The Green New Deal proposal is one of the only effective, broadly recognized pathways to tackle the climate crisis and address its social and economic consequences. It is technologically possible and economically sustainable. Yet although the Green New Deal project is already under way in some shape or form in various states, it has yet to be scaled up to the national level. In fact, climate policy as a whole has been stalled in Congress, and the Biden administration has so far engaged more in symbolic gestures than in living policy processes.
With time quickly running out to prevent a greenhouse apocalypse, activists need to reorganize and unite efforts to build massive public support and political will for climate action. In this context, much is to be gained by looking at the work of ReImagine Appalachia, which is promoting a Green New Deal blueprint for the Ohio Valley region. This is the focus of the following exclusive interview for Truthout with Amanda Woodrum, senior researcher at Policy Matters Ohio and co-director of project ReImagine Appalachia.
Woodrum works at the intersection of energy, equity and the environment with the aim of finding common ground among environmental, labor, racial justice and community leaders to create a powerful grassroots movement with the capacity to assist in the transition toward an ecologically sustainable and equitable future.
C.J. Polychroniou: It has been three years since Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Massachusetts) introduced a Green New Deal resolution. Progressive Democrats in Congress also introduced the THRIVE Αct in April 2021, which is in line with the vision of the Green New Deal. Yet, very little progress has been made so far toward decarbonizing the economy and moving in the direction of a sustainable and equitable future. Is this an accurate assessment of where we are? If so, what are the main obstacles that need to be overcome so we can keep moving forward in the hope of avoiding a greenhouse apocalypse?
Amanda Woodrum: Let my answer be a big verbal hug to you and others who feel like you do. We have made progress, big progress, it just hasn’t fully materialized into actual infrastructure quite yet (at least not at the scale we need).
First, I think of [the bipartisan infrastructure package] as a down payment on our climate infrastructure needs. It contains hundreds of billions of dollars for modernizing our electric grid, electrifying our transportation system, including public transportation, upgrading the nation’s rail infrastructure, and starting to repair the damage from the last century of extraction industry practices — reclaiming abandoned mine lands, capping orphaned oil and gas wells that spew methane, and remediating brownfields at shuttered coal plants and former steel facilities. The Biden administration is currently working to develop federal policy guidance on these resources designed to ensure the jobs created from these investments are good union jobs and pathways into those union jobs are built for Black workers and other people of color, as well as women and the many other people currently working in low-wage jobs.
Second, we are at a tipping point. Much work needs to be done to make sure the resources from bipartisan infrastructure package are spent the right way. If we are successful in this, it will change the landscape, both physically and mentally.
Even in Appalachia, if these resources are spent wisely, we will see that national climate solutions, if done right, can be good for the economy and the working people it serves. More and more people already understand this, or we wouldn’t have gotten this far.
As you know, the Ohio River Valley of Appalachia, also known as coal country, has long been a political stumbling block to national climate and clean energy solutions. No longer. Appalachia is now at the table of the national conversation. We know what we want and need.
ReImagine Appalachia is advancing the vision of a 21st century economy for the Ohio Valley. Can you talk about the principles and aims guiding this vision?
ReImagine Appalachia is a collection of hundreds of stakeholder groups working across the Ohio River Valley states of Appalachia — Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky. We came together to create a collective vision of what a 21st century sustainable Appalachia looks like, and to build out the roadmap for how we get from where we are to where we need to go.
It is important to understand that Appalachia is essentially an area of concentrated poverty. The region has been exploited for more than a century by absentee corporations in the extractive industries — exploiting our workers, damaging our lands, and leaving our workers and neighbors sick. With the abundance of natural resources in the lands of coal country, one would think we would be the richest region in the nation. But we are not. We are the poorest. Too many of the region’s counties rank in the bottom 10 percent nationally for their high level of unemployment and poverty, and low family incomes. The region is poor, and it isn’t going to lift itself up by its collective bootstrings.
National climate solutions, if Appalachia is at the table, can be an opportunity to secure much needed and deserved resources for the region. Appalachia literally powered the prosperity of the rest of the nation, while the region itself was left in poverty. We believe the region is owed its due share of climate infrastructure resources.
The people of Appalachia want everything everyone else wants — a modern electric grid in Appalachia that doesn’t lose power every time it rains hard; universal, quality broadband affordable to everyone so the kids can use computers without going to the library and parents can work remotely; to grow clean and efficient manufacturing in the region with equivalent jobs to those found in the coal industry; and, to build out a sustainable transportation network that includes an Appalachian rail corridor. Perhaps more importantly, we want the good union jobs that can come with these investments. These infrastructure investments can put the region’s residents to work building the future they want to live in while also laying the foundation for a much more prosperous economy over the long haul.
We must also invest to repair the damage from the last century of extractive industry practices — reclaiming abandoned mine lands; remediating brownfields, including coal ash ponds and coal slurries; reforesting the region; restoring the wetlands; and supporting sustainable agricultural practices among local farmers rather than Big Ag. This is why the coalition to ReImagine Appalachia is calling to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, as a carbon farming strategy that involves absorbing excess carbon with natural greenery. One can easily see how many people we could put to work just planting trees. We also think a revived Civilian Conservation Corps, as a public jobs program paying living wages, could be used to create second-chance opportunities for our many residents that were caught up in the “war on drugs” and opioid[crisis], something that hit Appalachia hard.
Who are ReImagine Appalachia’s partners, and what is being done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the Ohio Valley?
ReImagine Appalachia is a diverse group of stakeholders — organized labor, racial justice leaders, faith groups, local government officials and environmental organizations, among many others. Folks based in the region working to find common ground and to re-find our common humanity. The last decade or so has been incredibly divisive. Absentee corporations in the extractive industries have helped foment that divide. But the reality is that there is a win-win solution for the 99 percent of us. To find it we must stop to listen to each other. All sides must do this. Environmental leaders must realize that no one will replace their job for an idea. People must be able to put food on the table for their families. And they shouldn’t have to choose between a job and the environment.
But if we work together, we can make sure the climate-friendly jobs of the future are good for workers, communities and the environment. That means making sure most of the jobs we create are good union jobs, we are prioritizing coal industry workers for new opportunities; we are including on-the-job training opportunities on publicly funded infrastructure projects for union apprentice; and we are targeting Black workers, women, other people of color and low-wage workers for these apprenticeships. We can learn a lot about how to do this from best practices in the national movement to ensure community benefits from big development projects. Essentially, public infrastructure resources should come with community and labor standards, or “strings attached.”
What strategies have you discovered that work best for securing broad consensus around ReImagine Appalachia’s policy blueprint for a sustainable future?
ReImagine Appalachia’s success is in part due to the creation of an inspiring, collective vision in the context of the very real possibility of securing federal resources that can actually turn that vision into reality. That vision is a collective vision created by people with deep roots in the states of the Ohio River Valley of Appalachia. Many people in the region have been waiting a long time for something like this to come along.
Nothing we do is done in a vacuum. Every year, we start the year off with a strategy summit that hundreds of stakeholders participate in to help develop our vision and our workplan. Our initial vision and blueprint was written after culling through 50 pages of notes from a virtual convening of stakeholders. Even then, the draft document was shared widely for even broader input and additional listening sessions were held to secure reactions to the draft.
We continue to dig deeper into every piece of our vision, collectively, with listening sessions and input into various drafts. When many people with different backgrounds, experiences and areas of expertise help to craft a vision, those diverse stakeholders not only help make it better, they learn from each other and ultimately become more dedicated to helping make that vision a reality. To promote wide dialogue, across stakeholder groups, we hold many public events (virtually), and share almost all of them live on Facebook. So, even if you cannot attend the actual event, you can see and learn what happened later and weigh in.
We also have several teams that get together regularly to discuss issues — a labor team, a racial and community justice team (that helped launch the Black Appalachian Coalition, or BLAC), and a research team. Our 2022 strategy summit led us to believe we need to create a faith table, one dedicated to promoting community dialogue at the local level and visioning sessions, and a manufacturing team.
We are particularly excited about the idea of redeveloping shuttered coal plants and former steel facilities into environmentally friendly industrial parks, or eco-industrial parks. The basic idea of an eco-industrial park is that one company’s waste is another company’s useful input. Shuttered coal plants have incredible electric grid and transportation infrastructure that can be harnessed to make the sustainable products of the future. For various reasons, we believe Appalachia could become a hub for battery technology, alternatives to single-use plastics, steel bars for rail, and electric buses and vehicles.
We have so much work to do and so little time! But rest assured, the proverbial train has left the station and we are chugging forward into the new energy economy. We just need to keep hammering away at it, beating the same drum, and singing from the same hymnal. All the metaphors will be needed to keep this train on track.
Dover, DE – A coalition of progressives and environmental groups are challenging lawmakers to sign on to a set of green New Year’s resolutions to kick off the 2022 session. Says participant Phillip Bannowsky, “this is a way to separate the committed from the compromised.”
The activists claim in their text that confronting the climate crisis “has been impeded by the short-sighted interests of powerful economic players.” Specifically, they call for a Green Amendment to the Delaware Constitution and support current legislation in the pipeline, including HB 259, requiring an emergency alert system to inform citizens when disasters like Croda’s November 25, 2018, toxic leak erupted, which injured workers at their Atlas Point plant as well as neighbors and motorists on the Delaware Memorial Bridge.
We cannot make the most urgent infrastructural investments of our lifetimes with gentle signals to financial markets. The clearest path forward is to embrace the capacity of the state.
Amid rising public outcry over government inaction toward the climate crisis, the nuclear power industry has attempted to advertise itself as “zero emissions,” “carbon-free” and even “renewable” in order to convince politicians and the public that it is essential to solving this world-historical disaster.
However, nuclear power is none of these things, and it in fact stands in the way of achieving an ecologically just society.
Unfortunately, a persistent and widespread public relations campaign by the nuclear power industry is endeavoring to convince some in the climate movement, as well as prominent Democrats in Congress, that nuclear energy has a role to play.
For example, after we checked in recently with the Sunrise Movement, the leading youth climate lobbying group on Capitol Hill, to see where the group stands on nuclear power, a volunteer signing his name “Josh” wrote to my organization, Beyond Nuclear, in an email that, “We don’t think shutting down existing [nuclear] plants makes much sense.” It’s not clear if this is a shift in Sunrise’s official position, since it contradicts the views on nuclear power in a position paper targeted at U.S. representatives that it signed onto in 2019, but, if so, we’ll be working to shift it.
This mythmaking had apparently infiltrated those backing the Green New Deal (GND) in 2019, when Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said she was happy to leave “the door open on nuclear.”
What AOC, Sunrise, and others may have overlooked is that nuclear power violates the very cornerstone of the GND: a “Just Transition.” Supporting existing nuclear power operation ignores the fact that currently operating U.S. reactors still have to run on fuel manufactured almost entirely from imported uranium — predominantly from Canada and Kazakhstan — often mined by Indigenous peoples. The radioactive detritus left behind by uranium mining and milling has decimated these and other Indigenous communities around the world. These operations, often conducted by foreign corporations, perpetuate racist colonialism.
Choosing to keep nuclear plants running means continued generation of lethal high-level radioactive waste, which is invariably targeted at frontline communities. For example, the proposed but now-canceled deep geological repository site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is on Western Shoshone land. Two U.S. sites currently identified for “temporary” dumps in Texas and New Mexico have significant low-income and Latinx populations. The Goshute’s Skull Valley Indian Reservation in Utah was chosen but also defeated. (All of these sites were, or are, opposed not only by residents but by their political leadership.)
Numerous studies have shown that nuclear power plant operation causes increased rates of leukemia in children living nearby. Keeping nuclear plants operating also runs the incalculable risk of accident or sabotage with consequences that will last for decades or millennia and which violate human rights.
Accepting nuclear power as part of a GND would sabotage success on climate and undermine its first pillar: to adhere to the fundamental tenets of environmental justice.
Nuking the Transition to Renewables
Embracing or remaining agnostic on nuclear power may also delay the transition to renewables, as running these power plants requires subsidies, starving renewables of funding. There are now even efforts to include nuclear power in state Renewable Energy Portfolios — designed to increase a state’s percentage of electricity generation from renewable energy sources — which will divert available funds away from renewables and to a financially failing industry that is far from “renewable.” Renewables will reduce more carbon emissions faster and for less cost than other energy choices, especially nuclear. Propping up unreliable, financially failing nuclear power plants impedes progress on climate change and is counter-productive to the goals of the GND.
According to the International Energy Agency, “By 2026, global renewable electricity capacity is forecast to rise more than 60% from 2020 levels to over 4 800 GW — equivalent to the current total global power capacity of fossil fuels and nuclear combined.” It makes no sense to cut this industry off at the knees in favor of nuclear energy.
Sound energy policy does not mean an “all-of-the-above” option. Choosing to continue with nuclear “cancels out” renewables (and vice versa). After examining datasets for 123 countries over 25 years, researchers found that countries choosing to keep nuclear power going are slower and less effective at meeting carbon reduction goals than those that choose renewables.
The configuration of electricity transmission and distribution systems that optimizes a grid structure for larger-scale centralized power production, such as conventional nuclear, will also make it more challenging, time-consuming and costly to introduce small-scale distributed renewable power.
We should also push back against the argument that closing nuclear power plants would necessarily mean bringing on more fossil fuels. For example, New York State is on target to meet its 100 percent zero carbon by 2040 climate goals, despite closing its Indian Point 2 and 3 reactors in 2020 and 2021. This is due to political foresight and planning which saw New York enact “ambitious climate and clean energy legislation” in 2019, which will achieve these goals regardless of a nuclear shutdown, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Any decision to replace closed nuclear power plants with fracked gas is “not fate but choice,” writes Amory Lovins, now adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University. That choice is political, not technological, often a “tactic to extort subsidies by making closure more disruptive,” allowing fracked gas to fill a short-term need. As the prices of renewable energy continue to fall, it will take an ever-greater share of the electricity market. But it is also up to political leaders to make the choice to switch to renewable energy rather than persist with fossil fuels.
Those in positions of power with a chance to get carbon reductions right before it’s too late should not continue to fall prey to the politically motivated and corporate profit-driven delusion that closing nuclear power plants is bad for climate mitigation.
The outcome at COP26 doesn’t bode well for the future of the planet, but then again, no one remotely aware of the history of international climate talks should have expected anything but a failure at Glasgow.
As a matter of fact, given what we already know about the science of climate change (fossil fuels are the primary culprits behind global warming), and, in light of our experience with the catastrophic effects of global warming (heat waves, wildfires, floods, droughts, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, habitat loss and species extinction), COP26 must be regarded as a “monumental failure.”
Indeed, it is quite shocking to see reports and commentaries from certain quarters trying to convince the public that COP26 represents a step forward in the fight against the climate crisis.
Why? Because for the first time in nearly three decades the world “coal” was used in a COP climate agreement? Or because of the pledge to end deforestation by 2030? Or could it be because world leaders agreed to end “inefficient” subsidies for fossil fuels?
Hypocrisy reigned supreme at COP26 in Glasgow. Leaving aside the presence of the fossil fuel industry with a bigger delegation than any country, most world leaders were there to defend their national economic interests rather than the sustainability of the planet.
Let’s start with President Joe Biden. He argued that “there is no more time to hang back or sit on the fence,” and then sought to convince everyone present that the U.S. will “lead by example” in the fight against global warming. How? By leasing over 80 million acres of public waters in the Gulf of Mexico to fossil fuel companies for oil and gas extraction immediately after his rhetorical posture at COP26.
And let’s not forget his urgent plea to OPEC just a few months ago to increase oil production.
Countries such as China, Russia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, to name just a few, worked hard during the negotiations to weaken as much as possible the final COP26 pact.
Of course, wealthy nations, which are primarily responsible for the climate crisis, bear the vast majority of the blame for climate impasse.
Their failure to honor a pledge of $100 billion in climate financing a year to poor nations, which are hit hardest by the consequences of global warming, speaks volumes of their commitment to the transformation of a sustainable and just future. So does their position on the issue of financing for “losses and damages” at COP26, which was deliberately couched in very vague terms and was left to be addressed in future climate talks.
But that’s what international climate diplomacy amounts to in the end: governments fighting for a climate agenda that won’t harm the specific interests and needs of their own ruling classes. This is exactly the reason why world leaders have been kicking the can down the road for nearly three decades now when it comes to taking drastic measures to combat global warming.
The truth of the matter is that whatever progress has been made so far in our fight against the climate crisis has been greatly due to activism on the part of individuals and a wide array of organizations such as community groups, labor unions, non-governmental organizations, and Indigenous groups. Youth voices on the climate crisis have been, of course, most instrumental in raising public consciousness and building momentum for the formation of a global climate movement, which is our only hope left towards securing the goal of sustainability for all life on Earth.
The irony is that actually no sober and rational thinking human being could possibly have any illusions about the challenge humanity faces in the 21st century. It requires an indubitably high level of ignorance, in conjunction with a heavy dose of misanthropy, to pass over the fact that the world is faced with a titanic struggle over how to save the planet.
Moreover, there is no mystery about how humanity can avoid a possible collapse of civilized order as we have known it. A global Green New Deal is our only hope to save the planet from the disastrous effects of global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Decarbonization in conjunction with natural climate solutions such as reforestation are key to making sure that humanity doesn’t get trapped in a conundrum the “the gates of hell are locked on the inside.”
There is no other choice at the present juncture. It is still not clear to what degree technology can be part of the solution at some point in the future, and we surely have no luxury in waiting to find out whether emerging technologies can solve the climate crisis.
Also, let’s have no illusions about the global Green New Deal project. This is not some sort of a utopian dream, as its opponents seem to suggest. The research, for instance, conducted by economists at the renowned Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst shows with unquestionable clarity that the implementation of the Green New Deal project will not only spare us from the worsening effects of global warming, but will also ensure sustainable development and a just transition.
But, perhaps more important, there are already scores of organizations in places all over the world working hard to turn the Green New Deal vision into reality. For example, ReImagine Appalachia, a collection of individuals and organizations seeking to “built a sustainable 21st century Appalachia,” is restoring damaged lands and water, refashioning the electric grid, building a sustainable transportation system, reforesting the region, while at the same time promoting union rights and ensuring that workers in extractive industries remain vital elements of the workforce in the post-fossil fuel economy.
Mass organizing is central, of course, to the attainment of the goals set forth by Reimagine Appalachia. Amanda Woodrum, Senior Researcher, Policy Matters Ohio, and Co-Director, Project to ReImagine Appalachia, says ReImagine Appalachia “reaches out and engages a wide variety of stakeholders – labor, faith, enviro, racial justice, criminal justice reform advocates, local electeds and others.”
Indeed, participation from below is the key to ensuring a societal transformation towards sustainability. As Amanda Woodrum so eloquently expressed to Truthout, this is the only way that “Appalachia stays on the climate table, otherwise it will be on the menu.”
In addition, ReImagine Appalachia appears to have developed a very effective local elected outreach strategy, which, according to Amanda Woodrum, “has secured a number of endorsements from local electeds and passed community resolutions in several communities.” Equally important, the organization has launched BLAC, the Black Appalachian Coalition, an initiative led by Black women, as Black Appalachians have been hit hardest by the downward mobility of the neoliberal project since the 1980s.
The outcomes of international climate summits are very discouraging, but the work done at the grassroots level by researchers and activists alike in the fight against humanity’s greatest existential crisis is quite inspiring.
