A Tale of Two Possible Futures: Do We Invest in a Just Transition or Double Down on Big Oil?
Do it right and you can help fight economic inequality, transform the economy, and create a sustainable future.
By Jim Miller
I am writing this in a motel in the California desert where my family is staying for a few days. My wife and I are taking our son to see Joshua trees in the National Park after reading an article recently in the Guardian noting that it’s likely they won’t survive as a result of climate change’s effect on trees and forests in our state and elsewhere around the world.
As the piece points out of this sad truth of the Anthropocene, “Forest mortality researchers say while this does not mark the end of the forests, it may well be the end of many forests as we’ve known them. Iconic species such as giant sequoias and Joshua trees are succumbing in remarkable numbers.”
Hence, it’s nice that my son will still get to see them in their full glory even if that won’t be true for his own future children. The Sequoias are next on our list before he gets out of high school.
This is the way we live now, anticipatory grief.
But all does not have to be lost as there is new hope on horizon for adaptation and saving what can be saved with the Biden Administration’s proposals on infrastructure and climate. As the New York Times reported, the administration is aiming to tackle climate change in a big way:
President Biden’s next big thing would fuse the rebuilding of America’s creaky infrastructure with record spending to fight climate change, a combination that, in scale and scope, represents a huge political shift, even for Democrats who have been in the climate trenches for decades.
A guiding philosophy of the Biden proposal argues that the future of good jobs is the transition to an economy that no longer churns out carbon dioxide through the burning of coal, oil and gas.
Aides are set to brief Mr. Biden this week on plans to invest between $3 trillion and $4 trillion in spending and tax credits on a wide range of efforts meant to bolster the economy . . . The underlying message — that the next step of America’s economic recovery is fundamentally tied to countering the climate crisis — represents a major pivot in the way Democrats make the case for tackling global warming. No longer merely an environmental imperative like saving the polar bears, or a side element of a stimulus package like it was under the Obama administration, climate change has become the centerpiece.
Administration officials say they view averting catastrophic warming and pursuing American dominance of the emerging global industries as inseparable. That is a sharp break from even the most recent Democratic administration, when Mr. Biden was vice president, let alone the Trump era, when the president denied the existence of climate change.
As with many other aspects of the Biden agenda, the boldness of this approach is pleasantly surprising and, despite the daunting challenge of driving this kind of policy through a Republican brick wall, it offers those of us who care about stopping the worst outcomes of catastrophic climate change a glimmer of hope.
Linking the fight against climate change to an economic recovery package that aims to produce good jobs for working Americans is precisely the right approach. Do it right and you can help fight economic inequality, transform the economy, and create a sustainable future.
But just as this potential political transformation gives us some optimism, a recent study of capital investment serves as a cautionary tale. The Guardian notes that just as many Wall Street and corporate leaders are coming out and talking big about the need to fight climate change, the money of investment bankers is walking very differently:
The world’s biggest 60 banks have provided $3.8tn of financing for fossil fuel companies since the Paris climate deal in 2015, according to a report by a coalition of NGOs.
Despite the Covid-19 pandemic cutting energy use, overall funding remains on an upward trend and the finance provided in 2020 was higher than in 2016 or 2017, a fact the report’s authors and others described as “shocking”.
And this despite the fact that as the same article observes, “A separate report last Thursday from the International Energy Agency and Imperial College London found that investments in renewable energy have seen a 367% greater return than fossil fuels since 2010.”
Thus, we stand at the cusp of two possible futures: one where we try to salvage a better future for our children and another where short term greed and lack of vision doom us to the worst possible outcome. The fork in the road is right in front of us and there’s not a lot of time for wrong turns.