What Would a Fair and Sustainable Economic Recovery Look Like?
Join Local Environmental, Community, and Labor Activists for a Talk with Robert Pollin on Wednesday, 3/17 at 7pm
By Jim Miller
Come join yours truly along with the San Diego Green New Deal Alliance, the Labor, Environmental, and Community Coalition, the San Diego County Democrats for Environmental Action, and the Progressive Labor Alliance as we host a talk on "A Fair and Sustainable Economic Recovery" with Robert Pollin on Wednesday, March 17th at 7pm.
This event is Part Two of our series of community conversations on a Just Transition and Jobs in a Green Economy.
Robert Pollin is a Distinguished University Professor of Economics and founding Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He has worked as a consultant for the US Department of Energy, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and numerous NGOs around the world. Foreign Policy magazine selected him as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers for 2013.
Pollin has authored many books, including Contours of Descent and Greening the Global Economy. Most recently, he co-authored Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet with Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at MIT and one of the world’s leading public intellectuals. Pollin's latest report on “A Fair and Sustainable Economic Recovery for California” will be coming out soon.
In the concluding section of Pollin’s most recent book with Chomsky, he answers the question of what it would take to turn things around and elevate climate change to the top of the global agenda by referring to the oft-quoted aphorism from Antonio Gramsci:
“Pessimism of the mind; optimism of the will.” That is, if we take climate science seriously and then look at where the world is today, the odds of us moving the world onto a viable climate stabilization path—and specifically, of hitting the IPCC’s stated target of net zero CO2 emissions by 2050—are shaky at best. On the other hand, to invoke Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum, “there is no alternative” to doing everything possible to accomplishing exactly these goals.
. . . A critical factor in advancing this movement, in the developing countries and elsewhere, will be to demonstrate unambiguously how climate stabilization is fully consistent with expanding decent work opportunities, raising mass living standards, and fighting poverty in all regions of the world. This needs to be recognized as the core proposition undergirding the global Green New Deal. Advancing a viable global Green New Deal should therefore be understood as the means by which “optimism of the will” comes alive in defining the political economy of saving our planet.
In the wake of the passage last week of the historic relief package, the Biden administration will soon turn its attention to an infrastructure-heavy recovery act with the intention of putting good union jobs and climate action at its heart. This combined with the stated intentions of local and statewide leaders to act boldly on climate change make the possibility of substantial measures dramatically better than they have been in our recent history.
Come join us Wednesday evening at 7:00 to talk about what a Just Transition in the post-COVID crisis world might look like at the local, statewide, national, and global levels.