So, yes, the struggle ahead promises to be hard and brutal, but the “general will” can always prevail in the end even under the most gruesome of circumstances if people are willing to fight for the right cause. And no cause can be more sacred than saving planet Earth.
An interview with Derecka Purnell, the author of Becoming Abolitionists, about what makes communities unsafe—and how she went from calling 911 to fighting for abolition.
This is the first in a series of commentaries on “The Green New Deal–From Below.” This commentary explains the idea of a Green New Deal from Below and provides an overview of the series. Subsequent commentaries in this series will address dimensions of the Green New Deal from below ranging from energy production to the role of unions to microgrids, coops, anchor institutions, and many others.
The 26th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which takes place in Glasgow from October 31-November 12, will bring together more than 120 world leaders for 12 days of talks aimed at forming an agreement on how to tackle the climate emergency. The expectation is that countries will produce 2030 emissions reductions targets that will secure global net zero by 2050. For that to happen, the phase-out of coal must be accelerated, deforestation must be curtailed and investment in green energy must rise significantly.
The urgency for action at COP26 cannot be overstated. We are running out of chances to save the planet from a climate catastrophe. But in order for the stated goals of COP26 to be attained, it is imperative that narrow views of national interest be put aside and great powers steer clear of geopolitical confrontations. Indeed, without international cooperation, the continued use of fossil fuels is set to drive societies across the globe into climate chaos and collapse.
So, what can we expect from COP26? Definite action or, as Greta Thunberg recently put it, more “blah, blah, blah?” In this expansive and eye-opening interview, leading scholars Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin share their thoughts and insights about the upcoming global climate summit and what must ultimately be done to save humanity and the planet from a global climate catastrophe. Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and currently Laureate Professor of Linguistics and Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice at the University of Arizona. Chomsky, one of the most cited scholars in history and long considered one of the U.S.’s voices of conscience, is joined by one of the world’s leading economists of the left, Robert Pollin, Distinguished Professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Chomsky and Pollin are co-authors of the recently published book Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy to Save the Planet.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, COP26 is believed to be our “last best hope” for meaningful action to tackle the climate crisis. Why is COP26 so important? And wasn’t pretty much the same thing said about COP21?
Noam Chomsky: It was indeed, and correctly. The concept of “last best hope” keeps narrowing. What’s the last best hope at one point is gone later, and the remaining last best hope becomes far more difficult to realize.
That’s been true since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, ratified by 192 nations, but not the U.S. The Senate would not accept it. George W. Bush pulled out completely; later Canada, did as well. Kyoto was the last best hope in 1997. If the U.S. had joined, the task of escaping devastating climate change would have been far easier.
By 2015 (the Paris Agreement, COP21), the “best hope” was much more remote and difficult to realize. Again, the U.S. Senate blocked it. More precisely, the plan was for a verifiable treaty, but Republicans would not accept that, so it was reduced to toothless voluntary agreements. And shortly after, Trump pulled out completely. Biden has formally rejoined, but what that means remains to be seen.
Right now, the Republican commitment to destroying the planet in the interest of short-term profit for their prime constituency of extreme wealth seems unassailable. But it was not always so. As we’ve discussed before, in 2008, there were signs of a deviation towards minimal concern for the fate of humanity, but it didn’t last long. A juggernaut by the huge Koch Brothers energy conglomerate quickly returned the Party to obedience, since unchanged.
In defense of the stand of what was once a genuine political party, we should take note of the fact that the U.S. very rarely accepts international conventions, and when it does so, it is with reservations that render them inapplicable to the U.S. That’s even true of the Genocide Convention.
One may plausibly argue, however, that these fine distinctions are all irrelevant. Even when the U.S. fully accepts international treaties, it violates them at will, hence also violating the U.S. Constitution, which declares them to be the Supreme Law of the Land, binding on the political leadership. The clearest case is the UN Charter, the basis for modern international law. It bans “the threat or use of force” in international affairs, with reservations irrelevant to the constant violation of the Treaty (and the Constitution) by U.S. presidents.
So normal that it virtually never elicits a comment.
Discourse on international affairs has found a way around these inconvenient facts by devising the concept of a “rule-based international order,” as contrasted with the old-fashioned “UN-based international order.” The former is preferred, since the U.S. can set the rules and determine how and when they can be enforced — an interesting topic, but not for now.
A treaty on climate change, if it can be reached, is in a different category. Survival is at stake. The basic facts are brutally clear, more so with each passing year. They are laid out clearly enough in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released on August 9. In brief, any hope of avoiding disaster requires taking significant steps right away to reduce fossil fuel use, continuing annually with the goal of effectively phasing out fossil fuel use by mid-century. We are approaching a precipice. A few steps more, and we fall over it, forever.
Falling off the precipice does not imply that everyone will die soon; there’s a long way down. Rather, it means that irreversible tipping points will be reached, and barring some now-unforeseen technological miracle, the human species will be entering a new era: one of inexorable decline, with mounting horrors of the kind we can easily depict, extrapolating realistically from what already surrounds us — an optimistic estimate, since non-linear processes may begin to take off and dangers lurk that are only dimly perceived.
It will be an era of “sauve qui peut” — run for your lives, everyone for themselves, material catastrophe heightened by social collapse and wholesale psychic trauma of a kind never before experienced. And on the side, an assault on nature of indescribable proportions.
All of this is understood at a very high level of confidence. Even a relic of rationality tells us that it is ridiculous to take a chance on its being mistaken, considering the stakes.
We might tarry for a moment on the date of the release of the IPCC report: August 9. Whether by accident or design, the choice is a momentous date in human affairs: the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. Putting aside the horrors and the dubious efforts at justification, the Hiroshima bombing a few days earlier demonstrated that human intelligence would soon reach the level of being able to destroy everything. Nagasaki demonstrated that the commitment to attain this goal was deeply entrenched in the reigning sociopolitical system and intellectual culture. What remained open was whether human moral capacities, and the institutions humans had created, had the capacity to overcome what human intellect was on the verge of achieving: total cataclysm. After 75 frightening years, the question still remains open even as prospects shrink for a hopeful answer.
The crisis of environmental destruction — which extends well beyond the crime of global heating — raises quite similar questions.
The evidence at hand is not encouraging. Let’s go back to August 9, 2021, with its clear warning that we must begin now to reduce fossil fuel use.
Immediately on receipt of this grim warning, the president of the most powerful state in world history issued an appeal to the global oil cartel OPEC to increase production. Europe followed suit, joined by the rest of what is called “advanced society.” The reason is an energy crunch. That’s doubtless a problem. One way to deal with it is to race towards the precipice. Another is for the rich in the rich societies, the major culprits, to tighten their belts while we sharply accelerate transition to sustainable energy.
The choice is unfolding before our eyes.
Petroleum industry journals are euphoric, announcing promising new discoveries that they can exploit to enhance production and reveling in the prospects for growing demand for their poisons. A few examples fill in details.
Germany is reacting to the August warning by joining in the call for increasing fossil fuel use and making its own contribution, for example, by destroying villages to expand coal mining.
Turning to the U.S., a mere 60 percent of voters regard global warming as an urgent problem for government. It is only the most urgent problem that humans have ever faced.
The party breakdown is the usual one: Among Republicans, 45 percent of “liberal/moderate Republicans” see global warming as an urgent problem along with 17 percent of “conservative Republicans.” The persisting lethal denialism is not a great surprise in the light of pronouncements of the leadership and the media to which they are exposed.
Thanks to significant popular activism, Biden’s major program, now being torn to shreds in Congress, did include some useful steps on climate change. Nothing seems likely to survive. Republicans are 100 percent opposed. Democrats need unanimity to pass anything. The Senate chair of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources is a right-wing Democrat, also a coal baron and the leading recipient of fossil fuel funding in Congress: Joe Manchin. His position on climate concerns is simple: “spending on innovation, not elimination.” Straight out of the fossil fuel industry playbook.
In South America, destruction of the Amazon is proceeding apace for the benefit of the domestic and international corporate sector, which has been hailing the policies of Chicago School Economics Minister Paulo Guedes: “privatize everything,” and who cares about the consequences. Recent scientific studies have found that “the southeastern Amazon was releasing more carbon that it was absorbing, even in rainy years when scientists had expected the forest to be in better health. It meant a part of the rainforest was no longer helping to slow climate change, but adding to the emissions driving it.”
That is a disaster for Brazil and indeed for the world, given the role of the huge tropical forests in regulating the global climate.
A leaked report of governmental efforts to weaken the IPCC study shows that the usual scoundrels are at work.
Saudi Arabia calls for eliminating such phrases as “the need for urgent and accelerated mitigation actions at all scales” and “the focus of decarbonisation efforts in the energy systems sector needs to be on rapidly shifting to zero-carbon sources and actively phasing out fossil fuels.” It is joined by OPEC, along with fossil fuel producers Argentina and Norway.
Saudi officials elaborated further. Giving no details, one Saudi prince explained that a transition to net-zero carbon emissions is welcome, but it must be reached through a “carbon circular economy” — a plan built around initiatives such as recycling and carbon removal.
Just innovation, no elimination.
Saudi officials and the chief executive of Saudi oil giant Aramco, the press reports, “expect demand for oil to continue and for it to be the dominant energy source for decades to come, and argue that reducing supply before demand drops risks a dangerous oil price spike, hurting economies such as Saudi Arabia’s that are dependent on oil and gas.”
Turning elsewhere, “A senior Australian government official rejects the conclusion that closing coal-fired power plants is necessary” — a stand that is perhaps related to Australia’s position as the world’s leading coal exporter.
Continuing with the submissions to the IPCC, “Brazil and Argentina, two of the biggest producers of beef products and animal feed crops in the world, argue strongly against evidence in the draft report that reducing meat consumption is necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Both countries call on the authors to delete or change some passages in the text referring to ‘plant-based diets’ playing a role in tackling climate change, or which describe beef as a ‘high carbon’ food.”
Again, not surprisingly, “A significant number of Switzerland’s comments are directed at amending parts of the report that argue developing countries will need support, particularly financial support, from rich countries in order to meet emission reduction targets.”
In brief, as we fall off the precipice, the near-uniform reaction is that: I want to grasp my share of the loot as doomsday approaches.
Returning to the still-open question posed by the August 9 anniversary, do human moral capacities, and the institutions humans have created, have the capacity to overcome what human intellect and these institutions have shown themselves capable of achieving: total cataclysm?
The answer will soon be known.
And while reflecting on the unanswered question, we should never forget that human intellect has also forged feasible solutions to impending crises, easily at hand, though not for long.
Given our experience up to now with global climate talks, should we really have high expectations about the outcome of COP26? After all, in addition to everything you mentioned above, global oil demand is booming, China continues to build coal-fired power plants around the world, the U.S. is bent on maintaining its hegemonic status in the world system, and we not only have a divided world but a world where now the majority of citizens say that their country’s society is more divided than ever before. Indeed, what can we realistically expect from COP26?
Chomsky: The business press is generally fairly realistic. Its audience has a stake in knowing what’s happening in the world. So, to answer the question, it is useful to open today’s (October 24) business press and read the first paragraph of the major article on what we can realistically expect: “As the prospects for strong government action to curb climate change grow less certain, energy shares, and especially coal mining stocks, are generating astonishing returns.” The article goes on to review the great opportunities for huge short-term profits for the super-rich while they destroy the diminishing hopes for a livable world for their children.
Economists soberly explain that this is a “market failure” caused by “externalities” — uncounted costs. Not false. The article quotes a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) study that found that that “market-based fossil fuel prices in 2020 failed to account for $5.9 trillion in global environmental costs, equivalent to 6.8 percent of global gross domestic product. The I.M.F. estimated that the gap will rise to 7.4 percent of world G.D.P. by 2025.”
Not false, but misleading. Market failures occur all the time, with increasing intensity since the heralded “market revolution” that has assaulted the world since Ronald Reagan opened the doors to wholesale robbery 40 years ago. But the anodyne phrase “market failure” does not begin to do justice to the monstrous crime that state-backed capitalist institutions are perpetrating.
The business press gives little reason to be optimistic about the outcome of COP26, but it’s worth remembering that it does not consider what humans can accomplish, if they choose. With regard to human effort and action, the outcome of COP26 doesn’t matter all that much. If governments make pledges, they won’t implement them without extensive popular activism. If they don’t make pledges, they won’t be driven to adopt and implement them without extensive popular activism. The message is much the same whatever the outcome: More work, lots more, on many fronts, not excluding the long-term dedication to dismantle lethal institutions and the doctrines that chain people to them.
Bob, the economics of global warming and global climate stabilization are quite straightforward. Indeed, a broad consensus has emerged about the economic impacts of global warming, although there is disagreement among economists about the best solutions to achieve significant reductions in carbon emissions. Why is it so difficult to implement viable climate policies even at the national, let alone the global, level?
Robert Pollin: Let’s start with the most obvious obstacle to advancing viable climate policies, which is the implacable opposition of the fossil fuel companies. Here I refer to both the private companies, such as ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell as well as public corporations such as Saudi Aramco, Gazprom in Russia and Petrobras in Brazil. Let’s assume we are working with the target set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that we must stabilize the average global temperature at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (1.5°C) above preindustrial levels. Within that framework, the most recent careful research by Tyler Hansen shows that the extent of total fossil fuel assets owned by these corporations that are “unburnable” — i.e., cannot be burned to produce energy if the world has a chance of achieving the 1.5°C stabilization target — amounts to between $13-$15 trillion. Of this total, about 75 percent of these fossil fuel assets, between about $10-$11 trillion, are owned by the public corporations, with the remaining $3-$5 trillion owned by private corporations. We should not be surprised that the fossil fuel companies are fighting by all means available to them to continue profiting lavishly from selling this oil, coal and natural gas still in the ground. They don’t want to hear about dumping $15 trillion in assets.
It’s true that the publicly owned national companies, controlling approximately 90 percent of the globe’s total fossil fuel reserves, do not operate with precisely the same profit imperatives as big private energy corporations. But let’s be clear that this does not mean that they are prepared to commit to fighting climate change simply because their stated mission is to serve the public as opposed to private shareholders, and because we, the public, face a global environmental emergency. Just as with the private companies, producing and selling fossil fuel energy generates huge revenue flows for these publicly owned companies. National development projects, lucrative careers and political power all depend on continuing the flow of large fossil fuel revenues.
Overall, then, there is no getting around that the interests of these fossil fuel companies will simply have to be defeated. Obviously, that will not be easy to accomplish. We are seeing this right now in the U.S., with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia doing everything possible to kill even the minimally decent climate provisions of Biden’s Build Back Better program. Manchin himself started his own coal brokerage company in the state and continues to receive large profits from it. We are also seeing it on a global scale, with Russian President Vladimir Putin issuing dire warnings of upcoming energy shortages if investments to expand fossil fuel supply do not increase.
But it is also critical to recognize that the fossil fuel companies are not the only obstacle to advancing a viable global climate stabilization project. There is also the matter of pure inertia, which cannot be overlooked. We are faced with the challenge of building a new global energy infrastructure on the foundations of high efficiency and clean renewable energy, while also phasing out our existing fossil fuel-dominant energy infrastructure. This has to be a hugely challenging project, even under the best of circumstances and even putting aside machinations of the fossil fuel companies. I have experienced this firsthand, for example, in our project at UMass-Amherst in which we built the first zero-emissions office building in western Massachusetts to house the Economics Department. There are lots of new ways of doing things that need to be learned, in terms of engineering, use of materials and workers developing new skills. It also requires people cooperating effectively.
There is also the absolutely critical question of “just transition” for workers and communities whose livelihoods are, at present, dependent on the fossil fuel industry. In my view, just transition has to be at the center of any global Green New Deal project. There is no denying that these workers and communities throughout the world will lose out in the clean energy transition. In order for the global clean energy project to succeed, it must provide adequate transitional support for these workers and communities. It is a matter of simple justice, but it is also a matter of strategic politics. Without such adjustment assistance programs operating at a major scale, the workers and communities facing retrenchment from the clean energy investment project will, predictably and understandably, fight to defend their communities and livelihoods. This in turn will create unacceptable delays in proceeding with effective climate stabilization policies.
My co-workers and I have estimated the costs of a very generous just transition program for all workers in the United States now tied to the fossil fuel and ancillary industries, working with the assumption that all fossil fuel production will have been shut down by 2050. This program would include a re-employment guarantee with wages at least matching the workers current pay, along with pension guarantees, and, as needed, retraining and relocation support. We estimated these total costs as averaging about $3 billion per year. This would be equal to roughly 1/100 of one percent (0.01 percent) of average U.S. GDP between now and 2050. In other words, in terms of financing, it would be a trivial matter to establish this sort of just transition program throughout the U.S.
In fact, path-breaking developments are occurring right now in California toward advancing a just transition program in the state. This movement is being led by visionary labor leaders in the state, including leaders of the state’s oil refinery workers’ union. One such leader, Norman Rogers, a vice president of United Steelworkers Local 675, recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times that,
Though the energy transition is inevitable, a just version is not. Workers know what happens when whole industries go away: Companies maneuver behind our backs, squeeze every last drop of work out of a dying auto plant, steel mill or coal mine and shutter it overnight, devastating communities and stiffing workers out of jobs, pensions and healthcare. The fear is real of jobs lost with no plan for when operations begin to phase out.
Rogers emphasizes that “many speak of a ‘just transition,’ but we’ve never seen one. No worker or community member will ever believe that an equitable transition is possible until we see detailed, fully funded state safety net and job creation programs.” But he, optimistically, is arguing that, “With a fully funded equitable transition plan — meeting the immediate need for a safety net for workers and communities, and offering a bold vision to restructure our economy — we can jump-start recovery and move California’s workers, communities and the planet toward a more secure future.”
The enactment of a robust just transition program in California, led by the state’s labor unions, including its fossil fuel industry unions, will also provide a model for comparable measures to be adopted throughout the U.S. and globally. Supporting such initiatives should therefore be understood as an absolute first-tier priority for the U.S. and the global climate movement.
China has emerged as a global economic superpower in the last couple of decades and, in fact, since 2008 tops the annual list of being the largest emitter of greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, although we get a different picture if we look at carbon emissions per capita. Be that as it may, what sort of finance conditions need to be introduced in countries like China and in emerging economies for a successful transition to clean energy resources without sacrificing economic and social development?
Pollin: As of the most recent data, global carbon dioxide emissions were at about 34 billion tons. China is generating about 10 billion tons, 30 percent of this total, making it by far the country with the largest share of total emissions. The U.S. is next at about 5 billion tons, 15 percent of the total. The countries of the European Union (EU) account for another 9 percent. Thus, China, the U.S. and the EU are responsible for 54 percent of all global emissions. They all need to drive their emissions down to zero no later than 2050 for there to be any chance of meeting the IPCC’s global emissions reduction targets of a 45 percent decline by 2030 and a net-zero global economy by 2050.
It’s true that in terms of emissions per person, China’s figure, at 7.4 tons per person, is still less than half the 15.2 tons per person figure for the United States. But it remains the case that China must go from its current total emissions level of 10 billion tons down to zero by 2050, just as the U.S. needs its emissions to fall absolutely, from 5 billion tons to zero.
It also follows that, even if China, the U.S. and the EU managed to push their carbon dioxide emissions down to zero tomorrow, we would still be only a bit more to halfway to achieving the global zero emissions goal, since the rest of the world is today responsible for about 46 percent of all emissions. It is therefore obvious that the transition to a global clean energy system has to be a global project. The transition has to be advancing in India, Vietnam, Australia, Kenya, Puerto Rico, Chile, South Korea, South Africa and Mexico just as much as in China, the U.S. and EU.
