Even if a magic decarbonator miraculously appeared overnight, we’d still have an ecological crisis. This raises the most contentious dichotomy of all: growth or degrowth. GDP growth has never been a great metric for the things we care about. The past forty years show that it can continue without benefiting most people’s well-being or trickling down. Contrary to the ideology of capitalism, materially intensive growth can’t continue forever. We can’t pretend ecological limits don’t exist. And contrary to the arguments of clean technophiles, there’s zero evidence that growth can be meaningfully “decoupled” from resource use, or occur without environmental impact. Our view is that we need a “Last Stimulus” of green economic development in the short term to build landscapes of public affluence, develop new political-economic models, jump off the growth treadmill, break with capital, and settle into a slower groove.
Reconnecting the Dots
The old ecological adage is right: everything is connected. The planet and its atmosphere are the material base on which all other human activity rests. Today, capitalism drives most of that activity. At every turn, carbon emissions are entangled with the drive for profit and filtered through the lived realities of race, class, gender, and place.
Yet policy discussions tend to divide climate change into silos, offering analyses sector by sector—buildings, transportation, power plants, agriculture—and targeted solutions for addressing them one at a time. But each issue intersects with others in countless ways. Climate change, the economy, social inequalities—they’re all tied up together. So we break the problem down in a way that emphasizes the connections between politics, economics, and carbon, using a holistic, political economy approach that could be applied to any number of issues.
A Planet to Win devotes a chapter each to four strategic battlegrounds: fossil fuels and private utilities; labor; the built environment; and the global supply chains of a renewable transition. In each, we explore our vision of what a Green New Deal could do and how to dig into the struggles ahead.
For a stable climate and a more equal world, we have to simultaneously unmake our fossil-fueled lifestyles and build infrastructures that equitably distribute renewable energy. We have to dismantle the most powerful industry on earth incredibly fast, or the things we build to replace it won’t matter. That means tackling fossil capital head on.
To do that, we’ll need the power that comes with a renewed labor movement—which means overcoming longstanding tensions between labor and environmental politics. There’s a lot of work to do to build a world that runs on sunshine. But all the work we’ll need to retrofit homes and erect wind turbines, solar arrays, and transmission lines doesn’t exhaust the category of “green jobs.” Far from it. In our vision, care work—construed broadly to encompass reproducing our communities and restoring the planet’s ecosystems—is just as essential to a green economy.
Even the energy transition itself isn’t just about swapping out one energy source for another. Energy systems are embedded in everyday life: they shape everything from transit to housing to the landscapes traversed by power lines. We dig into the guts of all these systems to show how at every turn, remaking our built environment is wrapped up with politics—and opportunities for liberation.
Finally, we have to track the implications of an energy transition beyond US borders. A transition in the United States can’t come at the cost of more devastation elsewhere. Basic solidarity means respecting the democratic will of communities who supply the lithium, cobalt, copper, and other resources needed to produce renewable energy and who bear the brunt of extraction’s effects. Building solidarity across borders is the best way to strengthen global climate cooperation rooted in justice.
Coda: The Next Crisis
At the time of writing, in summer 2019, the Trumpian nightmare feels ghoulishly routine. But change comes in volcanic bursts, and the magma beneath us is boiling. Over the last two centuries, organized movements have repeatedly built enough strength to make vast social change, transforming worldviews and material conditions: the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, the movement for women’s suffrage, the radical labor movement, the civil rights movement, queer liberation. Broad majorities for radical change always start as militant minorities. Today, militant organizing is everywhere, from the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America to the teachers’ strike wave to the migrants’ rights movement, and increased mobilization around racial justice, housing justice, reproductive justice, and Indigenous rights. Even scientists are marching on Washington.
There’s also the matter of crisis. President Obama wasted his, but more are on the horizon. A global economic slump looms; climate disasters are unfolding faster than ever. Ecological and economic crises are sure to coincide and mutually reinforce. At the time of writing, Americans are struggling to make their car loan payments, and student debt is obliterating the bank accounts of millions of millennials. There are billions of dollars in real estate value in housing markets that are literally about to go underwater—forever—in places like Miami Beach. Oil majors, some of the world’s biggest companies, are valued based on their reserves—which contain roughly five times as much carbon as we can burn without destroying civilization. The Bank of England is warning all who will listen about these “stranded assets.” In 2008, we saw what a few million bad mortgages could do to a hyperfinancialized, overleveraged, and interconnected global economy. Worse is coming.
We don’t celebrate or romanticize brutal breakdowns of social, economic, and political stability. But as Naomi Klein showed to such devastating effect in her book The Shock Doctrine, the Right plans for crises meticulously. We should, too. If we can organize in advance, we can use the openings created by the next crises to directly attack their root causes. No more crises wasted.
Whenever they strike, those coming crises will be chances to charge forward with our organizing. And when market crashes coincide with progressives and leftists holding state power, militant organizing proliferating, and millions marching in the streets, our leverage will be huge. Each win that cuts carbon and betters everyday life lays the groundwork for more. The premise of a radical Green New Deal is that we’re entering a new era for politics—a whole new terrain, material and imaginative, for deciding how to channel our collective energies. The future is coming at us fast—but we still have the chance to shape it. We have nothing to lose, and a planet to win.
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1 Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018, wir2018.wid.world; Lisa Dettling et al., “A Wealthless Recovery? Asset Ownership and the Uneven Recovery from the Great Recession,” FEDS Notes, federalreserve.gov.
2 Christopher Alessi, “US Expected to Produce Half of Global Oil and Gas Growth by 2025,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2018.
3 Reed Hundt, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decision (Rosetta Books 2019).
4 Theda Skocpol, “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming,” Harvard University, prepared for the symposium on the politics of America’s fight against global warming, 2013, scholars.org.
5 Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns,” New Yorker, October 3, 2010.
6 Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking 2018), p. 280.
7 Philip Bump, “4.4 million 2012