There are a couple of reasons. The biggest is that any recovery plan is going to try to boost GDP, which is what recovery plans do: you want to get the economy growing again and to boost consumer demand, and so that will grow GDP and that will boost fossil fuels. That link has not been severed. So when you read oil and gas industry trade publications, for instance, they’re excited about a stimulus because transportation has been basically shut down for the last year. When people are flying again and they’re driving to work and school, you’re going to see demand grow for fossil fuels. Some of that, I would argue, is kind of unavoidable. We’re not going to see a totally green recovery. Even the greenest ecosocialist recovery you could design is still a recovery \u2014 and, in the context of fossil-fueled capitalism, it will boost demand for fossil fuels because we haven’t decarbonized.<\/p>\n
The other reason is that, so long as there are still all of the tax breaks in place, all of the bailouts that were delivered to the fossil fuel industry, things like the bond buying program the Fed set up, capitalism is just very weighted toward fossil fuels. As long as it\u2019s the case that a stimulus or recovery measure is looking to generally improve the economy without taking that on, it will be a big gain to fossil fuels just because of our tax law. If you don’t really tackle that, I don’t think tax credits for green things or even good public investments in infrastructure \u2014 those don’t outcompete that necessarily.<\/p>\n
It’s good that Biden is talking about climate as a jobs program. I think it\u2019s a big improvement on 2008 that the two are being talked about together, but there\u2019s a lot that needs to be done in a recovery to make sure that it doesn’t just fuel business as usual with some green initiatives tacked on.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
One part of it would just be to pay a lot more attention to the question of fossil fuel jobs. I think the problem with having a \u201cbuild back better\u201d approach which emphasizes all of the good stuff you’re going to build in clean energy is that it isn’t really speaking to folks who do work in the fossil fuel industry. Or, for example, the teachers in a district whose tax base relies on coal and relies on oil. Without real attention to the really deep ways the fossil fuel economy structures life for many people .\u2009.\u2009. it’s just not a satisfying answer to say, \u201cwe’re going to build a wind turbine factory in Ohio\u201d if you’re a coal miner in West Virginia or an oil worker or, for that matter, a housekeeper in Midland, Texas.<\/p>\n
There are whole regional economies that are really deeply bound up in fossil fuels. We can’t neglect the question of fossil fuel supply or the fact that these industries have been shedding jobs for the last year. I mean, the oil and gas industry lost 107,000 jobs. Every oil major has laid off if not tens of thousands then at least many thousands of people during the downturn. The traditional Democratic response to that has been to talk about piecemeal transition programs \u2014 the classic one being that we’re going to teach miners how to code. I think if we\u2019re really serious and we want it to both have a really great recovery and set up any sort of climate legislation for real success, we have to pursue some sort of full employment agenda. A federal jobs guarantee is a policy which has been pretty mainstream in the Democratic Party at different points in history (at least full employment: the idea of a jobs guarantee \u2014 making the federal government the employer of last resort \u2014 comes in part out of the social democratic tradition and the Civil Rights Movement).<\/p>\n
I just don’t see a way to deal with the problem of getting off of fossil fuels if you don’t actively create some sort of public option for employment and expand health care \u2014<\/strong> Medicare for All \u2014 and build out safety nets, because I don’t think there’s a way to sort of target those programs: a program for a just transition to West Virginia or the Permian Basin or North Dakota or Alaska…there needs to be a universal way to make sure these folks were okay, and full employment is a big part of that. There’s just a lot of work to do, right? Plugging abandoned mines that are spewing methane out into the atmosphere and polluting local communities, for example \u2014 that can happen in the places where people already live, rather than them having to move. Reclaiming abandoned mine sites, for example, could be a huge source of employment in West Virginia and it\u2019s currently not really happening there. All sorts of stuff needs to be done, and I think full employment is not a radical demand by any means. It\u2019s a pretty liberal idea in some sense. In any case, there needs to be some sort of jobs guarantee in order to make people whole.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n Luke Savage<\/dt>\n \n Something that\u2019s received considerably less attention than Biden\u2019s domestic climate spending pledges is the foreign policy dimension of climate change. If people are thinking anything at all about the intersection between the two, they\u2019re probably thinking about Biden\u2019s executive order rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. But there\u2019s a whole lot that\u2019s probably more relevant when it comes to how Biden\u2019s geo-political posture will impact global efforts to combat climate change. What\u2019s your initial impression of Biden\u2019s foreign policy as it relates to these efforts?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n