Building clean energy infrastructures in developing economies will not entail sacrificing economic and social development. Indeed, the Green New Deal remains focused on expanding good job opportunities, raising mass living standards and fighting poverty along with driving emissions to zero. All of these aims can be realistically accomplished, since investments in clean energy will be a major engine of job creation. Moreover, the costs of clean energy investments are already lower, on average, than those for fossil fuels. Building a clean energy infrastructure will also support the expansion of a range of new public and private ownership forms. This includes small-scale community ownership in rural low-income communities, such as in sub-Saharan Africa. To date, roughly half of such communities still do not have access to electricity of any kind, despite generations of promises made by politicians of all stripes.
At the same time, we cannot expect low-income countries to finance their clean energy and just transition programs on their own. I have sketched out a global financing framework, in which there are four main components. Other approaches could also be viable. These four funding sources are: 1) a global 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 military budgets from all countries, but primarily the U.S.; 3) eliminating all existing fossil fuel subsidies and channeling 25 percent of the funds into clean energy investments; and 4) a Green Bond lending program, initiated by the U.S. Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, with other major central banks in China, the U.K. and Japan also participating. 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 standalone measures.
I work through some of the details of these proposals in our 2020 book, Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal. But let’s briefly consider the Green Bond financing proposal by way of illustration. This program will not take money out of anyone’s pocket. It rather involves the world’s major central banks effectively printing money as needed. This would be just as they did during both the 2007-09 global financial crisis and during the COVID recession, except on a far more modest scale than the largesse that the central banks showered on Wall Street and global financial elite to keep them afloat. To be clear, I am not suggesting that the U.S. Fed or European Central Bank should rely on this policy — what is technically known as “debt monetization” — on a routine basis. But we need to be equally clear that this is a fully legitimate option that the major central banks have in their toolkit, and that this option should indeed be brought into action under crisis conditions. Note here that the funds will be generated by the major central banks but then distributed globally on an equitable basis, to underwrite the clean energy investment projects at scale in all regions of the globe. Public investment banks in all regions, but especially in low-income countries, will then serve as primary conduits in moving specific investment projects forward.
What would you consider as the optimal outcome of the talks at the COP 26 summit?
Pollin: The optimal outcome would be for the summit to not produce another round of what Greta Thunberg has accurately described as the “blah, blah, blah” which has resulted from previous such gatherings. COP26 needs to establish truly binding commitments on all countries that would include the following:
Meeting at least the IPCC’s emissions reduction targets, of a 45 percent global emissions cut by 2030 and to achieve zero emissions by 2050;
Mounting robust just transition programs in all countries and regions, to support workers and communities that will be negatively impacted by the emissions reduction project; and
Paying for these binding commitments through strongly egalitarian financing measures.
Noam, the impact of human activities on the environment is so real and profound that past, present and future are interlinked in such way that there can be no blurring between the empirical and the normative. The climate crisis has created a global storm and cooperation and solidarity are essential prerequisites to the survival of the planet. However, given the daunting task that lays ahead (shrinking and ultimately eliminating emissions while advancing at the same time a framework of development that embraces both developed and developing countries and guaranteeing a socially just transition), how do we encourage activists and concerned citizens alike to remain committed to a struggle where the outcome is uncertain without succumbing to defeatism?
Chomsky: Outcomes have always been uncertain. Defeatism is not an option; it translates as “species suicide, bringing down much of life on Earth with it.”
There are steps forward. Crucially, there is widespread understanding of the measures that can be take, quite realistically, to avert impending disaster and move on to a much better world. That includes the comprehensive and detailed studies by our friend and colleague economist Robert Pollin, by economist Jeffrey Sachs, and by the International Energy Agency, all coming to generally similar conclusions. These results have also reached Congress in a 2019 resolution recently reintroduced by its sponsors, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey. It’s all there to be acted upon.
And while Sen. Joe Manchin is working assiduously to block any congressional action that departs from the “no elimination” death warrant issued by the energy corporations, his constituents in West Virginia are showing more concern for survival. A recent report of the United Mine Workers recognizes that, “Change is coming, whether we seek it or not. Too many inside and outside the coalfields have looked the other way when it comes to recognizing and addressing specifically what that change must be, but we can look away no longer.”
The union supports a transition to renewable energy, rightly insisting that workers receive good jobs — which should in fact be better jobs, as can be readily accomplished along lines that Bob Pollin has laid out in his studies and conveyed to the public in his grassroots work in West Virginia and other mining states, where unions are moving in the same direction.
There has also been considerable progress since COP21: sharp reduction in cost of sustainable energy, significant steps towards electrification and constant pressure to do more, mostly by the young, those who will have to endure the consequences of our folly and betrayal of their hopes. The recent global climate strike was a noteworthy example.
Another hopeful sign is the recovery of the labor movement from the state-corporate blows that were a salient feature of the neoliberal years from their outset, with deep roots in the origins of neoliberal doctrine in interwar Vienna. That’s a long and important story, but there are many indications that it is underway, somewhat reminiscent of the early 1930s. The vibrant U.S. labor movement had been almost crushed by state-corporate violence. But as the Depression hit, it began to revive, and spearheaded the New Deal moves towards social democracy that greatly improved the lives of [many, though not all] Americans. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that the business counteroffensive became powerful enough to restore a system of radical inequality and suppression of the basic rights of the great majority. Today, that assault is being challenged and may be overcome. One sign of many is the massive refusal to return to the rotten, dangerous, precarious jobs offered to the workforce during the neoliberal class war. The catastrophic “market failure” of environmental destruction is a catalyzing factor.
If that happens, we can hope for — and try to nurture — a revival of core features of labor activism from the early days of the industrial revolution, among them solidarity and internationalism. We’re all in this together, not each alone trying to collect as many crumbs as we can for ourselves. That consciousness is essential for survival, at home and abroad.
In particular, there must be an end to provocative confrontations with China and a serious rethinking of the alleged “China threat” — experiences we’ve been through before with dire consequences, now literally a matter of survival. The U.S. and China will cooperate in approaching the urgent crises of today, or we’re doomed.
The choices before us are stark. They cannot be evaded or ignored.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
After 40 years of neoliberal rule, in which the state actively sought to eradicate the boundary between market, civil society and governance by making economic rationality the cornerstone of every human activity, advanced capitalism appears to be at a crossroads on account of the economic and social impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. So-called “big government” has staged a dramatic comeback, and even conservative leaders have broken with some of the basic orthodoxies of neoliberalism.
Are we in the midst of fundamental and permanent changes with regard to the relation between the state and markets? Are we witnessing the demise of neoliberalism? Has the pandemic led to the emergence of a new variant of capitalism?
In this interview, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual Noam Chomsky, along with two preeminent economists of the left — Costas Lapavitsas from the University of London and Robert Pollin from the University of Massachusetts Amherst — share their thoughts and insights about economics and capitalism in the age of the pandemic and beyond.
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the neoliberal era of the last 40 years has been defined to a large extent by growing inequalities, slow growth and environmental degradation. Indeed, even the International Monetary Fund admitted some years ago that neoliberalism had failed. Yet, it took the outbreak of a pandemic for a consensus to emerge regarding the failures of neoliberalism. Why did neoliberalism triumph and endure in the first place, and is it actually dead?
Noam Chomsky: My feeling is that a version of neoliberalism has triumphed because it has been highly successful — for the designers, whose power has been considerably enhanced by such predictable consequences as radical inequality, restricting democracy, destruction of unions and atomization of the population so that there is limited defense against the version of neoliberalism that has been pursued with impressive dedication in this latest phase of class war. I say a “version” because the state-corporate managers of the system insist upon a very powerful state that can protect their interests internationally and provide them with massive bailouts and subsidies when their programs collapse, as they do regularly.
For similar reasons, I don’t think that this version is dead, though it is being re-adjusted in response to growing popular anger and resentment, much fueled by the successes of the neoliberal assault on the population.
Bob, the pandemic has shown us that neoliberal capitalism is more than inadequate in addressing large-scale economic and public health crises. Are the resources mobilized by national states during the pandemic crisis a simple case of emergency Keynesianism, or do they represent a fundamental shift in the traditional role of government, which is to maximize society’s welfare? Moreover, are the policies we have seen implemented so far at all levels of government sufficient to provide the basis for a progressive economic agenda in the post-pandemic era?
Robert Pollin: Neoliberalism is a variant of capitalism in which economic policies are weighted heavily in favor of supporting the privileges of big corporations, Wall Street and the rich. Neoliberalism became dominant globally around 1980, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. The top priorities under neoliberalism, as practiced throughout the world, have included: cutting both taxes on the rich along with public spending on the non-rich; weakening protections for both working people and the environment and any semblance of a commitment to full and decent employment; and enabling financial speculation to run rampant while bailing out the speculators when the markets proceed, inevitably, into crises.
Neoliberalism represented a counterrevolution against social democratic/New Deal/developmental state variants capitalism, which emerged primarily as a result of successful political struggles by progressive political parties, labor unions and allied social movements, out of the 1930s Depression and continuing through the early 1970s. Of course, social democratic/New Deal/developmental state capitalism was still capitalism. Disparities of income, wealth and opportunity remained intolerably high, along with the malignancies of racism, sexism and imperialism. Nevertheless, the broadly social democratic models produced dramatically more egalitarian versions of capitalism than the neoliberal regime that supplanted these models. The neoliberal model, in turn, has been highly successful in achieving its most basic aim, which is to shower ever-greater advantages on the already over-privileged. For example, under neoliberalism in the United States between 1978 and 2019, the average pay for big corporate CEOs has risen tenfold relative to the average non-supervisory worker.
With the onset of the COVID pandemic in March 2020, government policies in the high-income countries did pursue measures to prevent a total, 1930s-level economic collapse. Depending on the country, these measures included direct cash support for lower- and middle-income people, significant increases in unemployment insurance and large payroll subsidy programs to prevent layoffs. But by far, the most aggressive policy interventions were the bailouts provided for big corporations and Wall Street.
In the U.S., for example, nearly 50 percent of the entire labor force filed for unemployment benefits between March 2020 and February 2021. However, over this same period, Wall Street stock prices rose by 46 percent, one of the sharpest one-year increases on record. The same pattern prevailed globally. The International Labour Organization reported that, “There were unprecedented global employment losses in 2020 of 114 million jobs relative to 2019.” At the same time, global stock markets rose sharply — by 45 percent throughout Europe, 56 percent in China, 58 percent in the U.K., and 80 percent in Japan, and with Standard & Poor’s Global 1200 index rising by 67 percent.
So while there was a desperately needed expansion of social welfare programs helping people to survive under COVID, these measures were enacted within the framework of still larger efforts to prop up the still prevailing neoliberal order.
Of course, the severity of the climate crisis has continued to deepen during the pandemic. In February, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said, “2021 is a make-or-break year to confront the global climate emergency…. Governments are nowhere close to the level of ambition needed to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees and meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The major emitters must step up with much more ambitious emissions reductions targets for 2030 … well before the November UN Climate Conference in Glasgow.”
We are now into October in the “make or break year” and yet, little has been accomplished since Guterres spoke in February. It is true that, throughout the high-income countries, social movements and climate activists are fighting to advance programs that combine climate stabilization and an egalitarian social agenda, under the rubric of a global Green New Deal. The extent to which they succeed will determine whether we will have established a basis for a progressive economic agenda and effective climate policies in the post-pandemic era. We do not yet know how successful these efforts will be. As we discussed at some length recently, the social infrastructure and climate proposal being debated right now in the U.S. Congress is itself not ambitious enough to be truly transformative. But if it is enacted, it will still represent a significant break from neoliberal dominance that has prevailed since Thatcher and Reagan.
Costas, the COVID pandemic has exposed numerous structural flaws of capitalism, and the neoliberal order may be indeed on the verge of collapse. Still, can we speak of a “crisis of capitalism” given that we do not see large-scale opposition to the current system?
Costas Lapavitsas: There is no question that the pandemic shock represents a tremendous crisis of global capitalism, but I would urge strong caution regarding the collapse of neoliberalism. The period since the Great Crisis of 2007-2009 looks more like an interregnum (a term offered in the spirit of Antonio Gramsci) when the old is refusing to die and the new cannot be born. And like all such periods, it is prone to monsters, including fascism.
The Great Crisis of 2007-2009 was overcome by the state deploying its massive strength to defend financialized capitalism and globalization. But what followed was a decade of low growth, poor investment, weak productivity growth, sustained inequality and partially revived profits. Economic performance was poor in core countries, providing further evidence of the failure of neoliberalism. The Golden Era of financialization is well and truly over, despite the sustained rise of stock markets in the previous decade. Yet, economic performance was also mediocre in China, reflecting an underlying weakness of productive accumulation across the world.
When COVID-19 struck, it became crystal clear that contemporary capitalism is entirely dependent on massive state intervention. Core Western states were able to intervene on an unprecedented scale mostly because of monopoly command by central banks over fiat money. Unlike 2007-2009, however, the state also deployed fiat money to relax austerity, thus engaging in the unspoken nationalization of the wage bill and the income statements of thousands of enterprises.
It is a misunderstanding that neoliberalism necessarily means marginalizing the state and imposing austerity. Rather, it is about using the state selectively to defend the interests of a small elite, an oligarchy, associated with big business and the financial sector. Fundamentally, it stands for shifting the balance of power in favor of capital by removing controls on its activities. When the pandemic shock threatened the foundations of class rule, austerity and forbearing from direct economic intervention were abandoned in the blink of an eye. The neoliberal ideologists rapidly adapted to the new reality, though it is always possible that austerity will return. What has not taken place is an institutional shift in favor of workers’ interests that would limit the freedom of capital. It is primarily in this sense that the old is refusing to die.
The pandemic also made it clear that there is great variety in the relationship between powerful states and domestic capitalist accumulation. Core Western states, in the grip of neoliberal ideology, derive their strength primarily from command over fiat money. In contrast, the Chinese state remains directly involved in both productive accumulation and finance as well as having possession over vast resources. Their respective responses to the pandemic differed greatly.
Inevitably there has been a tremendous escalation in the contest for global hegemony, including in the military field. For the first time since 1914, moreover, the hegemonic contest is also immediately economic. The Soviet Union was exclusively a political and military contestant to the U.S. — the Lada could never compete with Chrysler. But China can outcompete the U.S. economically, making the struggle considerably deeper and removing any obvious point of equilibrium. The U.S. ruling bloc realizes that is has made a strategic miscalculation, and this accounts for its current unrelenting aggressiveness. Conditions in the international arena are exceedingly dangerous.
Still, the global hegemonic struggle lacks entirely in ideological content. Western neoliberal democracies are exhausted, failed and bereft of new ideas. The attempts of the U.S. ruling bloc to present its aggressiveness as a defense of democracy are hollow and ludicrous. On the other hand, Chinese (and Russian) authoritarianism has considerable domestic support but no capacity to offer a globally appealing social and political perspective.
The characteristic feature of the interregnum since 2007-2009 is an ideological impasse. There is tremendous discontent with capitalism, particularly as the degradation of the environment and the warming of the planet have raised great concern among the young. But that concern has not translated into a broad-based mobilization behind fresh socialist ideas and politics. This is the challenge ahead, particularly as the far right is already taking advantage.
Postcapitalism (defined broadly as a social system in which the power of markets is restricted, productive activity is premised on automation, work is delinked from wages, and the state provides universal basic services and a basic income) is possible because of changes in information technology, according to some pundits. Should the left spend political capital by envisioning a postcapitalist future?
Lapavitsas: During the pandemic crisis, the domestic actions of nation states displaced the precepts and prescriptions of neoliberal capitalism, foisted invasive measures on social and personal life centering on public health and hygiene, and imposed severe restrictions on civil liberties and economic activity. The state inflamed political tensions, heightened social polarization and restricted freedoms.
Workers paid the greatest price through income loss, rising unemployment and worsening public provision. But the middle strata were also left out in the cold, thus delivering a major blow to the class alliances that supported the neoliberal project. Giant oligopolies in new technology emerged as the main beneficiaries — Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the rest. Their actions are steadily eclipsing the figure of the citizen as personal identities are increasingly organized around market links to the oligopolies. At the same time, the extreme right was strengthened, a trend that started before the pandemic and has accelerated through the agency of powerful oligarchies.
There has been no shortage of grassroots reactions to these developments. Heavy-handed state actions, official cultivation of fear, suspension of rights and liberties, the danger of permanent repression, and the crushing of workers and the middle strata during the lockdowns spurred various responses often in a libertarian direction.
Bear in mind that maintaining capitalist accumulation in the years to come will be exceedingly difficult across the world. The underlying weakness of accumulation is far from easy to confront. It is also clear that state intervention in the pandemic has created major difficulties with the disruption of supply chains, the rise of inflation eating into workers’ incomes and the tremendous escalation of public debt. And all that is without even mentioning the broader issues of environment and climate.
It is hardly possible that economic growth could be sustained without large-scale state intervention on the supply side through public investment that also involves profound distributional changes in income that benefit workers. It seems even less likely that this would happen without a major shift in property rights, redistributing wealth and productive resources in favor of workers and the poor.
Technology alone is never the answer for complex social problems. Indeed, one aspect of the technological revolution of the last four decades is its inability even to improve the economic conditions of accumulation since its effect on the average productivity of labor is modest. I see no reason at this stage to expect that artificial intelligence would prove dramatically different. Perhaps it will, but there are no guarantees.
Western neoliberal democracies are ideologically exhausted, and their capitalist economies are beset with problems. In this context, it is imperative for socialists and progressives to think of a postcapitalist future and ascertain its broad parameters. We need to think about the use of digital technologies, the greening of production and the protection of the environment. But all that should take place in social conditions that favor working people and not capitalists, with a new sociality, collective action and individual fulfilment through communal association. The rejuvenation of the socialist promise is the paramount need of the times.
Bob, during the neoliberal era, mainstream economics shaded easily into ideology. Indeed, it is rather easy to show that mainstream economic policy is full of misrepresentation of reality. The question is: How does an alleged science become ideology? And how likely it is that the coronavirus pandemic, in conjunction with the flaws of neoliberalism and the urgency of the climate crisis, will lead to an intellectual paradigm shift in “dismal science”?
Pollin: Let’s recognize that all varieties of economists are heavily influenced by ideology, or what the great conservative economist Joseph Schumpeter more judiciously termed their “pre-analytic vision.” Leftist economists, myself included, are as guilty as anyone else. Our ideology influences the questions that we decide are most important to ask. Ideology also provides us with some initial guesses as to what the answers to these questions are likely to be. Still, if we are also attempting to be the least bit scientific, or even minimally honest, as economic researchers, we will put our hunches and our preferred answers to the test of evidence and be open to challenges.
I think it is fair to say that, not all, but a high percentage of mainstream economists have not been committed to these minimally objective scientific standards. They rather have been so fully immersed in their ideological biases that they are unable to even think about how they might ask questions differently. Their biases have been reinforced by the fact that these prejudices provide succor to policy regimes that, as noted above, shower benefits on the already overprivileged.
Joan Robinson, the renowned Cambridge University economist of the Great Depression and post-World War II era, beautifully captured this allure of orthodox economics as follows: “One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was … a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.”
