act now to address the worsening climate crisis. Beyond demonstrations, people must use the political process to change policy.

Today, even as the focus of the environmental movement has evolved from concerns about pollution to fear of possible extinction, proponents and opponents of tackling climate change largely take their places along party lines. But safeguarding the enviroment was not always a partisan matter. The Environmental Protection Agency was established during the Nixon administration, and President Richard Nixon planted a tree on the South Lawn of the White House to recognize the first Earth Day. The Senate passed the Clean Air Act in 1970 without a single nay vote.

Young people recognize the urgency of the climate crisis that their elders failed to summon.

We must join them—pushing for bold political and policy initiatives to reverse climate change and reduce the intertwining issue of economic inequality. Our youth have lit a spark and given us a beacon of hope. We must follow their lead.

Young people recognize the urgency of the climate crisis that their elders failed to summon.

In the decades since, environmental regulations and enforcement have helped clean up rivers so polluted with toxins that they once caught on fire, and reduced smog and acid rain. Wind and solar energy are booming. Cleaning up our environment is not a choice between jobs and the environment.

As new green technologies show, we can grow the economy, sustain good jobs, and save our planet.

The disastrous effects of climate change are outpacing policy changes to combat them. Corporations and opponents of government regulations have leveraged their fortunes and influence to undo environmental protections. Communities of color and low-income people suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation and climate change. President Trump has withdrawn from the Paris climate agreement, and his administration has reversed many efforts to safeguard the environment. Trump and his administration have abandoned the once bipartisan leadership of the United States in addressing global climate change.

People want a better life and a better future. But we need the means. That is why it is so important that individuals—not just the most powerful—have a voice in our democracy. Young voters increasingly name protecting the environment as one of their top concerns. People too young to vote are raising their voices in other ways—walking out in climate strikes, standing up, and speaking out.

Photo: Pamela Wolfe

A student activist in the D.C. Youth Climate Strike on Sept. 20, 2019.

Follow AFT President Randi Weingarten: www.twitter.com/RWeingarten

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