Kate Aronoff<\/dt>\n \n Like you said, I think when people think about climate change in foreign policy the only thing that comes to mind for many is the Paris agreement and maybe the UN. And that\u2019s just such a small part of what climate policy actually is. Climate policy is<\/em> foreign policy and it’s not super complicated: we all live on the same planet. Carbon doesn\u2019t care about borders. It really is an international problem that demands an internationalist solution. There’s this interesting thing happening with the Biden administration where John Kerry \u2014 who I disagree with on many, many things \u2014 he is, relative to Biden’s foreign policy team, a lot less hawkish than people like Tony Blinken and \u201cthe blob.\u201d<\/p>\nSo it\u2019s good there\u2019s someone who is not egging on a cold war with China, which is incompatible with any sort of climate action. But I think it\u2019s worrying for that to be a minority view in the national security establishment. If we\u2019re heading into some ginned-up conflict with China in particular, collaboration on climate becomes impossible and, in no uncertain terms, we\u2019re fucked. A precursor even to the Paris agreement was Obama opening up relations with China on climate, so that obviously has to happen again. There\u2019s just a foreign policy establishment and an administration that\u2019s extremely hawkish on these questions.<\/p>\n
I think the US-China relationship is extremely important on climate, but I would also be pretty surprised if the administration calls for widespread debt relief across the global south or for the sorts of things that I think are prerequisites for having a productive conversation about climate policy on the world stage. I think it’s really bad optics to have John Kerry riding around on a private jet and telling countries like Indonesia or Nigeria that they can\u2019t burn coal or oil. I think in order to have any good faith engagement on climate on the world stage, there needs to be a much broader conversation about what US responsibilities are on climate, which are massive.<\/p>\n
We have the capacity to transition very quickly in our own borders and also to make that possible in other places. I’m excited to see some kind of conversation about climate reparations and also the US taking a much more active role in institutions like the IMF and World Bank in a push for debt relief and other measures that will make it possible for the rest of the world to transition.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n
Luke Savage<\/dt>\n \n You have a book coming out in April called Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet \u2014 and How We Fight Back<\/em>. It\u2019s obviously a pretty big question, but for those who haven\u2019t been following the book, what\u2019s its basic thrust?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n Kate Aronoff<\/dt>\n \n The basic argument of the book is that when climate politics comes into popular consciousness in the United States \u2014 in 1988, when James Hanson gives his testimony on global warming to the Senate \u2014 that happens at the zenith of neoliberalism. That happens at this moment where the most reasonable solutions for dealing with this crisis have been taken off the table by neoliberalism but also centuries of anti-democratic thinking in the United States and a long-standing push for minority rule across the right, which bleeds into the Democratic Party.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\nThe book tries to look at just how badly we’ve been set up to deal with this problem. But, then also what are the solutions for this problem that can be put back on the table? Things like nationalizing the fossil fuel industry, bringing utilities under public ownership, a jobs guarantee, climate reparations, and a four-day workweek. So it will also be looking at the big, macro solutions we need to address climate change.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n <\/dl>\n \n \n\n \n
\n \n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On January 21, Joe Biden issued an executive order recommitting the United States to the Paris climate agreement and rescinding the construction permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, moves that have been heralded throughout the media as the beginning of a new era for climate policy in the United States. But what are the real [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2284,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42228,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42227\/revisions\/42228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}