At the same time, there has been no shortage of progressive economists over the neoliberal era who have stood up to mainstream orthodoxy, as represented, for example, by the 24 people you interviewed in the new book, Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists. In my view, how much influence economists such as these will have will depend primarily on how successful are the progressive movements in advancing the Green New Deal and related programs in the coming months and years.
There are hopeful signs. Just late last month, the Federal Reserve released a paper by Jeremy Rudd, a senior member of its own staff, which begins with the observation that “mainstream economics is replete with ideas that ‘everyone knows’ to be true, but that are actually arrant nonsense.”
Rudd also notes on page one that he is leaving aside in this paper “the deeper concern that the primary role of mainstream economics in our society is to provide apologetics for a criminally oppressive, unsustainable, and unjust social order.” There may well be more Jeremy Rudds out there, poised to spring from the shadows of the professional mainstream. This would be a most positive development. But I would also say that it’s about time.
Noam, it’s been said by far too many that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Given that capitalism is actually destroying the Earth, how, firstly, would you respond to the above statement, and, secondly, how do you envision economy and society after capitalism?
Chomsky: I’d prefer to rephrase the question to refer to state capitalism. Those whom Adam Smith called “the masters of mankind,” the dominant business classes, would never tolerate capitalism, which would expose them to the ravages of the market. That’s for the victims. For the masters, a powerful state is required — insofar as they can control it and reduce the “underlying population” (Thorstein Veblen’s ironic term) to subordination and passivity.
It does not seem to me too difficult to imagine at least a serious mitigation of the destructive and repressive elements of this system, and its eventual transformation to a far more fair and just society. In fact, we must not only imagine but proceed to implement such programs, or we’ll all be finished — the masters too.
It’s even quite realistic to imagine — and implement — the overthrow of the basic state capitalist principle: renting oneself to a master (in a more anodyne formulation, having a job). After all, for millennia it’s been recognized — in principle at least — that being subjected to the will of a master is an intolerable attack on human dignity and rights. The concept is not far back in our own history. In late 19th-century America, radical farmers and industrial workers were seeking to create a “cooperative commonwealth” in which they would be free of domination by illegitimate bosses robbing their labor and of northeast bankers and market managers. These powerful movements were so effectively crushed by state-corporate force that today even the highly popular ideas sound exotic. But they are not far below the surface and are even being revived in many important ways.
In short, there’s reason to be hopeful that what must be done can be done.
Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.
Some readers might be offended by criticism of the US military, but nothing should be above critique. Some of the worst periods of human history occurred when people didn’t question authority or question the course their society was taking.
Democrats in Congress are engaged in an increasingly bitter debate over what to cut from their budget reconciliation package in order to appease party conservatives who refused the original $3.5 trillion price tag. Progressives fear that key climate provisions may be on the chopping block even as President Joe Biden prepares for international climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland.
Four Senate Democrats now say they will only support the reconciliation package and the bipartisan infrastructure deal at the heart of the Biden agenda if lawmakers approve new efforts to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions, which the president will need in negotiations at the United Nations climate conference next month.
“President Biden must be able to put a deal on the table that reflects what we then expect from the rest of the world, so we begin a downward trajectory in terms of the greenhouse gases that are going up in the atmosphere,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) at a Capitol Hill press conference with youth climate activists on Thursday.
Progressives and activists warn that elements of the bipartisan infrastructure bill are a Trojan horse for the privatization of public resources, such as transportation and water systems. Critics also say the separate Democratic proposal to invest $3.5 trillion in new social and climate spending over the next 10 years is not enough to address the nation’s various crises, including the growing cost of climate-related disasters. Researchers estimate the global economy could lose up to $23 trillion by 2050 due to climate change, while the United States loses more than $800 billion each year.
Still, Markey said lawmakers should pass both the Democratic Party’s reconciliation package and the bipartisan infrastructure bill that have consumed Congress for months. In the House, progressives recently delayed a vote on the bipartisan bill in order to force action on the reconciliation package. Markey said only the reconciliation package is a “climate bill” — the bipartisan bill contains subsidiesfor the fossil fuel industry — and measures for confronting the climate crisis must not be dropped in negotiations with conservative Democrats that continue to frustrate progressives.
“Here’s the deal: Climate cannot and will not be cut. No climate, no deal,” Markey said to applause from activists with the Sunshine Movement and other groups. “Climate solutions must remain up front and center in this reconciliation package.”
Markey was joined by Senators Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), Tina Smith (D-Minnesota) and Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), three Green New Deal Democrats who remain focused on climate as debate over the reconciliation package splinters their caucus. The press conference was one of the latest swipes by liberals against conservative Democrats Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who threaten to derail the spending package or significantly reduce the scope and price tag. Votes from both Sinema and Manchin are needed to pass the legislation along party lines.
Manchin, a top recipient of fossil fuel contributions, told Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as early as July that he would support only $1.5 trillion in new spending through the budget reconciliation process Democrats are using to bypass Republican opposition. The White House now says it would accept a $2.2 trillion deal, though Manchin has so far outraged progressives by refusing to budge on his spending cap, according to reports. The final price tag is expected to land somewhere between these two figures.
Manchin has also balked at Democratic proposals that would subsidize a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy while pushing for infrastructure investments in the bipartisan bill that would help the fossil fuel industry stay afloat.
Markey said allied Democrats are committed to creating a Civilian Climate Corps, a proposal championed by the youth climate activists and the Sunrise Movement that would put young people to work building the next generation of climate resilient infrastructure. A $150 billion proposal to create a Clean Energy Performance Program that would incentivize utilities to make progress toward Biden’s goal of 80 percent clean electricity by 2030 is also non-negotiable, Markey said.
“We’re willing to listen to Sen. Manchin to try to deal with his concerns, but ultimately all of those programs that we talked about here today, we want to have in the final reconciliation bill,” Markey said.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), the Senate Budget Committee chairman who originally proposed a $6 trillion spending package, also took aim at Manchin and Sinema this week and demanded to know what exactly the two holdouts would cut from the reconciliation bill to reduce spending.
“It’s not good enough to be vague, and I do not understand to be honest how in this time in world history you cannot talk about the crisis of climate change and tell us what you want to do,” Sanders told reporters on Wednesday.
Manchin has yet to say publicly which climate provisions he considers deal breakers, but the West Virginia senator with ties tothe fossil fuel industry appears concerned about any federal efforts that would put the fossil fuel industry that has long dominated his state at a competitive disadvantage. Democrats are reportedly prepared to appease Manchin with tax credits for power plants that install expensive and controversial carbon capture technology, which environmentalists fear will lock in fossil fuels for decades to come.
Manchin has said market forces should guide the transition to clean energy rather than government intervention. This view puts multiple Democratic priorities at risk, including proposed tax credits for renewables and the Clean Energy Performance Program, which would penalize utilities that remain reliant on dirty energy, as well as a proposed tax on methane emissions from natural gas production.
Methane is responsible for about 30 percent of global temperature rise to date, and 75 percent of methane emissions must be reduced in order for the world to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency. (This is the international climate goal supported by the Biden administration.) Globally, fossil fuel extraction is responsible for 120 million tons of methane emissions each year, but that number could be cut by up to 70 percent if the oil and gas industry simply fixed leaks in its infrastructure. The U.S. is a top producer of oil and gas, and the industry is responsible for 30 percent of domestic methane emissions.
Democrats want to tax methane emissions to encourage the industry to clean up its act. The industry has pushed back, telling congressional leaders that a tax on methane pollution would be felt by consumers. Experts say the industry is being misleading. The tax would only penalize the industry for failing to capture and sell its own product — natural gas. The Biden administration is writing new regulations for reducing methane pollution from the oil and gas sector, a process that was stalled for years by the Trump administration.
“While cutting methane is a vital start, it is not enough,” said Lauren Pagel, policy director at the environmental group Earthworks, in a statement this week. “The U.S. must begin a managed decline of fossil fuels that centers industry workers and frontline communities who are most exposed to the health and climate impacts of fossil fuels.”
Progressives in the House are pushing to include a repeal of tax breaks and other subsidies for the fossil fuel industry in the reconciliation package, which would complement new investments in renewables. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a Democrat leading the push, said repealing fossil fuel subsidies is a “key part” of fulfilling Biden’s climate agenda.
“That’s billions of dollars that can be used to invest in renewable energy, education, and childcare,” Khanna said in an email to Truthout. “This is our opportunity to make meaningful progress on climate and take away the special advantages that this polluting industry has been relying on for decades.”
As Sanders pointed out on Wednesday, the focus on fossil fuels among Democrats alarmed the oil and gas industry, which has spent more than $55 million lobbying Congress so far this year. Manchin and Sinema are among six Democrats who are considered allies by the fossil fuel lobby and received a combined $330,000 in contributions from political committees and lobbyists for the oil company ExxonMobil.
Whether climate provisions such as the methane tax, the Civilian Climate Corps and the new incentives for electric utilities will survive the Democrats’ efforts to “trim and slash” the reconciliation bill remain to be seen. Environmental justice provisions, including a plan to replace lead water pipes that put children at risk of serious health problems, may not make the cut as Democrats prioritize climate.
“I do not want my generation to have to look their kids and grandchildren in the eye and say ‘yes, we failed you, and the planet is now uninhabitable,’” Sanders said.
LONDON, ENGLAND: Protesters hold signs at the YouthStrike4Climate student march on April 12, 2019 in London, United Kingdom. Students are protesting across the UK due to the lack of government action to combat climate change. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
President Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” he said.
But the U.S. is not a leader when it comes to saving our planet. Yahoo News recently published a report titled “Why the U.S. Lags Behind Europe on Climate Goals by 10 or 15 years.” The article was a rare acknowledgment in the U.S. corporate media that the United States has not only failed to lead the world on the climate crisis, but has actually been the main culprit blocking timely collective action to head off a global existential crisis.
The anniversary of September 11th and the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan should be ringing alarm bells inside the head of every American, warning us that we have allowed our government to spend trillions of dollars waging war, chasing shadows, selling arms and fueling conflict all over the world, while ignoring real existential dangers to our civilization and all of humanity.
The world’s youth are dismayed by their parents’ failures to tackle the climate crisis. A new survey of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 in ten countries around the world found that many of them think humanity is doomed and that they have no future.
Three-quarters of the young people surveyed said they are afraid of what the future will bring, and 40% say the crisis makes them hesitant to have children. They are also frightened, confused and angered by the failure of governments to respond to the crisis. As the BBC reported, “They feel betrayed, ignored and abandoned by politicians and adults.”
Young people in the U.S. have even more reason to feel betrayed than their European counterparts. America lags far behind Europe on renewable energy. European countries started fulfilling their climate commitments under the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s and now get 40% of their electricity from renewable sources, while renewables provide only 20% of electric power in America.
Since 1990, the baseline year for emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Europe has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 24%, while the United States has failed to cut them at all, spewing out 2% more than it did in 1990. In 2019, before the Covid pandemic, the United States produced more oil and more natural gas than ever before in its history.
NATO, our politicians and the corporate media on both sides of the Atlantic promote the idea that the United States and Europe share a common “Western” culture and values. But our very different lifestyles, priorities and responses to this climate crisis tell a tale of two very different, even divergent economic and political systems.
The idea that human activity is responsible for climate change was understood decades ago and is not controversial in Europe. But in America, politicians and news media have blindly or cynically parroted fraudulent, self-serving disinformation campaigns by ExxonMobil and other vested interests.
While the Democrats have been better at “listening to the scientists,” let’s not forget that, while Europe was replacing fossil fuels and nuclear plants with renewable energy, the Obama administration was unleashing a fracking boom to switch from coal-fired power plants to new plants running on fracked gas.
Why is the U.S. so far behind Europe when it comes to addressing global warming? Why do only 60% of Europeans own cars, compared with 90% of Americans? And why does each U.S. car owner clock double the mileage that European drivers do? Why does the United States not have modern, energy-efficient, widely-accessible public transportation, as Europe does?
We can ask similar questions about other stark differences between the United States and Europe. On poverty, inequality, healthcare, education and social insurance, why is the United States an outlier from what are considered societal norms in other wealthy countries?
One answer is the enormous amount of money the U.S spends on militarism. Since 2001, the United States has allocated $15 trillion (in FY2022 dollars) to its military budget, outspending its 20 closest military competitors combined.
The U.S. spends far more of its GDP (the total value of goods produced and services) on the military than any of the other 29 Nato countries—3.7% in 2020 compared to 1.77%. And while the U.S. has been putting intense pressure on NATO countries to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, only ten of them have done so. Unlike in the U.S., the military establishment in Europe has to contend with significant opposition from liberal politicians and a more educated and mobilized public.
From the lack of universal healthcare to levels of child poverty that would be unacceptable in other wealthy countries, our government’s under-investment in everything else is the inevitable result of these skewed priorities, which leave America struggling to get by on what is left over after the U.S. military bureaucracy has raked off the lion’s share – or should we say the “generals’ share”? – of the available resources.
Federal infrastructure and “social” spending in 2021 amount to only about 30% of the money spent on militarism. The infrastructure package that Congress is debating is desperately needed, but the $3.5 trillion is spread over 10 years and is not enough.
On climate change, the infrastructure bill includes only $10 billion per year for conversion to green energy, an important but small step that will not reverse our current course toward a catastrophic future. Investments in a Green New Deal must be bookended by corresponding reductions in the military budget if we are to correct our government’s perverted and destructive priorities in any lasting way. This means standing up to the weapons industry and military contractors, which the Biden administration has so far failed to do.
The reality of America’s 20-year arms race with itself makes complete nonsense of the administration’s claims that the recent arms build-up by China now requires the U.S. to spend even more. China spends only a third of what the U.S. spends, and what is driving China’s increased military spending is its need to defend itself against the ever-growing U.S. war machine that has been “pivoting” to the waters, skies and islands surrounding its shores since the Obama administration.
Biden told the UN General Assembly that “..as we close this period of relentless war, we’re opening a new era of relentless diplomacy.” But his exclusive new military alliance with the U.K. and Australia, and his request for a further increase in military spending to escalate a dangerous arms race with China that the United States started in the first place, reveal just how far Biden has to go to live up to his own rhetoric, on diplomacy as well as on climate change.
The United States must go to the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow in November ready to sign on to the kind of radical steps that the UN and less developed countries are calling for. It must make a real commitment to leaving fossil fuels in the ground; quickly convert to a net-zero renewable energy economy; and help developing countries to do the same. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres says, the summit in Glasgow “must be the turning point” in the climate crisis.
That will require the United States to seriously reduce the military budget and commit to peaceful, practical diplomacy with China and Russia. Genuinely moving on from our self-inflicted military failures and the militarism that led to them would free up the U.S. to enact programs that address the real existential crisis our planet faces – a crisis against which warships, bombs and missiles are worse than useless.
This summer, two popular bills to democratize New York’s energy system died in the state legislature. A revived campaign will need both sympathetic legislators and the direct action tactics of social movements.
The United States is an outlier among advanced democratic countries in terms of societal well-being. In the 2020 Social Progress Index rankings, the U.S. is 28th, in the lower half of the second tier of nations, behind economic powerhouses Cyprus and Greece. The countries that perform best in the societal well-being index adhere to the social democratic model and have strong labor unions and a long tradition of left-wing parties.
The dismal performance of the United States in well-being, which includes having dilapidated and uneven infrastructure, could change in the next few years if the Democrats manage to get their act together and pass the infrastructure and reconciliation bills. These pieces of legislation, although hardly adequate in terms of size to address the country’s urgent needs, would be undoubtedly a step forward in terms of changing the federal government’s priorities, according to Robert Pollin, distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. But we have to see whether the so-called U.S. “moderates” (who would be seen as right-wingers in the European political spectrum) inside the Democratic Party can put the interests of the people ahead of those of big business, or whether the so-called “progressives” (who would be seen as “moderates” in most European multi-party systems) will even back the infrastructure bill if the accompanying spending bill fails to get the necessary support. In U.S. politics, change rarely, if ever, comes from the top.
C.J. Polychroniou: After decades of political inaction on a dangerously overstretched infrastructure which lags far behind those of most other advanced countries, the U.S. Senate has finally approved a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package which is on a path to final passage in the House. Lawmakers have also agreed to a $3.5 trillion budget process, although its status remains less certain as some moderate Senate Democrats find the total size of the budget to be too large. But let us first discuss the infrastructure bill whose current proposal targets spending over a five-year period. First, how does the world’s leading economy end up with such poor infrastructure, and what can we expect to be the economic impact of the infrastructure bill?
Robert Pollin: Let’s first be clear on the actual size of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. In fact, the version of the bill that passed in the Senate on August 10 allocates $550 billion over 5 years for the infrastructure investments, not $1 trillion, as widely reported. The bill mostly supports investments in traditional infrastructure areas, such as roads, bridges, airports, rail, ports, water management and the electric grid. It does also provide funds, if to a generally lesser extent, to high-speed internet, public transportation, electric vehicles and charging stations, and climate resilience.
Of course, the total price tag sounds gigantic, but in fact it is quite small, along multiple dimensions. First of all, spread over five years, the total spending averages to $110 billion per year. That is equal to less than one-half of one percent of current overall U.S. economic activity — i.e., U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In addition, this overall level of spending on upgrading the U.S. infrastructure falls far below what objective analysts have concluded is necessary to bring U.S. infrastructure up to a reasonable level. Specifically, the American Society of Civil Engineers recently concluded that the U.S. would need to spend an average of $260 billion per year for 10 years to bring the U.S. only up to a “B” level of infrastructure quality from its current “C-“ level. So the bipartisan bill provides only about 40 percent of what the leading professional society of civil engineers says is needed for the U.S. to maintain an adequate infrastructure in traditional areas. Without the full funding in the range of $260 billion per year, the civil engineers anticipate the U.S. infrastructure continuing its longstanding pattern of deterioration. Beyond that, this bill also provides only miniscule amounts relative to what is needed to advance a viable U.S. climate stabilization project.
The U.S. infrastructure today is in poor condition today for the simple reason that under 40 years of neoliberalism, the idea of undertaking major public investments in strengthening the domestic economy was pushed to the bottom of the federal government’s priorities. Virtually all Republican members of Congress have been doing this pushing, with enough congressional Democrats following along, regardless of whether a Democrat or Republican was in the White House. The top priorities of these members of Congress have been cutting taxes for the rich and continuing to expand the massive military budget. The military budget for 2021, at $704 billion, is nearly 7 times greater than what would be allocated for all the infrastructure projects if the bipartisan bill were to pass. Passing this bill is certainly preferable than having no new support for infrastructure projects. It will also have a modest positive impact on jobs. But let’s also be clear that this level of funding will produce none of the pressures on the federal budget or on inflation, as is being charged by critics. The funding level is just too small for that.
The $3.5 trillion budget package, if enacted, will be a huge step toward a progressive reshaping of the federal government. It will be “the most consequential legislation for working people since the New Deal,” according to Bernie Sanders, while it will also help to combat the climate crisis. Still, is the size of the reconciliation bill big enough to address the damage that 40 years of neoliberal policies have had on working people, the economy and our climate?
The $3.5 trillion bill goes far beyond the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill in critical ways. First of all, obviously, just in terms of its size. This bill also devotes significant levels of funds to build a clean energy economy and stabilizing the climate. It also provides significant support in the areas of elder and child care, health care and housing. So let’s call it the climate and social infrastructure bill. But the fact is that even this $3.5 trillion proposal is not large relative to the size of the U.S. economy, much less relative to the country’s pressing needs, both in terms of climate stabilization and advancing social justice. In other words, I don’t agree with Bernie Sanders’s assessment as to the historic magnitude of this bill as it is currently written. I certainly have a great deal of respect for what Bernie is trying to accomplish with this climate and social infrastructure bill. I wish I could agree with his assessment.
