A Green No Deal: Congressman Peters' Recycled Climate Playbook

San Diego Congressman Scott Peters is attracting media attention via his announcement of  a “Climate Playbook.” It’s a compendium of 53 already existing bills, some of which have bipartisan support, in various stages of legislative development related to the issue of climate change.

The bills in the Playbook are organized into a dozen categories. In his introduction to the proposal published at Medium, Rep. Peters acknowledges the included initiatives “are only the beginning of a conversation.” And it’s true many of these ideas could move the emissions needle in the right direction.

(Hear Rep. Peters discuss his ideas at this KPBS Roundtable interview.)

It’s also true his proposal represents a deliberately incrementalist approach, based on the premise...

“This (climate playbook) is something that people who don’t want to sign on to all the language in that resolution can use to say, ‘This is what I mean by climate action.’

My take on the ‘all the language’ part of his statement is Peters thinks it’s possible to act on the environment without making justice a big part of the plan. That kind of thinking is how large parts of the black working class got left out of the provisions of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

The Playbook fails to acknowledge the breadth of the problem, particularly as applied to the underlying economic assumptions. Using the implied sports analogy, some plays could be made, but not enough to win the game.

Here's David Roberts at Vox:

Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution — renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.

Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND) — a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s — and it has become the talk of the town.

The Union-Tribune coverage of Peter’s proposal incorporated local activists disapproval:

In recent months, Peters has taken heat from local environmental groups for not supporting the Green New Deal, and his playbook didn’t seem to immediately win back support from those activists.

“This is not the response we wanted from Congressman Peters,” said Masada Disenhouse, co-founder of SanDiego350. “What we’re looking for is a bold comprehensive vision that addresses climate change at the scale of the crisis, and this is not that.

“If he’s expecting change to come from the places where it hasn’t even worked in the past, I think it’s unrealistic,” she added.

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The Green New Deal, as introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), is nothing more than a vision --a non-binding one-- calling for high-level goals in response to the global crisis of climate change.

The Green New Deal does not call for the appropriation of even one penny. It does not create a single regulation. It does not ban hamburgers.

If you saw claims made about the Green New Deal on Fox News, you can be sure they’re either distorted or deceptive. Or just an outright lie.

What the Green New Deal starts with is an acknowledgement that humanity has just over a decade to peak and begin rapidly reducing global carbon emissions if there is to be any hope of hitting the (already inadequate) international target of limiting global temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius.

What it does is to say ‘we need to have a comprehensive plan.’ When you consider the fact that Democrats did not have a plan to address climate change coming into this session of Congress and the topic wasn’t even on the leadership’s radar, the Green New Deal has already succeeded by getting the conversation started.

https://twitter.com/CREDOMobile/status/1116094865710804992

While the particulars of our looming planetary crisis may sometimes be ill-defined, the core research includes an ever-increasing body of data being realized through natural disasters on a regular basis.

Unlike some of the other man made calamities in recent history, we have been given an early and specific warning of what’s coming.  Think of the Great Depression or World War ll as examples.

Standing in the way of acting on this insight are denialists and the incrementalists who either deny the underlying science or fail to comprehend the scope of the problem. The denialists are, for now, a lost cause.

Naomi Klein, interviewed at The Nation, discussed the need for bold and comprehensive action (emphases mine):

There is this idea that a more incrementalist policy focused just on climate would be more sellable—something that doesn’t talk about fighting inequality, and a huge jobs program, and health care for all. But what’s actually stood in the way of strong climate policy in the past has been that, in times of real economic stress, like the ones we’ve been living in, people consistently rank climate below health care and below jobs. Often it ranks last on the list of political priorities. And that’s why politicians always feel that it can be sacrificed. Obama did that. He looked at the polls and he prioritized health care. And when that led to a huge amount of pushback, he didn’t spend any political capital trying to get a cap-and-trade policy through—even though that was totally inadequate.

And the other thing that stands in the way when politicians actually do introduce climate policies, is that, if they don’t prioritize justice, the proposals are actively unjust. For example, look to Emmanuel Macron in France, where this very neoliberal president introduced a tax cut for the very, very rich at the same time that he introduced a carbon-pricing scheme that increased the cost of living for working people. Then you had an uprising, and rioting in the streets, with the yellow vest movement—precisely because, as one of the protesters put it, “The politicians care about the end of the world when we have to care about the end of the month.”

I think the brilliance of the Green New Deal framework is that it doesn’t ask people to choose. It says, “We all care about the end of the world. But we also care about the end of the month. So how do we design policies that simultaneously lower emissions and lower that economic strain?” And that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.

The scope of a response to these worsening conditions demands a set of high-level goals.

Each one (e.g., “decarbonizing, repairing, and improving transportation and other infrastructure”) would entail dozens of policies, at different levels of government. And this goal setting process needs to incorporate responses to some very ugly truths about the economy.

The “grow or die” mantra of contemporary capitalism is a huge impediment toward changing the kind of consumer culture built on non-sustainable practices. The direct and indirect government subsidies (socialism!) to industries actively impeding a cleaner planet can not continue.

You cannot address this global crisis without acting on issues like migration, with the most common projection being that the world will have 150–200 million climate change refugees by 2050.

The kind of economic planning the U.S. practiced during World War II and is practiced internally today by many of the world’s biggest corporations needs to replace willy nilly visions driven by greed. This isn’t, despite what the naysayers will tell you, a plea for five-year plans and Soviet style control.

Healthcare, childcare, fair wages, and a more generally cooperative society are goals needed for a Green New Deal. We need to think more about “we” than “me” to save the planet.’

Finally, I guess it’s necessary to address the question about how all this gets paid for.

Kate Aronoff, writing at the Intercept on what a Green New Deal would looking like in practical terms, speaks to those questions (emphases mine):

IT’S NOT HARD to imagine cries from Republicans and Democrats alike about how much such a program might cost, and of the dangers of blowing up the deficit. Worth noting is the cost that 13 federal agencies have said are likely if we do nothing, according to the National Climate Assessment quietly released on Black Friday. By 2100, heat-related deaths could cost the U.S. $141 billion. Sea-level rise could rack up a $118 billion bill, and infrastructure damages could cost up to $32 billion. Along the same timeline, the report’s authors found, the financial damages of climate change to the U.S. could double those caused by the Great Recession.

By comparison, the 1 to 2 percent of gross domestic product that Pollin has said a Green New Deal would cost seems pretty cheap, never mind the fact that putting millions of people to work would bolster tax revenues and consumer spending. Pollin calls it “equitable green growth,” coupled with “degrowth down to zero of the fossil fuel industry.” Incumbent fuel sources, and coal in particular, aren’t exactly saving anyone money. A recent analysis from the group Carbon Tracker has found that 42 percent of coal capacity worldwide is already unprofitable, and that figure could spiked to 72 percent by 2030.

“The question is, ‘What policy do you use to build up the public investment and incentivize private investment?’” Pollin said. “You can’t just have these private sector incentive programs. That’s just not going to get it.”

As several proponents have pointed out, though, so-called pay-for questions are rarely asked of public spending programs designed to further national interests, be that getting out of a recession or fighting a war. “If we were threatened by an invader, we would mobilize all the resources we have at our disposal to deal with that security threat,” says U.K.-based economist Ann Pettifor. “As in those circumstances, you cannot rely entirely on the private sector.”

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