In the pages that follow, I will present my case that the Green New Deal vision, ambitious as it is, must go even further and deeper. As the plan is formulated and carried out in coming months and years, it must be accompanied by effective mechanisms to (1) directly eliminate fossil fuels from the economy on an accelerated schedule and (2) reverse the widespread ecological damage that has been done in the pursuit of economic growth—damage that reaches well beyond greenhouse warming. Fossil fuels cannot be suppressed solely through the expansion of non-fossil energy or through market interventions such as carbon pricing; eradicating emissions will require a statutory limit on all fuel extraction, one that lowers quickly year by year, along with a system to guarantee material sufficiency for all people and excess for none. And even if we manage to free ourselves from fossil fuels, the reversal of broader ecological damage will not be achieved solely by the reduction or elimination of greenhouse emissions; it will require a transformed economy that operates on less, not more, energy and does not depend on over-exploitation of the Earth’s ecosystems. I will also show why neither fossil-fuel elimination nor ecological restoration is compatible with continued economic growth.
DIRECT ACTION NEEDED
Deep social change cannot be achieved by a single piece of legislation, no matter how profound it is. An obvious example is the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It became essential because the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments a century earlier had failed to end racial oppression. But the Civil Rights Act itself needed some backup. To be effective, it had to be followed up by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and other major legislation—and that struggle is still not over. Passage of a Green New Deal, like that of the Civil Rights Act, is widely viewed as a vital step toward righting a wrong that threatens the nation. Nevertheless, one act of Congress cannot successfully tackle a multifaceted threat such as the emerging climate emergency. Like the Civil Rights Act, a Green New Deal Act can be the beginning of a transformation, but it can’t be the end; it must be accompanied by other essential legislation.
The Green New Dealers have not yet specified a mechanism by which the United States can guarantee the elimination of greenhouse emissions by a hard-and-fast deadline. The absence of a direct, airtight mechanism to achieve the necessarily rapid decline and elimination of fossil fuels is not unique to the Green New Deal. None of the climate proposals debated so far, either in Washington or at international climate talks, have included such a component. But the intensifying symptoms of our climate predicament now require an immediate switch from the current steady rise in fossil-fuel use to a much steeper decline—something like doing a U-turn at 80 miles an hour in a tanker truck. There’s no time left for legislating corporate-friendly policies and waiting to see if they work. If, in 2030 or 2040, such policies turn out to have been insufficient, it will be too late for a do-over.
The most widely discussed emissions-reduction strategies depend on three general elements: building up “green” energy capacity and infrastructure (with, in the case of the Green New Deal, lots of public investment); seeking to maintain or accelerate economic growth without increasing energy demand; and intervening in the market by setting a price on carbon in the event that greenhouse emissions are not declining fast enough.
If we are to eliminate fossil fuels from our society, the development of non-fossil energy capacity, as called for by the Green New Deal will be urgently needed. The national climate discussion, however, appears to be based on an implicit assumption that as new energy capacity comes online in the coming decade or two, it will push an equal quantity of fossil-energy capacity off-line. History and research argue against that assumption, showing that with economic growth, new energy sources simply add to the existing energy supply rather than replace it.6
The idea that investment in solar and wind technology and green infrastructure can work its way through the market to automatically eliminate fossil-fuel use and emissions is not supported by the evidence. So various interventions have been suggested to give new energy sources a leg up in the market. For example, governments could tax each of the fossil fuels based on the carbon emissions it produces; require energy companies to buy permits to burn or sell fossil fuels; or provide homeowners and business owners incentives to produce or buy solar or wind energy. Governmental and grassroots approaches to making fossil fuels more scarce or expensive include eliminating subsidies to the coal and petroleum industries; pressuring institutional investors to disinvest from those industries; banning leases and drilling on public land; and pressuring the industry through direct action, as with the anti-pipeline and “Keep It in the Ground” movements.
Most of these actions have been pursued in one or more places around the world. Worthy as they may be, all are at best indirect approaches to driving down carbon emissions. Research tells us, as I show in Chapter Three, that none of those approaches, separately or together, can make that necessary 80 mph U-turn. None of the widely debated climate strategies has included an element that is essential for fairly and humanely stopping greenhouse emissions: a mandatory, impervious cap on the quantities of fossil fuels entering the economy, one that lowers year by year, and is accompanied by planned allocation of the nation’s energy resources and fair-share rationing of energy. I will outline how this might be done in Chapter Four.
The Green New Deal is a stimulus package in both name and aim. If not implemented with great care, it will encourage the same pursuit of economic growth that got us into this climate predicament in the first place.7 Resource use must be carefully restrained during the transition; otherwise, the new non-fossil energy coming online will feed growth rather than displace oil, natural gas, and coal. (I generally avoid the term “renewable energy,” because a wind turbine or solar array is not self-renewing in the way a forest or prairie is. But I will sometimes use the term when referring to others’ documents or remarks.) Full displacement of fossil energy by non-fossil energy can happen only if a cap is imposed on fossil fuels, and that cap is lowered each year in order to eliminate their emissions on schedule. Even an urgent buildup of new energy capacity cannot proceed quickly enough to compensate for all of the fossil-fueled capacity being withdrawn, so our society will need to operate on a smaller total energy supply. The national economy will need to reorient toward ensuring sufficiency for all rather than feeding the accumulation of wealth by the few.
Successfully enacting such a system will not be easy, and time is running out. As the struggle for the Green New Deal and other legislation proceeds, there will be much wrangling over the question of what is politically acceptable. That’s inevitable, but we must keep at the center of the public debate the most urgent question of all: What actions must be undertaken to eliminate greenhouse emissions in time?
THE DANGERS OF INACTION
The IPCC’s 2018 report calls for a stepped-up rate of emissions reductions and highlights the devastating impacts expected if warming is allowed to rise past 1.5°C.8 Letting the global temperature blow up to 2° or beyond would, says the report, risk irreversible loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, eventually raising sea levels by one to two meters. At 2°, one-fourth to over one-half of all permafrost will disappear, irreversibly releasing a surge of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Storms, wildfires, and pest outbreaks will cause far more widespread