Here are the basics: The $3.5 trillion in spending would be spread over 10 years. So that gets us to $350 billion per year. Once again, the number sounds gigantic. But it amounts to about 1.5 percent of current U.S. GDP. About one-third of the total funding is devoted to fighting climate change — let’s say around $120 billion per year. That would be a huge boost relative to the paltry amounts being spent now by the federal government on what is, ever more obviously, an existential ecological crisis. But, in my view, it amounts to only about 25 percent of the $500 billion per year that is needed to have a chance of reducing CO2 emissions in the U.S. economy by 50 percent as of 2030. In terms of a climate stabilization project, we would therefore still need to find around $400 billion per year to build a clean energy economy. These funds would be separate from support needed to create much greater resiliency in the face of the increasingly severe climate disasters — i.e., the floods, wildfires, droughts and heat extremes that are now part of the everyday global news cycle. It would also be separate from the funding needed to provide a just transition for workers and communities that are now dependent on the fossil fuel industry.
The additional investment levels needed to create a zero-emissions energy system funding could possibly come from private investors, but realistically, only if the federal government enacts stringent regulations through which the fossil fuel industry is truly phased out over the next 20 to 30 years. So far at least, I am not aware of any federal initiative to impose any such stringent regulations, such as requiring that all fossil fuel companies cut their production and sales of oil, coal and natural gas by, say, 5 percent per year, every year, or face criminal liability.
In terms of other categories of spending, such as child and elder care, the climate and social infrastructure bill is a major breakthrough in recognizing these areas as vital to improving people’s lives and creating a decent society. For example, this bill would support client-employed provider programs in the area of elder care, through which elderly people in need of care are able to stay in their homes and hire the home-based provider of their choice. Adult children, spouses, other family members, neighbors and friends would be eligible to be hired under this type of program. As it is, at present, most hours of elder care support are provided by family and friends on a voluntary basis. Providing financial support for a client-employed provider program would enable these voluntary providers to be paid for at least some of the hours of work they now provide voluntarily. These family members and friends would then be better able to concentrate their paid working hours on care provision, rather than having to also be employed at separate paid jobs in order to earn sufficient income.
The problem with the bill, at 1.5 percent of GDP per year for 10 years, is that the funding level, again, is too small. In fact, we have right now an important benchmark against which to compare this climate and social infrastructure bill. This is the THRIVE Act, which is a bill introduced in Congress in April 2021, aiming to “Transform, Heal and Renew by Investing in a Vibrant Economy” — i.e., THRIVE — through a range of investments to rebuild the U.S. economy. The THRIVE Act was the work of the national Green New Deal Network, a coalition of 15 grassroots organizations, including the Center for Popular Democracy, Climate Justice Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, Greenpeace, Indigenous Environmental Network, Indivisible, Movement for Black Lives, MoveOn, People’s Action, Right To The City Alliance, Service Employees International Union, Sierra Club, Sunrise Movement, US Climate Action Network, and the Working Families Party. The THRIVE Act was introduced in Congress by Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Congresswoman Debbie Dingell of Michigan.
The THRIVE Act proposes to provide over $1 trillion in investments per year for 10 years — i.e., $10 trillion in total — in four major areas: clean renewable energy and energy efficiency; infrastructure; agriculture and land restoration; and the care economy, public health and the postal system. On average then, the funding levels supported by the THRIVE Act are in the range of 2-3 times larger than the combined figures for the $110 billion/year (over 5 years) infrastructure bill and the $350 billion/year (over 10 years) climate and social infrastructure bill.
To see the type of impact the THRIVE Act could have on individual communities throughout the country, consider, for example, the situation for the metropolitan area around Louisville, Kentucky. With THRIVE Act funding, solar panels could be installed on rooftops, over parking lots and on other artificial surfaces all over the city to provide over 10 percent of the area’s overall electricity demand. All public buildings could be retrofitted to raise energy efficiency levels significantly and save the city lots of money. Both the solar and building efficiency investments would contribute toward pushing down CO2 emissions in Louisville, to the point where reducing overall emissions by 50 percent as of 2030 becomes a realistic target.
In addition, there are about 10,000 elderly residents of the area who require personal care. The THRIVE Act could enable all of these people to hire whomever they wanted — family members or friends — to support them and be paid decently for some of their hours of care. The THRIVE Act would also enable Louisville to address the fact that the city has become an “urban heat island” — i.e., a city in which summer temperatures can be up to 200F hotter than nearby rural areas, creating health hazards for the city’s population. Through THRIVE, the city could follow through on plans to expand the city’s tree canopy and create cool surfaces on roads and rooftops. Still further, Louisville could invest adequately in upgrading its sewer system. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has assessed the area’s flood protection system to be “high risk.”
Overall, investing in these and related projects through THRIVE would generate about 15,000 jobs in Louisville and surrounding communities, equal to about 4 percent of the area’s current employment level.
The THRIVE Act would have similar impacts in all communities throughout the country. The $350 billion/year climate and social infrastructure bill could also deliver positive results in Louisville and elsewhere, but only at about one-third the level of the THRIVE Act. We then have to ask: which parts of the THRIVE Act do we sacrifice? Do we abandon the idea of advancing a climate stabilization program that has a serious chance of cutting U.S. emissions by 50 percent as of 2030? Do we give up the idea of supporting family members and friends who are providing critical elder care? Should Louisville’s summer temperatures be allowed to rise by, say, 250F relative to surrounding rural areas? And with expanding employment opportunities: should we be satisfied with creating 5,000 more jobs in Louisville when we could create 15,000 through THRIVE?
I want to emphasize again that I am not disparaging the climate and social infrastructure bill being advanced by Bernie Sanders and other Congressional Democrats. Without question, it is pushing in the right direction. But we also have to be clear-eyed as to the actual size of this measure and what its impact can be relative to the climate and social crises that we face. The grassroots activists throughout the country in the Green New Deal Network, who crafted the THRIVE Act, have established the standard that we need to be reaching for now as best we can.
Desperate calls for far-reaching climate action came from New York City Wednesday night and into Thursday as the city and the surrounding area was inundated with the remnants of Hurricane Ida — causing partial building collapses, severely flooded subway stations and homes, and the deaths of at least 14 people.
“I’m asking for a Green New Deal!” tweeted Ellen Sciales, communications director for the Sunrise Movement, as she shared a video showing several feet of water flooding her own home.
A two-year-old was among those who were found unconscious by emergency workers in homes in New York and New Jersey, after authorities responded to calls about flooding. “When do we start caring about the climate crisis and stop pretending like we’ve done enough in New York?” asked Democratic New York state Sen. Alessandra Biaggi in response to a video of a flooded subway station.
All of the city’s subway lines were suspended Wednesday night.
As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last month, the warming of the planet is causing hurricanes to dump more rain on impacted areas when the storms hit. The atmosphere can hold 7% more water for every 1.8° Fahrenheit (1° Celsius) of warming, increasing precipitation. The planet is already about 2° Fahrenheit warmer than it was in the 19th century as a result of fossil fuel extraction.
New York City saw a record-breaking 3.24 inches of rain in a single day on Wednesday, and at least 7.2 inches of rain inundated Newark, New Jersey. Nearly 250,000 people in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut were without power on Thursday morning.
Videos showed flooding at Newark Liberty International Airport, where many flights were canceled or delayed.
One terminal looked “like a giant swimming pool,” Dr. Lucky Tran of the March for Science tweeted.
“I never want to hear anyone say that a Green New Deal is too expensive ever again,” Tran tweeted, referring to the legislation proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) that would create more than a million jobs and put people to work upgrading U.S. infrastructure, shifting to 100% renewable energy, retrofitting buildings, and taking other actions to mitigate the climate crisis.
Ocasio-Cortez, who represents parts of Queens and the Bronx, said she was going door-to-door in her district Thursday morning to find out how residents were affected. As the city was drenched Wednesday night, the congresswoman denounced members of both major political parties who have claimed in recent years that a Green New Deal is “unrealistic.”
Experiencing all this flooding in NYC right now and thinking about all the politicians who told me that pursuing a Green New Deal to adapt our nat’l infrastructure to climate change is “unrealistic” & “too expensive.”
As if doing too little is the responsible, adult thing to do?
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency for the state as the rain fell, but as Fossil Free Media director Jamie Henn tweeted, “What we really need is for [President Joe Biden] to declare a national climate emergency and do everything in his power to address this crisis.”
What we really need is for @POTUS to declare a national Climate Emergency and do everything in his power to address this crisis.
Instead of saying the flooding was caused by Hurricane Ida, Henn added, policymakers and the press alike “should be saying names like ‘Exxon,’ ‘Chevron,’ and ‘Shell.’”
The news keeps saying “Ida” caused the damage in the Gulf and the flooding in NYC.
They should be saying names like “Exxon” “Chevron” and “Shell.”
The primary inspiration for The Red Deal was the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba, adopted at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in 2010, writes Simon Butler.
As hopes for ambitious climate policy fade, Joe Uehlein, Founding President of the Labor Network for Sustainability, talks about why we must decarbonize the economy while protecting workers.
These days there is no shortage of hype surrounding the “Green New Deal” (GND). The “Green New Deal” has become a major buzz-phrase that has ensnared many along the way.
Like so many top-down schemes, the GND is being promoted by many world leaders in unison. This alone should be worrisome. History shows that this is usually a red flag. Few pro-social things come out of movements that are not real grass-roots movements. These world leaders are the main representatives of the international financial oligarchy—a tiny ruling elite obsessed with maximizing private profit no matter the damage to society and the environment. These are the same forces responsible for tragedies such as high levels of inequality, poverty, unemployment, under-employment, inflation, debt, homelessness, hunger, racism, war, occupation, pollution, de-forestation, anxiety, despair, alienation, depression, and suicide worldwide.
The GND is being presented by the rich and their political and media representatives as something great for society and humanity; everyone is under pressure to “just embrace it.”
The GND uses the “New Deal” language of the 1930s and ostensibly addresses climate change, inequality, energy efficiency, job creation, labor rights, racial injustice, and other social aims. This includes a GND for public schools, healthcare, and housing as well.
The GND is supposed to improve conditions for humanity and help us all “build back better”—a major slogan of the World Economic Forum (WEF), which is dominated by millionaires and billionaires. Alongside this disinformation, the WEF is also promoting disinformation about “reinventing capitalism” to fool the gullible. The GND is supposedly rooted in the principles of economic justice, puts the planet ahead of profits, and provides a “blueprint for change.” It is said that Green Projects will cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
Europe has its own version of the GND. “Variations of the [“Green New Deal”] proposal have been around for years,” says the New York Times. The so-called Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was introduced more than 20 years ago, for example. In 2007, the imperialist journalist, Thomas Friedman, wrote the following in the New York Times:
If you have put a windmill in your yard or some solar panels on your roof, bless your heart. But we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid – moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project – much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.
Pollution, inequality, and 50 other problems have worsened since this observation was made 14 years ago. The quote rejects economic science and fails to help workers, youth, students, women, and others make sense of the economy in a way that favors their interests.
GND Means More PPPs and Tragedies
“Green New Deal” goals are to be attained through “joint” public sector and private sector “investments.” The disinformation from the rich is that the public can’t achieve the lofty goals of the GND on its own and that “investors” from the so-called “efficient,” “entrepreneurial,” “innovative,” and “smart” private sector are needed to achieve these big goals. It is by working “together” that “we” will supposedly achieve what the GND sets out to do. “New Deals” are purportedly too big for either sector to pull off alone and thus some sort of “partnership” or “alliance” is “needed.”
In reality, private competing owners of capital are unwilling and often unable to pay for major infrastructure projects and want the government to guarantee them big investments and returns using the public purse. PPPs essentially guarantee risk-free profits for various monopolies and further diminish control of the economy by workers and the public. PPPs enable major owners of capital to seize more of the added-value produced by workers through “infrastructure projects” guaranteed by the state at public expense. This further enriches a handful of people, intensifies inequality, and leaves workers and the public with less wealth and less control over the economy.
This is not how “partners” work. This is how an unequal relationship works.
Terms such as “alliance” or “partnership” are designed to fool the gullible and hide the enormous financial gain made by a handful of billionaires through PPPs that purport to advance the goals of the GND. In this, way the door is nonchalantly and pragmatically opened to imposing private alien claims on the wealth produced collectively by workers. The rich are given greater access to public funds and resources that belong to the public, all in the name of “partnership.” We are to believe that without a “Public-Private-Partnership” the GND will not become reality, meaning that the GND is possible only if the ultra-rich pocket more public wealth and resources. This is cynically called a “win-win.”
“Public-Private-Partnerships” promote the illusion that the public sector and the private sector can harmonize their philosophies, interests, aims, operations, activities, and results when in fact PPPs are antisocial, antiworker, and undercut a modern nation-building project.
The public and private sectors cannot be partners; they rest on different foundations, goals, world outlooks, operations, and legal frameworks; they are different categories and phenomena with different properties and characteristics. These differences are not trivial and cannot be reconciled or harmonized. Don’t believe neoliberals and privatizers whey they self-servingly claim that the two distinct spheres can “work together.”
Public and private are antonyms; they mean the opposite of each other; they are not synonymous. Public refers to everyone, non-competition, transparency, the common good, and society as whole (e.g., public parks, beaches, and roads). The public is pro-social and human-centered. It approaches life and relations with a big modern vision. Private refers to exclusivity, for a few, not for everyone, and usually involves rivalry and hierarchy. Private is also often associated with secrecy, not transparency, especially in business. The private sector pertains to relations between private citizens, whereas the public sector has to do with relations between individuals and the state. This distinction is critical. These spheres represent two profoundly different domains. The rights belonging to each sector are different.
Blurring the critical distinction between public and private should be avoided at all costs. It is irresponsible and self-serving to treat the public and private as being synonymous and easy to harmonize without big disadvantages for the public. The public does not benefit from blurring this distinction. The public suffers when the dissimilarity between public and private is obscured and not grasped in its depth.
PPPs conceal harsh irreconcilable class differences and interests in society. They reinforce a “no-class” outlook of society and, in doing so, distort reality at the ideological level, leaving many disoriented, unclear, and confused about their interests, which makes them vulnerable to disinformation from the rich and their media. In the world of PPPs, everyone is merely a “stakeholder.” There are no workers or owners of capital. There are no antagonistic irreconcilable social class interests. There are no classes and class struggle. There are no millionaires and billionaires on one side and workers on the other side who produce all the wealth of society.
Not surprisingly, PPPs form a big part of the antisocial “Great Reset” agenda of the world’s billionaires, which has been publicly articulated by the main leaders of the World Economic Forum such as Klaus Schwab. Many prime ministers, presidents, and prominent state leaders around the world continue to parrot the same tired slogans of the “Great Reset” agenda.
In practice, PPPs use the neoliberal state to funnel more public funds than ever to the private sector under the banner of “partnerships” and “making the world better for everyone.”
This funneling of more public funds to narrow private interests will not only solve no problems, it will intensify many problems that are already serious. The existing all-sided crisis will keep deepening under such a set-up.
As a main form of privatization, the “Green New Deal” will significantly intensify inequality, increase costs for everyone, reduce efficiency and quality, lessen accountability and transparency, increase corruption, and diminish the voice and wealth of workers and the public. It will not enhance democracy or improve the environment in any way because it will further concentrate greater economic and political power in even fewer hands, if that is even possible at this point in history. Funneling more public funds, assets, and authority to competing private interests in a highly monopolized economy is a disaster for the social and natural environment. It is the claims of workers, the public, and society that must be expanded and affirmed, not the narrow claims of competing owners of capital obsessed with maximizing their own profits at the expense of everyone and everything else.
The “Green New Deal” will not challenge the entrenched class privilege of the rich. It will not increase the power of workers or give them greater control of the wealth they produce. It will not make the economy more pro-social, balanced, diverse, and self-reliant. Pollution and de-forestation will still persist under the GND. Experience has repeatedly borne out that capital-centered environmental plans and activities ensure that things keep going from bad to worse.
A 2016 United Nations report highlights many ways that PPPs undermine the public interest and produce more problems. Global PolicyForumstates that:
PPPs are used to conceal public borrowing, while providing long-term state guarantees for profits to private companies. Private sector corporations must maximize profits if they are to survive. This is fundamentally incompatible with protecting the environment and ensuring universal access to quality public services.
Public and private simply do not go together. The organization In The Public Interest offers many reports, articles, and documents that expose how PPPs harm the public interest and benefit major owners of capital at the public expense. Numerous other organizations around the world have also described and explained how PPPs make things worse for the public while enriching a handful of people.
In the context of a continually failing economy, competing owners of capital have no choice but to cloak their egocentric drive to maximize private profit by seizing public funds from the state as a “win-win” for everyone, as something great for the natural and social environment. The neoliberal state is increasingly being used to divert public funds and assets to major owners of capital as they compete with each other for domination of the economy in an increasingly unstable and dangerous environment. The old ways of profit-taking are no longer as lucrative as before, so the rich have to use PPPs to seize public funds for private financial gain under the banner of “working together” to “build back better.”
As always, the rich will not brook any opposition to their narrow private interests. They will not support anything that places a greater portion of the social wealth in the hands of those who actually produce the wealth of society: workers. They will continue to act like they have a natural right to the wealth produced collectively by workers.
Major owners of capital have no human-centered interest in improving the environment or social conditions. They pragmatically strive for what will best serve their narrow private interests and class privilege without any consideration for the well-being of all sectors of the economy as a whole. Modern nation-building cannot take place in such a context. The human-centered resolution of social, economic, and environmental problems requires confronting powerful private interests and their outdated economic system if humanity is to have a bright future.
To fix the economy and to reverse social and environmental problems requires a public authority worthy of the name. There is no reason why a real public authority cannot use the wealth and resources produced by workers to improve the social and natural environment for the nation. Planned public investment for the public and for modern nation-building is not possible under the direction and influence of competing owners of capital obsessed with maximizing private profit. Such forces are only looking out for their narrow interests, not the needs of a balanced self-reliant crisis-free economy that consistently and responsibly raises the material and cultural well-being of all.
There is no need to involve powerful private interests in social programs, social investments, or green projects. The rich are not only the cause of many problems the GND ostensibly seeks to remedy, they also have no valid and legitimate claim to any public funds, resources, and assets. The rich mainly seize and control the wealth produced by workers; they themselves do not produce the wealth of society.
The rich are a historically superfluous and exhausted force blocking social progress. Without the rich, their entourage, and their outdated political and economic system, the social product could be wielded by people themselves for the benefit of the natural and social environment. The impact of this shift and change on time and space would be monumental.
The point has been to make it clear that using the MMT lens and choosing to look for public purpose solutions yields full employment and a path to a progressive society.
The new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate assessment report, released on August 9, has finally stated in the most absolute terms that anthropogenic emissions are the cause behind global warming, and that we have no time left in the effort to keep temperature from crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold. If we fail to take immediate action, we can easily exceed 2 degrees Celsius by the middle of the century.
Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that while the IPCC report underscores the point that the planet is warming faster than expected, it does not directly mention fossil fuels and puts emphasis on carbon removal as a necessary means to tame global warming even though such technologies are still in their infancy.
