The Obama administration did pour $90 billion into clean energy measures through the stimulus package. It included clean energy research and development, subsidized wind and solar build-out, and allocated billions for high-speed rail (most of which wasn’t built). Thanks to Fox News, the bankruptcy of stimulus-funded Solyndra grew infamous, while few knew that the same stimulus established Tesla with billions of public dollars. ARRA really was good for wind, solar, and batteries. So centrists defend Obama’s green stimulus on the grounds that it was better than it gets credit for. What they never consider is that he didn’t try to make green investment viscerally popular, by tying his clean industrial policy to a transformative government jobs program and housing rescue.
On the contrary, Obama’s team fastidiously avoided anything that smacked of socialism. In the eyes of top advisors like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, this precluded nearly all major public interventions into the economy. Recall that in late 2008 and 2009, the federal government and Treasury had poured trillions of public dollars into rescuing Wall Street and real estate, effectively putting the government in charge. Obama chose not to use that power to implement Left populist policies that would have helped millions struggling to survive, building the appetite for more aggressive action. He fired Van Jones, his “green jobs czar,” to appease the conservative media mere months after taking office. He declined to directly hire millions of workers to make needed infrastructure repairs and restore ecosystems. (In 1934, FDR temporarily hired four million workers to relieve devastating unemployment.) Instead of directly stemming foreclosures through aggressive government action, Obama implemented convoluted and ineffective programs. And he signed onto the Bush administration’s wildly unpopular bank bailout, emphasizing continuity for Wall Street’s benefit. He wouldn’t even restrict bonuses for bank executives saved by bailouts. As he told financial CEOs in early 2009, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” Frankly, he should have put unemployed people to work in a solar-powered pitchfork factory.
As the sociologist Theda Skocpol shows, the administration’s striving for elite compromise also helped doom the 2009 Waxman-Markey climate bill. Grassroots green groups were sidelined, while a handful of NGOs and fossil fuel executives haggled behind closed doors, wasting what was left of the precious political opening created by the crisis.4 Although the bill made major concessions to the fossil fuel industry and other business interests, it still collapsed in the Senate in 2010.5
In his second term, Obama accelerated regulations to make the economy more energy efficient and shut down coal plants. He signed the Paris Agreement, a modest achievement hyped as a major victory. The low-carbon pledges made by signatory countries failed to match the Agreement’s stated goal of keeping warming below 2º Celsius. The biggest bottleneck in global climate politics remained the United States.
Fundamentally, the limits of Obama’s climate policies reflected the broader failures of the United States center-left’s neoliberal turn, premised on the idea that bipartisan consensus could pass reasonable policies to advance the common good—without the common people getting in the way. As historian Adam Tooze observes, “Obama’s administration never built the constituency of Democrats-for-life that was shaped by Roosevelt’s New Deal.”6 This failure made it all too easy for Trump to win the electoral college by promising to bring manufacturing jobs back to the rust belt, which had never really recovered from the 2008 crash—or, for that matter, from Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Four-and-a-half million Obama voters, half of them people of color, stayed home in November 2016.7 And now Trump is threatening a climate apocalypse. Can a return to mild progressivism really stem the tide of authoritarian, conservative oligarchy?
Brad DeLong, an economist who helped lead the Democrats’ neoliberal era, recently admitted that project’s failure: “Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract more Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition.” DeLong’s message for his centrist friends? “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.”8
Today’s young climate activists have seized the baton and turned it into a torch. In that, they’re joining the broader wave of movements that have shaken the post-Katrina, post-2008 world, declaring that business as usual must end if we’re to have a future.
In late 2018, the charismatic democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset a longstanding Democratic congressman in a New York primary, got elected to Congress, and immediately made the Green New Deal a priority. Before she was even sworn in, she joined Sunrise Movement protesters sitting in at Nancy Pelosi’s office. A month later, Ocasio-Cortez and climate stalwart Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) released a resolution calling for a Green New Deal.9
The resolution calls for massive public investment to get the US economy to net zero carbon in the 2030s (the exact timeline is ambiguous). Connecting the climate crisis to economic misery, it calls for a job guarantee, wherein the public sector would provide a job to any US resident who wants one. The resolution also echoes legislation in California and New York State by prioritizing clean energy and resiliency investments in racialized and working-class communities, and it calls for expanding and improving access to a huge range of social services through programs like free public college tuition and Medicare for All. Other issues, like housing and agriculture, are mentioned in passing. Environmental and climate justice movements, progressive greens, and some major labor unions have organized around these ideas for decades. Their arguments were finally reflected in a high-profile national policy framework.
The AOC-Markey climate program marks a radical break from the Obama era of climate policy, which sometimes used the language of the Green New Deal but failed to live up to the rhetoric. The Green New Deal resolution, by contrast, offers a program of economic transformation that shouts its ambition from the rooftops. Its realism isn’t grounded in Beltway savvy but the world’s best climate science. Its vision is on the scale of an existential threat to human civilization. But it’s also short on concrete next steps.
The battle over the Green New Deal’s meaning has begun, with pundits, grassroots movements, and presidential aspirants staking out clearer and more prominent positions on climate change than ever before. Many centrist economists, wonks, and pundits have tried to ride the new wave of excitement around climate policy, using the language of the Green New Deal to describe programs with far less ambition.10 We call their alternative the “faux Green New Deal.”
In the view of these cautious moderates, decarbonizing the economy by the mid 2030s—or even just the energy sector!—is absurdly ambitious. Faux Green New Deal advocates see the plan’s social agenda as an expensive distraction. They believe that carbon taxes, with refunds for the poor, and heavy investments in research and development (R&D), should be the main policies that decarbonize the economy—gradually, but efficiently. To be fair, it’s a coherent approach. Their view is that climate progress is most likely to happen if it’s simple and narrow in scope—focused mainly on energy, minimally intrusive in everyday life, and garnering agreement among policy elites. For these skeptics, it’s precisely because inequalities are so entrenched that it would be reckless to hinge decarbonization on struggles for universal, quality social services and public control over markets. Getting to net zero carbon in the