In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest scholars and leading activists, and Robert Pollin, a world-leading progressive economist, offer their own assessments of the IPCC report. Chomsky and Pollin are co-authors of Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (Verso, 2020).
C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, the new IPCC climate assessment report, which deals with the physical science basis of global warming, comes in the midst of extreme heat waves and devastating fires taking place both in the U.S. and in many parts around the world. In many ways, it reinforces what we already know about the climate crisis, so I would like to know your own thoughts about its significance and whether the parties that have “approved” it will take the necessary measures to avoid a climate catastrophe, since we basically have zero years left to do so.
Noam Chomsky: The IPCC report was sobering. Much, as you say, reinforces what we knew, but for me at least, shifts of emphasis were deeply disturbing. That’s particularly true of the section on carbon removal. Instead of giving my own nonexpert reading, I’ll quote the MIT Technology Review, under the heading “The UN climate report pins hopes on carbon removal technologies that barely exist.”
The IPCC report
offered a stark reminder that removing massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be essential to prevent the gravest dangers of global warming. But it also underscored that the necessary technologies barely exist — and will be tremendously difficult to deploy…. How much hotter it gets, however, will depend on how rapidly we cut emissions and how quickly we scale up ways of sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.
If that’s correct, and I see no reason to doubt it, hopes for a tolerable world depend on technologies that “barely exist — and will be tremendously difficult to deploy.” To confront this awesome challenge is a task for a coordinated international effort, well beyond the scale of John F. Kennedy’s mission to the moon (whatever one thinks of that), and vastly more significant. To leave the task to private power is a likely recipe for disaster, for many reasons, including one brought up by The New York Times report on the idea: “there are risks: The very idea could offer industry an excuse to maintain dangerous habits … some experts warn that they could hide behind the uncertain promise of removing carbon later to avoid cutting emissions deeply today.” The greenwashing that is a constant ruse.
The significance of the IPCC report is beyond reasonable doubt. As to whether the necessary measures will be taken? That’s up to us. We can have no faith in structures of power and what they will do unless pressed hard by an informed public that prefers survival to short-term gain for the “masters of the universe.”
The immediate U.S. government reaction to the IPCC report was hardly encouraging. President Joe Biden sent his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, to censure the main oil-producing countries (OPEC) for not raising oil production high enough. The message was captured in a headline in the London Financial Times: “Biden to OPEC: Drill, Baby, Drill.”
Biden was sharply criticized by the right wing here for calling on OPEC to destroy life on Earth. MAGA principles demand that U.S. producers should have priority in this worthy endeavor.
Bob, what’s your own take on the IPCC climate assessment report, and do you find anything in it that surprises you?
Robert Pollin: In total, the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report on the physical basis of climate change is 3,949 pages long. So there’s a whole lot to take in, and I can’t claim to have done more than initially review the 42-page “Summary for Policymakers.” Two things stand out from my initial review. These are, first, the IPCC’s conclusion that the climate crisis is rapidly become more severe and, second, that their call for undertaking fundamental action has become increasingly urgent, even relative to their own 2018 report, “Global Warming of 1.50C.” It is important to note that this hasn’t always been the pattern with the IPCC. Thus, in its 2014 Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC was significantly more sanguine about the state of play relative to its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. In 2014, they were focused on a goal of stabilizing the global average temperature at 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, rather than the 1.5 degrees figure. As of 2014, the IPCC had not been convinced that the 1.5 degrees target was imperative for having any reasonable chance of limiting the most severe impacts of climate change in terms of heat extremes, floods, droughts, sea level rises and biodiversity losses. The 2014 report concluded that reducing global CO2 emissions by only 36 percent as of 2050 could possibly be sufficient to move onto a viable stabilization path. In this most recent report, there is no equivocation that hitting the 1.5 degrees target is imperative, and that to have any chance of achieving this goal, global CO2 emissions must be at zero by 2050.
This new report does also make clear just how difficult it will be to hit the zero emissions target, and thus to remain within the 1.5 degrees of warming threshold. But it also recognizes that a viable stabilization path is still possible, if just barely. There is no question as to what the first and most important single action has to be, which is to stop burning oil, coal and natural gas to produce energy. Carbon-removal technologies will likely be needed as part of the overall stabilization program. But we should note here that there are already two carbon-removal technologies that operate quite effectively. These are: 1) to stop destroying forests, since trees absorb CO2; and 2) to supplant corporate industrial practices with organic and regenerative agriculture. Corporate agricultural practices emit CO2 and other greenhouses gases, especially through the heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer, while, through organic and regenerative agriculture, the soil absorbs CO2. That said, if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels to produce energy, then there is simply no chance of moving onto a stabilization path, no matter what else is accomplished in the area of carbon-removal technologies.
I would add here that the main technologies for building a zero-emissions economy — in the areas of energy efficiency and clean renewable energy sources — are already fully available to us. Investing in energy efficiency — through, for example, expanding the supply of electric cars and public transportation systems, and replacing old heating and cooling systems with electric heat pumps — will save money, by definition, for all energy consumers. Moreover, on average, the cost of producing electricity through both solar and wind energy is already, at present, about half that of burning coal combined with carbon capture technology. At this point, it is a matter of undertaking the investments at scale to build the clean energy infrastructure along with providing for a fair transition for the workers and communities who will be negatively impacted by the phase-out of fossil fuels.
The evidence is clear that human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide are behind global warming, and that warming, according to the IPCC report, is taking place faster than predicted. Most likely because of the latter, the Sixth Assessment report provides a detailed regional assessment of climate change, and (for the first time, I believe) includes a chapter on innovation and technology, with emphasis on carbon-removal technologies, which Noam, coincidentally, found “deeply disturbing.” As one of the leading advocates of a Global Green New Deal, do you see a problem if regional climate and energy plans became the main frameworks, at least in the immediate future, for dealing with the climate emergency?
Pollin: In principle, I don’t see anything wrong with regional climate and energy plans, as long as they are all seriously focused on achieving the zero emissions goal and are advanced in coordination with other regions. The big question, therefore, is whether any given regional program is adequate to the requirements for climate stabilization. The answer, thus far, is “no.” We can see this in terms of the climate programs in place for the U.S., the European Union and China. These are the three most important regions in addressing climate change for the simple reason that these three areas are responsible for generating 54 percent of all global CO2 emissions — with China at 30 percent, the U.S. at 15 percent and the EU at 9 percent.
In the U.S., the Biden administration is, of course, a vast improvement relative to the four disastrous years under Trump. Soon after taking office, Biden set out emissions reduction targets in line with the IPCC, i.e., a 50 percent reduction by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050. Moreover, the American Jobs Plan that Biden introduced in March would have allocated about $130 billion per year in investments that would advance a clean energy infrastructure that would supplant our current fossil fuel-dominant system.
This level of federal funding for climate stabilization would be unprecedented for the U.S. At the same time, it would provide maybe 25 percent of the total funding necessary for achieving the administration’s own emission reduction targets. Most of the other 75 percent would therefore have to come from private investors. Yet it is not realistic that private businesses will mount this level of investment in a clean energy economy — at about $400 billion per year — unless they are forced to by stringent government regulations. One such regulation could be a mandate for electric utilities to reduce CO2 emissions by, say, 5 percent per year, or face criminal liability. The Biden administration has not proposed any such regulations to date. Moreover, with the debates in Congress over the Biden bill ongoing, the odds are long that the amount of federal government funding provided for climate stabilization will even come close to the $130 billion per year that Biden had initially proposed in March.
The story is similar in the EU. In terms of its stated commitments, the European Union is advancing the world’s most ambitious climate stabilization program, what it has termed the European Green Deal. Under the European Green Deal, the region has pledged to reduce emissions by at least 55 percent as of 2030 relative to 1990 levels, a more ambitious target than the 45 percent reduction set by the IPCC. The European Green Deal then aligns with the IPCC’s longer-term target of achieving a net zero economy as of 2050.
Beginning in December 2019, the European Commission has been enacting measures and introducing further proposals to achieve the region’s emission reduction targets. The most recent measure to have been adopted, this past June, is the NextGenerationEU Recovery Plan, through which €600 billion will be allocated toward financing the European Green Deal. In July, the European Commission followed up on this spending commitment by outlining 13 tax and regulatory measures to complement the spending program.
But here’s the simple budgetary math: The €600 billion allocated over seven years through the NextGenerationEU Recovery Plan would amount to an average of about €85 billion per year. This is equal to less than 0.6 percent of EU GDP over this period, when a spending level in the range of 2 to 3 percent of GDP will be needed. As with the U.S., the EU cannot count on mobilizing the remaining 75 percent of funding necessary unless it also enacts stringent regulations on burning fossil fuels. If such regulations are to have teeth, they will mean a sharp increase in what consumers will pay for fossil fuel energy. To prevent all but the wealthy from then experiencing a significant increase in their cost of living, the fossil fuel price increases will have to be matched by rebates. The 2018 Yellow Vest Movement in France emerged precisely in opposition to President Emmanuel Macron’s proposal to enact a carbon tax without including substantial rebates for nonaffluent people.
The Chinese situation is distinct from those in the U.S. and EU. In particular, China has not committed to achieving the IPCC’s emission reduction targets for 2030 or 2050. Rather, as of a September 2020 United Nations General Assembly address by President Xi Jinping, China committed to a less ambitious set of targets: emissions will continue to rise until they peak in 2030 and then begin declining. Xi also committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2060, a decade later than the IPCC’s 2050 target.
We do need to recognize that China has made major advances in support of climate stabilization. As one critical case in point, China’s ambitious industrial policies are primarily responsible for driving down the costs of solar energy worldwide by 80 percent over the past decade. China has also been the leading supplier of credit to support clean energy investments in developing economies. Nevertheless, there is no getting around the fact that if China sticks to its stated emission reduction plans, there is no chance whatsoever of achieving the IPCC’s targets.
In short, for different reasons, China, the U.S. and the EU all need to mount significantly more ambitious regional climate stabilization programs. In particular, these economies need to commit higher levels of public investment to the global clean energy investment project.
The basic constraint with increasing public investment is that people don’t want to pay higher taxes. Rich people can, of course, easily afford to pay higher taxes, after enjoying massive increases in their wealth and income under neoliberalism. That said, it is still also true that most of the funds needed to bring global clean energy investments to scale can be made available without raising taxes, by channeling resources from three sources: 1) transferring funds out of military budgets; 2) converting all fossil fuel subsidies into clean energy subsidies; and 3) mounting large-scale green bond purchasing programs by the U.S. Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China. Such measures can be the foundation for tying together the U.S., EU and Chinese regional programs that could, in combination, have a chance of meeting the urgent requirements for a viable global climate stabilization project.
Noam, I argued recently that we should face the global warming threat as the outbreak of a world war.Is this a fair analogy?
Chomsky: Not quite. A world war would leave survivors, scattered and miserable remnants. Over time, they could reconstruct some form of viable existence. Destruction of the environment is much more serious. There is no return.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book that opened with biologist Ernst Mayr’s rather plausible argument that we are unlikely to discover intelligence in the universe. To carry his argument further, if higher intelligence ever appears, it will probably find a way to self-destruct, as we seem to be bent on demonstrating.
The book closed with Bertrand Russell’s thoughts on whether there will ever be peace on Earth: “After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it has generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.”
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Since the advent of neoliberalism 40 years ago, societies virtually all over the world have undergone profound economic, social and political transformations. At its most basic function, neoliberalism represents the rise of a market-dominated world economic regime and the concomitant decline of the social state. Yet, the truth of the matter is that neoliberalism cannot survive without the state, as leading progressive economist Robert Pollin argues in the interview that follows. However, what is unclear is whether neoliberalism represents a new stage of capitalism that engenders new forms of politics, and, equally important, what comes after neoliberalism. Pollin tackles both of these questions in light of the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic, as most governments have implemented a wide range of monetary and fiscal measures in order to address economic hardships and stave off a recession.
Robert Pollin is distinguished professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and author of scores of books, including Back to Full Employment (2012), Greening the Global Economy (2015) and Climate Crisis and the Global Green new Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (co-authored with Noam Chomsky, 2020).
C.J. Polychroniou: Neoliberalism is a politico-economic project associated with policies of privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, austerity and limited government. Moreover, these principles have reigned supreme in the minds of most policymakers around the world since the early 1980s, and continue to do so. Is neoliberalism a new stage of capitalism?
Robert Pollin: Let’s first be clear on what we mean by “neoliberalism.” The term neoliberalism draws on the classical meaning of the word “liberalism.” Classical liberalism is the political philosophy that embraces the virtues of free-market capitalism and the corresponding minimal role for government interventions. According to classical liberalism, free-market capitalism is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. In this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes. Policy interventions to promote economic equality within capitalism — through, for example, taxing the rich, big government spending on social programs, or regulating market activities through, for example, decent minimum wage standards and regulations to prevent financial markets from becoming gambling casinos — will always end up doing more harm than good, according to this view.
For example, establishing living wage standards as the legal minimum — at, say $15 an hour or higher — would cause unemployment to rise, since, according to classical liberalism, employers won’t be willing to pay unskilled workers more than what the free market determines they are worth. Similarly, regulating financial markets will inhibit capitalists from undertaking risky investments that can raise living standards. Classical liberals will argue that the Wall Street Masters of the Universe are infinitely more qualified than government bureaucrats in deciding what to do with their own money. And if the Wall Street investors make dumb decisions, then so be it; let them fail. In that way, [classical liberalism says] the free market rewards smart decisions and punishes bad ones, all to the greater benefit of the whole society.
Now to neoliberalism: Neoliberalism is a contemporary variant of classical liberalism that became dominant worldwide around 1980, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the United States. At that time, it was certainly a new phase of capitalism. Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism became a rally cry, supplanting what had been, since the end of World War II, the dominance of Keynesianism and social democracy in global economic policymaking. In the high-income countries of Western Europe and North America along with Japan, in particular, this Keynesian/social democratic version of capitalism featured, to varying degrees, a commitment to low unemployment rates, decent levels of support for working people and workplace conditions, extensive regulations of financial markets, public ownership of significant financial institutions and high levels of public investment.
Of course, this was still capitalism. Disparities of income, wealth and opportunity remained intolerably high, along with the social malignancies of racism, sexism and imperialism. Ecological destruction, in particular global warming, was also beginning to gather force over this period, even though few people took notice at the time. Nevertheless, all told, Keynesianism and social democracy produced dramatically more egalitarian as well as more stable versions of capitalism than the neoliberal regime that supplanted these models.
It is critical to understand that neoliberalism was never a project to replace social democracy with true free-market capitalism. Rather, contemporary neoliberals are committed to free-market policies when they support the interests of big business and the rich as, for example, with lowering regulations in the workplace and financial markets. But these same neoliberals become far less insistent on free market principles when invoking such principles might damage the interests of big business, Wall Street and the rich.
An obvious example is the historically unprecedented levels of support provided during the COVID recession to prevent economic collapse. Just in 2020 in the U.S. for example, the federal government pumped nearly $3 trillion into the economy, equal to about 14 percent of total economic activity (GDP) to prevent a total economic collapse. On top of that, the U.S. Federal Reserve injected nearly $4 trillion — equal to about 20 percent of GDP — to avoid a Wall Street meltdown. Of course, pumping government money into the U.S. economy, at a level equal to roughly one-third of total GDP, all in no more than one year’s time, completely contradicts any notion of free-market, minimal government capitalism.
How would you assess the effects of neoliberal practices on the U.S. economy and society at large?
How neoliberalism works in practice, as opposed to rhetoric, was powerfully illustrated over the past year during the COVID-19 pandemic and recession. That is, due to the public health emergency, employment and overall economic activity throughout the world fell precipitously, since major sections of the global economy were forced into lockdown mode. In the U.S., for example, nearly 50 percent of the entire labor force filed for unemployment benefits between March 2020 and February 2021. However, over this same period, the prices of Wall Street stocks — as measured, for example, by the Standard and Poor’s 500 index, a broad market indicator — rose by 46 percent, one of the sharpest one-year increases on record. Similar interventions throughout the world achieved similar results elsewhere. Thus, according to the International Monetary Fund, overall economic activity (GDP) contracted by 3.5 percent in 2020, which it describes as a “severe collapse … that has had acute adverse impacts on women, youth, the poor, the informally employed and those who work in contact-intensive sectors.” At the same time, global stock markets rose sharply — by 45 percent throughout Europe, 56 percent in China, 58 percent in the U.K. and 80 percent in Japan, and with Standard & Poor’s Global 1200 index rising by 67 percent.
But, of course, these patterns of relentless rising inequality didn’t begin with the COVID recession. Consider, for example, the relationship between corporate CEOs and their workers over the course of neoliberalism. As of 1978, just prior to the rise of neoliberalism, the CEOs of the largest 350 U.S. corporations earned $1.7 million, which was 33 times the $51,200 earned by the average private-sector nonsupervisory worker. As of 2019, the CEOs were earning 366 times more than the average worker, $21.3 million versus $58,200. Under neoliberalism, in other words, the pay for big corporate U.S. CEOs has increased more than tenfold relative to the average U.S. worker.
Of course, there are real lives hovering behind these big statistical patterns. For example, recent research by Anne Case and Angus Deaton has documented powerfully an unprecedented rise, pre-COVID, in what they term “deaths of despair” — i.e., a decline in life expectancy through rising increases in suicide, alcoholism and drug addiction among white working-class people in the U.S. Case and Deaton explain this rise of deaths by despair to the decline in decent-paying and stable working-class jobs that has resulted from neoliberalism. In short, neoliberalism is fundamentally a program of champagne socialism for big corporations, Wall Street and the rich, and “let them eat cake” capitalism for almost everyone else.
Amid our current summer of unprecedented wildfires and flooding, the consequences of global warming are now everywhere before us. But we need to be clear on the extent to which global warming and the rise of neoliberal dominance have been intertwined. Indeed, as of 1980, the year Ronald Reagan took office, the average global temperature was still at a safe level, equal to that of the preindustrial period around 1800. Under 40 years of neoliberalism, the average global temperature has risen relentlessly, to where it is now 1.0 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average. Climate scientists have insisted that we cannot allow the global average temperature to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial level. Moreover, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released its Sixth Assessment Report, which projects we will be breaching this 1.5-degree threshold by 2040 unless we enact fundamental changes in the way the global economy operates. Step one must be to stop burning oil, coal and natural gas to produce energy. Under neoliberalism, we have allowed fossil fuel companies to continue profiting off of destroying the planet.
Large-scale government interventions are considered an anathema to neoliberal policymakers. Yet, as you and your colleague Jerry Epstein have argued, neoliberalism seems to rely extensively on the state for its own survival. Can you talk a bit about the connection between neoliberalism and government support?
The extraordinary bailout policies that were enacted during the COVID recession were by no means an aberration from what has been standard practice throughout the 40 years that neoliberalism has dominated global economic policymaking.
Indeed, it was only 13 years ago, in 2008, that Wall Street hyper-speculation brought the global economy to its knees during the Great Recession. To prevent a 1930s-level depression at that time, economic policymakers throughout the world — including the United States, the countries of the European Union, Japan, South Korea, China, India and Brazil — all enacted extraordinary measures to counteract the crisis created by Wall Street. As in 2020, these measures included financial bailouts, monetary policies that pushed central bank-controlled interest rates close to near-zero and large-scale fiscal stimulus programs financed by major expansions in central government deficits.
In the United States, the fiscal deficit reached $1.4 trillion in 2009, equal to 9.8 percent of GDP. The deficits were around $1.3 trillion in 2010 and 2011 as well, amounting to close to 9 percent of GDP in both years. These were the largest peacetime deficits prior to the 2020 COVID recession. As with the 2020 crisis, the interventions led by the Federal Reserve to prop up Wall Street and corporate America were even more extensive than the federal government’s deficit spending policies. Moreover, this total figure does not include the full funding mobilized in 2009 to bailing out General Motors, Chrysler, Goldman Sachs and the insurance giant AIG, all of which were facing death spirals at that time. It is hard to envision the form in which U.S. capitalism might have survived at that time if, following true free-market precepts as opposed to the actual practice of neoliberal champagne socialism, these and other iconic U.S. firms would have been permitted to collapse.
Bailout operations of this sort have occurred with near-clockwork regularity throughout the neoliberal era, starting with Ronald Reagan. Thus, in 1983 under Reagan, the U.S. government reached a then peacetime high in the U.S. for federal deficit spending, at 5.7 percent of GDP. At the time, the U.S. and global economy were still mired in the second phase of the severe double-dip recession that lasted from 1980 to ‘82. Reagan was also facing a reelection campaign in 1984. Of course, both as a political candidate and all throughout his presidency, Reagan preached loudly that big government was always the problem, never the solution. Yet Reagan did not hesitate to flout his own rhetoric in overseeing a massive fiscal bailout when he needed it.
If neoliberalism is bad economics and there is a continued need to bailout the current system from recurring crises and disasters, why is it still around after 40 or so years? What keeps it in place? And how likely is it that the return to “emergency Keynesianism” may spell the end of the neoliberal nightmare?
Neoliberalism is not “bad economics” for big corporations, Wall Street and the rich. To the contrary, neoliberalism has been working out extremely well for these groups. The regular massive bailout operations have been neoliberalism’s life-support system. It is due to these bailouts, first and foremost, that neoliberalism remains today as the dominant economic policy framework globally.
But it is also true that neoliberalism can be defeated, and supplanted by a policy framework that is committed to high levels of social and economic equality as well as ecological justice — which is to say, a project that has a reasonable chance of protecting human life on earth as we know it. Many people, including myself, like the term “Global Green New Deal” to characterize this project. It’s fine if other people prefer different terms. The point is that this project will obviously require massive and sustained levels of effective political mobilization throughout the world. Whether such mobilizations can be mounted successfully remains the open question moving forward. I myself am inspired by the extent to which the environmental and labor movements, in the U.S. and elsewhere, are increasingly and effectively joining forces to make this happen.
Looking at the state of the world, one is struck by the stark contradiction of progress being made on some fronts even as we are facing massive disruptions, tremendous inequalities and existential threats to humanity and nature. In this context, how do we evaluate the qualities of progress and decline? How significant is political activism to progress?
In this exclusive interview, Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s greatest scholars and leading activists, shares his insights on the state of the world and the conundrum of activism and change, including the significance of the Black Lives Matter movement, the movement for Palestinian rights, the urgency of the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear weapons.
C.J. Polychroniou: It’s been said by far too many, including myself, that we live in dark times. And for good reasons. We live in an era where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, authoritarianism is a global political phenomenon, and life on Earth is entering a state of collapse. From that perspective, human civilization is on an inexorable course of decline and nothing but a radical overhaul of the way humans conduct themselves will save us from a return to barbarism. Yet, there are at the same time signs of progress on numerous fronts, which are hard to overlook. Societies are becoming increasingly multicultural and also more aware of and sensitive to patterns of racism and discrimination. In the light of all this, do we see the glass half empty or half full? Moreover, is it possible to evaluate the qualities of decline and progress scientifically, or do we have to rely purely on normative evaluations and value judgments?
Noam Chomsky: There are attempts to measure the contents of the glass. The best-known is the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, with the hands placed a certain distance from midnight: the end. Each year that Trump was in office, the minute hand was moved closer to midnight, soon reaching the closest it had ever been, then going beyond. The analysts finally abandoned minutes and turned to seconds: 100 seconds to midnight, where the Clock now stands. That seems to me a fair assessment.
The analysts identify three major crises: nuclear war, environmental destruction and the deterioration of rational discourse. As we’ve often discussed, Trump has made a signal contribution to each, and the party he now owns is carrying his legacy forward. They are also currently hard at work to regain power by overcoming the dread danger of a government of the people, with plenty of far right big money at hand. If the project succeeds, emptying of the glass will be accelerated.
There has indeed been progress on many fronts. It is startling to look back and see what was regarded as proper behavior and acceptable attitudes not many years ago, even written into law. While substantial, the progress has not, however, been sufficient to contain and reverse the continuing assault on the social order, the natural world and the climate of rational discourse.
Without disparaging the great activist achievements, it’s hard sometimes to suppress memory of an ironic slogan of the ‘60s: They may win the battles, but we have all the best songs.
The glass that is before our eyes is not an encouraging sight, to put it mildly. Take the state of the three major crises identified in the setting of the Clock.
The major nuclear powers are obligated by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty “to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”
They are pursuing the opposite course.
In its latest annual survey, the prime monitor of global armament, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, reports that “The growth in total spending in 2020 was largely influenced by expenditure patterns in the United States and China. The USA increased its military spending for the third straight year to reach $778 billion in 2020,” as compared with China’s increase to $252 billion. In fourth place, below India, is the second U.S. adversary, Russia: $61.7 billion.
The figures are instructive, but misleading. The U.S. is alone in facing no credible security threats. The threats that are invoked in the calls for even more military spending are at the borders of adversaries, which are ringed with U.S. nuclear-armed missiles in some of the 800 U.S. military bases around the world (China has one, Djibouti).
Further threats, in this case quite real, are the development of new and more dangerous weapons systems. They could be banned by treaties, which were effective, until they were mostly dismantled by Bush II and Trump.
The current mythology concocted to justify escalation of this suicidal enterprise is carefully dismantled by nuclear physicist Lawrence Krauss, who for many years had the responsibility to present publicly the setting of the Clock. He also reminds us that “the US and Russia have both come within seconds of launching nuclear weapons due to software or human errors that erroneously indicated an incoming nuclear missile strike” and now have “more than 5,000 nuclear weapons each, with more than 1,000 of these on high alert, launch-on-warning status” just waiting for another accident or human decision. That might be by someone well down the chain of command, as we learned from Daniel Ellsberg in his essential book, The Doomsday Machine.
The bloated military budget could be sharply cut without harm to authentic security — in fact enhancing genuine security if undertaken as a project of international cooperation, which is not an idle dream as history reveals. That would free up badly needed funds for urgent necessities. But it is not to be. The military budget remains untouchable, the example of the cherished ideal of bipartisanship. For some, it is not enough. Three influential Republican senators have just introduced an amendment to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (BIP) now being debated, calling for another $50 billion for the “undernourished” Pentagon.
One consequence is a substantial contribution to environmental destruction: recent studies show that “the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries.”
That brings us to the one comparable threat to survival of organized human life: environmental destruction. In this case, unlike the nuclear menace, there is at least discussion and sometimes even corrective action, though nowhere near what is urgently needed. For years, scientists have been warning of a “climate emergency.” Thousands more are joining the call as the world is swept with disasters intensified by heating the atmosphere. A few weeks ago, we reviewed recent discoveries that show, once again, that the dire predictions of earlier studies were too conservative. Inexorably, the grim tale continues to unfold.
To mention a few more recent examples, new research has found that thawing of permafrost in rapidly heating Siberia may be releasing the “methane time bomb” that scientists have long feared — a rapid release of massive quantities of methane, which is not as long-lasting as carbon dioxide (CO2) but far more destructive. The main surprise is that the release is from hard rock, not wetlands, as previously anticipated. The lead researcher cautions that data are still uncertain; interpreting it correctly, he says, “may make the difference between catastrophe and apocalypse” as the climate crisis worsens.
Those are in fact the likely alternatives on our current course.
An accompanying report calls for a “global state of emergency” as temperatures continue to climb in Siberia and other Arctic regions. “Scientists have been shocked that the warm weather conducive to permafrost thawing is occurring roughly 70 years ahead of model projections,” the study warns. “The story is simple,” the report concludes. “Climate change is happening faster than anticipated. One consequence — the loss of ice in the polar regions — is also a driver for more rapid global heating and disastrously rapid global sea level rise.”
Turning elsewhere, new studies find alarming signs of collapse in major ocean currents that regulate global climates, possibly with an impact on the Gulf Stream, all with incalculable but likely far-reaching effects.
If we return to the topic in a few weeks, there will be more unpleasant news. Meanwhile, political leaders dither, or even act to amplify the threats.
That is the state of threats to survival — threats that could be overcome in a world of rational deliberation and judgment; we know the means.
That brings us to the third factor in the advance of the Doomsday Clock to midnight: the decline of rationality.
Illustrations are so numerous that any small sample will be hopelessly misleading. The most extreme form of irrationality is flat denial of what you don’t like. In the case of nuclear weapons and climate, the word “denial” translates as Doom, and not in the distant future.
Lesser examples illustrate the depths to which the malady has penetrated.
One example has to do with nuclear weapons in the Middle East, an obsession of the political class and the media for years. Anyone in the vicinity of the real world knows that Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons and that there is universal agreement among intelligence agencies that Iran has none.
Trump didn’t get his “beautiful wall,” but in protection of beliefs from reality, it may not be needed. Polls reveal that “more Americans think Iran possesses nuclear weapons than think Israel does … 60.5%, including 70.6% of Republicans and 52.6% of Democrats, say Iran possesses nuclear weapons — compared to 51.7% who say Israel does, including 51.7% of Republicans and 51.9% of Democrats.”
We have frequently discussed the obvious solution to the concern that Iran might develop nuclear weapons: a nuclear weapons-free zone (NWFZ) in the Middle East. In that case, there would be no constant tensions, no threat of major war, no murderous sanctions that the world must honor or be thrown out of the U.S.-run global financial system. In short, an ideal solution.
A few weeks ago, it seemed that there was finally a convert: the editorial board of The New York Times, who concluded that, “Ideally, the result [of current negotiations] would be a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East.”
The editors acknowledge that there are some problems, not least “Israel’s unacknowledged and nonnegotiable possession of nuclear weapons” — also unacknowledged by the U.S. to avoid the embarrassment of opening the question of the status of U.S. military aid to Israel under American law. Unmentioned is that Washington has unilaterally blocked moves toward the “ideal” solution for these reasons (notably Obama). And that the U.S. has some means to pressure Israel when it cares to, wielded by all pre-Obama presidents.
The editorial also states that there is an African NWFZ, failing to mention that it cannot go into effect because of the U.S. military base in Diego Garcia, part of Mauritius in Africa according to the World Court, the United Nations and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. But not according to the U.S. and its British client, which claims the island in order to provide Washington with the base.
Meanwhile the U.S.-U.K. righteously proclaim their leadership of the “rules-based international order” challenged by forces of evil.
Defiance of law is no minor matter in this case, not only for the expelled inhabitants and Mauritius, but also for the targets of U.S. bombing in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Nevertheless, at least the “ideal” solution is on the table, though it will plainly be a long struggle to free the public mind from the impressive grip of propaganda.
In a different domain, the gap between prevailing invented reality and old-fashioned reality is illustrated by the fealty of the Republican voting base to, for many of them, their bitter enemy.
Under Trump, the one legislative achievement of the self-declared party of the working man was the tax scam to enrich the very rich and harm the rest that we’ve already discussed. The practice now extends to the BIP. It has to be funded somehow. “Congressional Republicans objected to tax hikes on the rich or corporations, while also eventually ruling out other measures proposed by the White House, such as stepped-up IRS enforcement on tax cheats. The White House, meanwhile, ruled out higher taxes on Americans earning under $400,000, including a proposed gas tax.”
An instructive impasse.
Another illustration of deep loyalty, well reported, is the “stolen election” charade, still upheld by nearly two-thirds of Republicans.
A more subtle though highly consequential case is vaccine rejection, persisting in the face of overwhelming evidence of the efficacy of the vaccines and the grave danger of refusal. The danger, of course, is not limited to the refuser. On a sufficient scale, refusal will prevent herd immunity so that the plague will persist, and worse, will expedite mutations that may reach beyond control. Inquiry has identified many factors in refusal. A careful statistical study by Anthony DiMaggio reveals that the culprit, for once, is not Fox News, which has had no statistically significant effect on refusal. Rather, the most salient sector is Republicans confined to social media bubbles, already primed for distrust of science by decades of right-wing propaganda.
Refusal is no small matter. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans say they are unwilling to get vaccinated. Meanwhile, Republican leaders continue to oppose vaccine requirements, arguing that it’s up to the individual — whatever the lethal effect on others. The most outspoken is the new heroine of the party, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose fans cheered when she heralded the low vaccination rate in Alabama, which tossed 65,000 unused doses — badly needed elsewhere — in the midst of another sharp spike in cases.
This is the barest sample. The task of restoring a measure of rationality is daunting, and a responsibility that cannot be shirked.
Should we accept social change as inevitable or is it completely a consequence of collective action? Moreover, given that social change occurs rather slowly in the course of history, in what context is radicalism of better use than pragmatism for achieving progressive social change?
There are some tendencies in history, rooted in the nature of institutions, but it does not follow a predetermined course. Human agency is essential for achieving progressive social change. Almost invariably, it crucially involves collective action. The great historian and activist Howard Zinn dedicated his life’s work to “the countless small actions of unknown people” that lie at the roots of “those great moments” that enter the historical record, small actions almost always undertaken in concert. Labor historian Eric Loomis adds the crucial qualification that the labor actions that have commonly been in the forefront of the struggle for a better world have achieved success when a sympathetic administration contained state-business violence.
The usual path to success is a combination of radical goals and pragmatic choice of tactics, but there cannot be a general formula for the proper course.
Looking at the state of the contemporary United States, one is struck by the nearly simultaneous explosion of two highly contradictory phenomena — white supremacist ideology and a new civil rights or social justice movement known as Black Lives Matter, respectively. How do you assess the historical significance of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and do you see it as a pragmatic or a radical response to the plague of systemic racism?
Black Lives Matter has proven to be a highly significant social movement. The “simultaneous explosion” is real, and not too surprising. BLM is an activist manifestation of a long overdue reckoning with a shameful past and its bitter surviving legacy. Many want that history erased, and its legacy ignored. One salient reason, it seems, is fear of the “Great Replacement.”
It’s easy to scoff at Great Replacement absurdities, and to condemn the demagogues and cynics who exploit them for their ugly purposes. But it’s not hard to see why they appeal to parts of the population — mostly rural, white, Christian, less educated, relatively affluent, often tending toward white supremacist commitments and Christian nationalism. The absurdities resonate because they rest on a core of fact: Those who have survived under the jackboot for centuries are demanding basic rights and are receiving more general support. BLM and its broad outreach have significantly advanced this cause. The “traditional way of life” that rests on denying these rights is facing threats, including demographic realities.
It’s not necessary here to trace how these conflicts have poisoned American society from its origins. They remain virulent, unpredictable, affecting many aspects of life and the social order.
A noticeable change is also being observed among a growing segment of American citizens, from both political parties, with regard to attitudes toward Israel and the Palestinians. How significant is this shift in public opinion, and how do we explain it?
Highly significant, and unmistakable. The poll I cited earlier on the astonishing perception of Middle East nuclear weapons found that the latest Israeli assault on Gaza “appears to have led to the largest increase to date in the number of Democrats, especially young Democrats, who want the U.S. to lean toward the Palestinians.”
Each of the murderous Israeli assaults on Gaza has had that effect. The regular crimes of settlers and the army in the West Bank mostly pass under the radar. But the longtime tendency is very clear. In earlier years, even at moments where there was some recognition of the brutality of Israeli crimes, in the eyes of liberal America, Israel remained “a society in which moral sensitivity is a principle of political life” and which “through its tumultuous history” has been animated by “high moral purpose” (New York Times, Time, fall 1982, at the peak of condemnation of Israeli crimes after the Sabra-Shatila massacres).
That has changed. Now support for Israel has shifted to Evangelical Christians, right-wing nationalists and military-security sectors. The shift largely traces the drift to the ultranationalist right within Israel, along with the increasing difficulty of covering up its brutal actions and increased sensibility on a broad scale in the U.S.
The shift among the population has so far had little impact on policy, in fact runs counter to it. Obama was more supportive of Israel than his predecessors, even if not sufficiently so for the ascendant far right in Israel. Trump pulled out all the stops. Biden, so far, has scarcely modified his extremist stance. If the growing opposition to Israeli crimes crystallizes into an effective solidarity movement, it could bring about significant changes in U.S. policy. That could not fail to have major effects in Israel, which has been dependent on U.S. protection since the 1970s, when the Labor governments made the fateful decision to reject live diplomatic options, choosing instead expansion and construction of Greater Israel in violation of UN Security Council orders and international law.
Environmental activism is growing on a global scale and in various ways. Green political parties are flourishing in Europe, grassroots organizations such as the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion have emerged as crucial agents in the battle against the climate crisis, and even women in Latin America and the Caribbean have become active in defending the environment and fighting global warming. How do you assess the impacts of environmental movements so far to influence environmental policies and practices of governments and corporations?
There has been a notable impact, but it is nowhere near enough even to keep pace with the race to catastrophe, let alone to act decisively to avert it. There is much more to do, and not much time to do it. We cannot emphasize too strongly the immensity of the stakes.
The so-called radical wing of the Democratic Party, which is most vocally represented by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is coming under rather enigmatic criticism, at least as far as I am concerned, by various left-minded groups and individuals for allegedly not doing enough to push forward a radical agenda of social change, which includes, among other things, Medicare for All. How justified is this criticism considering that the so-called radical wing of the Democratic Party consists of just a handful of individuals, which means that they obviously lack the power to be movers and shakers in Washington, D.C.?
Much of the criticism seems to me misguided in two respects: First, it focuses on alleged failures to achieve what is beyond reach under existing circumstances; and second, and more significant, it largely ignores very serious failures to achieve what is well within reach, and crucial for survival.
In the first category, it makes very good sense to strongly advocate for Medicare for All and other measures that would bring the U.S. into the “civilized” world, and enable it to realize its potential to become a leading force for progress, as it was in many ways in the New Deal years.
It is a stunning fact that despite its unique advantages, the United States ranks last among the rich societies in health care. The most recent international study of 11 high-income countries finds that, “The United States ranks last overall, despite spending far more of its gross domestic product on health care. The U.S. ranks last on access to care, administrative efficiency, equity, and health care outcomes, but second on measures of care process.” This scandal is mirrored in other measures of social justice. And efforts to overcome it are imperative.
Choice of measures to do so has to begin with assessment of social and political reality. The reality is that the levers of power are in the hands of concentrated wealth, the corporate world and their political representatives. The labor movement has been severely weakened by the neoliberal assault, and other popular movements are in no position to challenge concentrated political-economic power even when their goals are backed by a majority of the population. The Republican half of the Senate is opposed, rock solid, to change that impinges on the welfare of their actual constituency of private wealth and corporate power (posturing aside). Simply look at their conditions on funding the BIP. And enough (so-called moderate) Democrats go along with them to block progressive legislation.
Vigorous advocacy should continue, accompanying the educational and organizational work that is needed to overcome dominant reactionary forces. It is idle, however, to direct criticism to a scattered few for failing to do what cannot be done until this foundational work is accomplished. To do that work is the proper task for the critics.
The second category of criticisms, which is largely lacking, should be directed at failures to undertake actions that are within reach and are of immense significance. I have already mentioned one: sharply cutting the Pentagon budget. A related concern is provocative foreign policy stances, dangerous and readily avoided in favor of diplomacy.
Keeping just to the domestic scene, there is a great deal that merits serious critical attention. The major Biden initiative is the BIP. As the business press reports, referring to climate policy, “most of Biden’s plans for radical change can’t be found anywhere” in the bill. The “radical” proposals that can’t be found are in fact moderate measures that are essential for escape from catastrophe.
The few progressives in Congress, backed by Sunrise Movement, have said they will not vote for the BIP unless Congress moves on a subsequent legislation that includes the full range of necessary proposals. The fate of the contemplated larger bill is very much in doubt.
While this failure is receiving at least some attention, there is more that is passing in silence and is truly ominous. APreports that, “Approvals for companies to drill for oil and gas on U.S. public lands are on pace this year to reach their highest level since George W. Bush was president, underscoring President Joe Biden’s reluctance to more forcefully curb petroleum production in the face of industry and Republican resistance.” The reference is to reserves already under lease but not authorized.
While there are legal issues about blocking prior leases, there seems to be plenty of room for executive action. Much had been hoped for from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who while in Congress had adamantly opposed drilling on federal lands and opposed fracking, and had co-sponsored the original Green New Deal. But the signs so far are hardly encouraging — and one can’t reiterate often enough that there is not much time.
In this domain, critical commentary is well warranted. And even more so, direct engagement and action.
Young people protesting against the Cambo North Sea oilfield confronted Nicola Sturgeon as she attended a carnival in her Glasgow Southside constituency.
Scotland’s first minister was cornered by young protesters from the Green New Deal Rising and the Stop Cambo campaign.
If given the go-ahead, the Cambo site could yield as many as 255m barrels of oil over its lifetime, according to environmental campaigners.
And that much oil could produce as much as 132m tonnes of CO2 emissions. Campaigners estimated that this would require an area of land some 1.5 times the size of Scotland to counteract.
Non-committal
Campaigners confronted Sturgeon in Queen’s Park at the Govanhill Carnival and asked if she will oppose the oil field.
She replied:
Look, I’m not going to stand here – it’s not an issue for the Scottish Government. We are thinking about all of these things, we are trying to come to the right decision. There’s no doubt we should be moving away.
So there are hard questions to ask about whether things like that are commensurate and I totally get that. There are tough things for all of us to address and make decisions on.
A campaigner told Sturgeon she was disappointed that the first minister would not commit to opposing the oil field. To this, Sturgeon responded:
You can have a politician that says to you what you want to hear, because you are standing here, or you can have a politician that says I do hear what you say, and I’ve got a lot of sympathy with it but there’s issues as First Minister I’ve got to make sure that I properly consider.
And that’s what I’m choosing to do.
“I am genuinely terrified for my future”
Speaking after the incident, campaigner Lauren MacDonald, 20, who challenged Sturgeon, said:
We are hosting Cop26 in my home city this year, yet Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson both have taken nowhere near enough action to meet the commitments already set.
The Scottish government can’t call itself a climate leader without opposing the Cambo oil field. How can we trust our governments to tackle the climate crisis when time and time again they refuse to take meaningful action to mitigate its effects?
She added:
I am genuinely terrified for my future. It makes me so frustrated that when I confront the leader of my country, she refuses to commit to taking action to safeguard the lives of her citizens.
If we have any hope of mitigating the climate crisis and seeing a fairer society in Scotland, we need a just transition out of oil and gas immediately. We need a Green New Deal now that delivers good green jobs.
As a presidential candidate, Joe Biden unveiled a plan to tackle climate change, which he termed “an existential threat — not just to our environment, but to our health, our communities, our national security, and our economic well-being.” He promised “a bold plan — a Clean Energy Revolution — to address this grave threat.”
Immediately after he was sworn into office in January 2021, President Biden issued two executive orders to tackle the climate crisis. The executive orders started undoing the damage done by the Trump administration — for example, reinstating the Obama administration’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, and rejoining the Paris climate accord.
But they went beyond restoring the Obama status quo by pausing oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters, and directing all federal agencies to identify and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.
The elevation of environmental justice as a government-wide concern, and the directive to the Environmental Protection Agency and Justice Department to enforce environmental justice laws, were very welcome developments. The credit for this goes entirely to years of organizing by environmental justice movements.
The response from environmental organizations was favorable. For example, the Sierra Club applauded the Biden administration for “utilizing the entire government to take bold and swift action that leaves no person and no community behind.”
Today, the prospect of serious action on the scale needed to address the climate emergency, and the image of the Biden administration as being committed to climate action, are both in shambles. What happened in just a few months to bring about this sea change in the politics of climate action in the U.S.?
Infrastructure Isn’t Climate-Neutral
A key reason for this shift is the ongoing infrastructure fight in Congress.
What kind of physical infrastructure we build for energy, transportation, housing, and other areas helps determine whether, and how fast, we start cutting our greenhouse gas emissions (referred to as climate mitigation), and how we adjust our society and economy to climate change impacts that are already happening (referred to as climate adaptation).
Some of this is obvious — gas-burning power plants are the wrong energy infrastructure choice for climate mitigation, and wind turbines are the right choice.
Consequently, the kind of infrastructure we fund helps determine our ability to fight climate change.
A Weak Beginning
In April 2021, Biden released his American Jobs Plan (AJP), an eight-year, $2 trillion infrastructure investment proposal.
It included $100 billion in funding for rebuilding our energy system, distributed between incentivizing the growth of renewable energy generation and storage, building a resilient electric transmission system, and more. It proposed $85 billion for public transit and $174 billion for vehicle electrification.
The plan fell far short of the level of funding that experts have estimated is needed to address the climate emergency. Energy consulting group Wood Mackenzie estimates the combined public and private investment needed to convert the U.S. power grid to 100 percent renewable energy to be $4.5 trillion, and a Rewiring America study estimates that eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. economy requires $3 trillion over 10 years in public investment alone. The public transit investment of $85 billion proposed was less than what the AJP admitted to be the repair backlog for transit systems ($105 billion).
The AJP also fell far short of the level of investments demanded by the Green New Deal Network, a network of grassroots movements: $1 trillion for renewable energy, and $600 billion each for mass transit and for retrofitting public buildings (including public housing and schools).
From the standpoint of environmental and climate justice organizations, there were additional concerns with the AJP. It proposed pilot projects for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology, and expanding the tax credit for CCS.
Environmental justice organizations have been clear in their opposition to CCS. The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, created by President Biden through an executive order, included CCS facilities in a list of the types of investments that would not benefit environmental justice communities.
But things went further downhill from this weak opening proposal from the administration.
Enter the Senate
Reviewing the composition and voting rules of the U.S. Senate helps explain what happened next.
The Senate is evenly divided between the two parties, with Vice President Kamala Harris holding a tie-breaking vote to give Democrats the slimmest of majorities.
But the Senate doesn’t pass most legislation through a normal majority vote. It subjects legislation to a process called filibuster, requiring 60 votes to pass. The only exception is legislation with budgetary (tax and spending) implications, which can bypass the filibuster through a process called reconciliation.
This means any infrastructure legislation needs at least 10 Republican votes to pass the Senate, unless it’s introduced as a budgetary measure.
A group of conservative Senate Democrats, prominent among them Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), insisted on passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill as a precondition to considering a bigger reconciliation bill. And even one dissenting Democrat could kill a bill if all Republicans opposed it. That was the administration and Senate Democratic leadership’s logic for addressing infrastructure with two bills — a bipartisan bill subject to filibuster, and a larger bill passed through reconciliation.
Compromising Climate Action Away
A bipartisan group of senators started negotiating a bill, producing a framework that eviscerated the climate elements of the AJP.
Renewable energy vanished from the energy priorities. Transit funding, already inadequate in the AJP, was cut from $85 billion down to $49 billion, and vehicle electrification spending was gutted by 91 percent, from $174 billion to $15 billion.
As negotiations continued, the bipartisan proposal got worse. Transit was cut further to $39 billion, less than half the amount in the original AJP. The energy spending proposed was entirely for transmission lines and for technologies controversial for their environmental justice impacts, such as nuclear energy and carbon capture.
One item that remained essentially unchanged from the original AJP was highway spending — which, as noted earlier, can hinder the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that attempting to negotiate an infrastructure bill with a political party that denies and minimizes the climate crisis would produce an outcome such as this.
The #ExxonPlan
A startling revelation at the end of June 2021 shed further light on why the bipartisan infrastructure proposal gutted attempts in the original AJP to address climate change.
Investigative journalists from Greenpeace posing as recruiters got two Exxon lobbyists to share secrets on video, including revealing the degree of influence the company had on the infrastructure bill, and their targeted lobbying of key senators, including four Democrats who negotiated the bipartisan deal: Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly (both D-Arizona), Chris Coons (D-Delaware) and Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire).
Exxon’s business interests in doing so are obvious — stripping away funding for the competition (renewable energy, public transit and vehicle electrification), and building highway infrastructure that incentivizes oil and gas use.
Biden’s Stark Choice
It’s hypothetically possible, but not guaranteed, that a reconciliation package will include significant climate infrastructure funding.
There are indications conservative Democrats such as Manchin and Sinema could block the reconciliation bill if the bipartisan bill doesn’t pass, or whittle down spending levels in the reconciliation bill out of purported concern about deficits. If they do, it’s possible that funding for renewable energy, public transit or energy-efficient buildings won’t survive.
Disturbingly, Biden has said he opposes “double dipping” in infrastructure spending. This means if any item is funded (even minimally) in the bipartisan bill, he won’t support more funding for it in the reconciliation bill. This includes public transit and vehicle electrification.
A few months into Biden’s presidency, prospects of bold action to address the climate emergency look bleak. Biden himself has a great deal of responsibility for this state of affairs, by negotiating with Republicans and appeasing conservative Democrats.
The Climate Justice Alliance (CJA), comprising more than 70 grassroots organizations from frontline communities most impacted by climate change and toxic pollution, made clear on the day of Biden’s inauguration that their support for him wasn’t unconditional, and that they intend to “hold President Biden accountable for delivering on his promises, starting today.”
Clearly, Biden can’t take progressive support for granted. If he continues choosing bipartisanship over delivering on his campaign promises on climate, he faces an escalating showdown with an increasingly assertive, frontline-led climate justice movement.
The world faces a dire climate emergency, with more than 14,000 scientists warning in a letter that the planet’s “vital signs” are in bad shape. The urgency to enact serious policies to counteract climate change can’t be emphasized enough. The choice before Biden is stark: will he do what it takes to tackle the climate emergency, or squander the opportunity for the sake of “bipartisanship,” with disastrous consequences for humanity?
From the definition of a dollar as a unit of measure all the way to what The Fed is and how public policy can be informed – Grumbine runs the gamut on MMT basics.
As the impacts of climate change and Covid-19 compound, politicians from around the world on Monday July 19th launched the new Global Alliance for a Green New Deal (GGND). Founded by Rep. Ilhan Omar of the United States, Dep. Joenia Wapichana of Brazil, and Manon Aubry of France among others, the Alliance aims to advance global momentum for collaborative and transformational social, economic and environmental policy.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) has introduced a bill aimed at combating the climate crisis while reducing inequities within the public school system called the Green New Deal for Public Schools.
The bill would invest $1.43 trillion over the next decade to upgrade and retrofit every public school building to be more climate-friendly, with a focus on schools with the highest need. It would also invest in expansions of social services at schools and funding for students from low-income families.
“It’s time for a revolution in public education,” said Bowman, a former teacher and middle school principal, in a statement. “The Green New Deal for Public Schools represents the level of school infrastructure investment that is urgent and necessary to heal the harm from decades of disinvestment, redlining and cycles of poverty and trauma, particularly for Black and brown children.”
The legislation has the backing of 22 cosponsors in the House, including members of the progressive “squad” like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York). It’s also backed by progressive organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party; education groups like the American Federation of Teachers, the second largest teacher’s union in the U.S.; and climate organizations like Sierra Club and 350.org.
— DSA for a Green New Deal (@DSAecosocialism) July 15, 2021
Bowman told The Washington Post that his proposal also has support from the White House, as it aligns with Joe Biden’s goal to cut climate emissions.
The bill calls for $446 billion in funding for what it deems “Climate Capital Facilities” grants and a “Climate Change Resiliency Program” that would provide funding for green retrofits. It offers the most funding for schools with the highest need, as determined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Social Vulnerability Index.
The bill allocates $250 billion in funding for high-need schools to hire staff and expand social services and, if the school chooses, “adopt trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and restorative justice practices” and partner with local organizations to offer after-school programs.
Additionally, Bowman’s bill proposes $695 billion to quadruple Title I funding, which provides financial assistance to schools with large numbers of students from low-income families, and increased funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which the Education Department uses to guide and aid special education programs.
Research from the climate + community project finds that Bowman’s bill, if enacted, could reduce carbon emissions by 78 million metric tons annually, or the equivalent of taking 17 million cars off the road. The organization also projects that the bill would fund 1.3 million jobs a year.
The climate + community project explains in a report on the Green New Deal for Public Housing that racist policies like redlining and a lack of federal oversight over public education has led to a stratified education system that benefits students from wealthy families while further suppressing students from low-income families and communities of color.
“The Green New Deal for K–12 Public Schools will address the contemporary needs of historically disinvested communities to create sustainable and just futures by directly investing in green retrofits for schools in high-need districts and communities,” the climate + community project explains.
“Schools are the best epicenter to be leaders in what climate infrastructure should look like, in terms of sustainable energy, in terms of renewable energy, and in terms of energy sharing,” Bowman told The Washington Post. “In terms of how we support the social, emotional and economic needs for students and families within a particular community to prepare for the challenges of climate change — our schools are not doing any of that at this moment.”
Progressives in the House are aiming to get Bowman’s bill incorporated into Senate Democrats’ $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, specifically the proposal for $446 billion in funding for green retrofits for schools.
After being targeted by progressive climate campaigners, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer made clear on Wednesday that he will work to include the creation of a Civilian Climate Corps in evolving federal infrastructure legislation.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued a lengthy statement outlining his support for the inclusion of a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC), which was inspired by a New Deal-era program and formally unveiled as legislation earlier this year by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on the same day they reintroduced the Green New Deal Resolution.
The Sunrise Movement, whose New York City chapter took to the streets to push Schumer on the CCC proposal, celebrated his statement as a victory for local organizers and the youth-led movement more broadly.
“In the upcoming American Jobs and Families Plans legislation, we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to confront the climate crisis and create millions of middle-class, family-sustaining union jobs,” Schumer said. “Creating a new Civilian Climate Corps is a key step towards both goals.”
The Senate majority leader vowed to “work tirelessly to achieve a big and bold Civilian Climate Corps that places justice at the center and urgently addresses the interlocking climate and economic crises.”
“In the coming weeks, I look forward to working in New York with Sunrise Movement, community organizations, and unions on a shared vision for the CCC,” he added, thanking “the dedicated young organizers and activists who have brought the idea of a new Civilian Climate Corps this far.”
In a tweet welcoming his promise that “together, we will work to make it a reality,” Sunrise NYC declared: “A monumental moment for the climate movement and beyond!”
Thanking Schumer “for standing with us” and supporting a CCC, the chapter said that “we look forward to collaborating with you to win big and tackle economic and climate injustice through transformative change.”
“This is a big deal,” tweeted Sunrise co-founder and political director Evan Weber, recognizing that it is not every day the Senate majority leader “backs your movement’s major demand in the midst of a high stakes, narrow-path-to-victory legislative fight.”
Weber credited the NYC Sunrise members for “leading the push.”
“Schumer’s statement shows us that he is listening to our generation and taking our demands seriously,” said Veekas Ashoka, an activist with Sunrise Movement NYC, in a statement. “The global pandemic, fatal heatwaves, and destructive storms have left New Yorkers with a 10% unemployment rate and with our communities struggling to survive. Young people are ready to get to work repairing our country, and we need good-paying, union jobs to do so.”
“Schumer’s commitment means our organizing is working. Now, we work to ensure he follows through on his promises,” Ashoka added. “We will continue building the political mandate for Schumer to deliver on the full scope of climate action we need by any means necessary, with or without the GOP.”
Markey also took to Twitter Wednesday to welcome Schumer’s statement.
“Agreed,” he said. “We must go big and bold with a Civilian Climate Corps. If we do, we can employ one million+ with good-paying jobs to strengthen our union workforce, fight climate change, deliver justice to frontline communities, and transition America to a clean economy.”
Markey and Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal envisions employing 1.5 million people to complete federally funded projects that help communities respond to the climate emergency. As Markey detailed for the Boston Globe in April:
For example, corps members may work to help weatherize and electrify housing in low-income communities, or be part of a team preparing for and installing a community solar facility, receiving relevant training and credentials along the way. Natural climate resiliency improvements, like shoreline and wetlands restoration that protect against rising seas, or environmental remediation that protects from historic pollution would also be part of corps work, with crucial benefits to communities in Massachusetts and beyond. From Groundworks Lawrence to AmeriCorps Cape Cod to the Southwest Boston Community Development Corporation and programs all across the country, corps members would be part of the country’s transition to a clean economy.
Schumer’s Wednesday statement increased pressure on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and President Joe Biden to ensure a CCC measure is included in any approved infrastructure package.
In a tweet urging them to join Schumer and “commit to a bold, visionary CCC,” Sunrise said that “this is our chance to build resilience in our communities [with] good-paying jobs. In the midst of worldwide economic and climate devastation, we need to invest in people and create jobs for our communities.”
During a Wednesday speech near Chicago, Biden explained Democrats’ current two-track approach to infrastructure — a bipartisan agreement he reached with centrist lawmakers last month as well as using the budget reconciliation process to avoid a GOP filibuster and advance “human infrastructure” policies.
“It’s a combination of parts of my American Jobs Plan that were essential and not included in the bipartisan infrastructure plan, as well as my American Families Plan,” said Biden, who later in his speech expressed support for establishing a new CCC.
“I also want to enlist a new generation of climate, conservation, and… resilience workers, like FDR did… preserving our landscape with a Civilian Conservation Corps,” the president said. “It’s a similar thing.”
“We can put Americans to work strengthening public lands and waters, and making our communities — rural and urban — more resilient against extreme weather,” he said. “And we can take on the long-overdue work of advancing environmental justice by addressing pollution.”
As Common Dreamsreported last week, although a CCC and other progressive priorities are included in a recent memo outlining the Biden administration climate and infrastructure goals, some of the document’s language has generated concerns.
Climate journalist Kate Aronoff noted when the memo was made public that “the wording for the $10 billion CCC strongly suggests that it’s gonna be structured as some kind of Americorps expansion rather than, well, a CCC.”
Wednesday afternoon, Politicoreported on a possible timeline for infrastructure legislation, citing a White House official who noted in an email that “as Leader Schumer has said, he wants to move on both the bipartisan plan and the budget resolution during the upcoming July/August Senate session.”
“Our understanding is that the process could begin as early as the week of 7/19, given that committees are still finalizing legislative text for both the budget resolution and the bipartisan bill,” the White House official said. “We of course support going forward as fast as possible, but it would be a mistake to think of July 19 as anything more than the opening of a window.”
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