Clearly, there’s big trouble ahead and we won’t be able to say that no one saw it coming. In fact, a warning of ecological calamity that made headlines more than 50 years ago is looking all too frighteningly prescient right now.

In 1972, a group of MIT scientists published a book, The Limits to Growth, based on computer simulations of the world economy from 1900 to 2100. It plotted out trajectories for the Earth’s and humanity’s vital signs, based on several scenarios. Even so long ago, those researchers were already searching for policy paths that might circumvent the planet’s ecological limits and so avoid economic or even civilizational collapse. In every scenario, though, their simulated future world economies eventually ran into limits — resource depletion, pollution, crop failures — that triggered declines in industrial output, food production, and population.

In what they called “business-as-usual” scenarios, the level of human activity grew for decades, only to peak and eventually plummet toward collapse (even in ones that included rapid efficiency improvements). In contrast, when they used a no-growth scenario, the global economy and population declined but didn’t collapse. Instead, industrial and food production both leveled off on lower but steady-state paths.

Growth and Its Limits

Why should we even be interested in half-century-old simulations carried out on clunky, ancient mainframe computers? The answer: because we’re now living out those very simulations. The Limits to Growth analysis forecast that, with business-as-usual, production would grow for five decades before hitting its peak sometime in the last half of the 2020s (here we come!). Then decline would set in. And sure enough, we now have scientists across a range of disciplines issuing warnings that we’re perilously close to exactly that turnaround point.

This year, a simulation using an updated version of The Limits to Growth model showed industrial production peaking just about now, while food production, too, could hit a peak soon. Like the 1972 original, this updated analysis foresees distinct declines on the other side of those peaks. As the authors caution, although the precise trajectory of decline remains unpredictable, they are confident that “the excessive consumption of resources… is depleting reserves to the point where the system is no longer sustainable.” Their concluding remarks are even more chilling:

“As a society, we have to admit that, despite 50 years of knowledge about the dynamics of the collapse of our life support systems, we have failed to initiate a systematic change to prevent this collapse. It is becoming increasingly clear that, despite technological advances, the change needed to put us on a different trajectory will also require a change in belief systems, mindsets, and the way we organize our society.”

What is America doing today to break out of such a doomed trajectory and into a more sustainable one? The answer, sadly, is nothing, or rather, worse than nothing. On climate, for example, the most important immediate need is to end the burning of fossil fuels as soon as possible, something not even being considered by Washington policymakers in the country that hit record oil production and record natural gas exports in 2023. Even a quarter-century from now, wind and solar energy sources together are forecast to account for only about one-third of U.S. electricity generation, with 56% of it still being supplied by gas, coal, and nuclear power.

Now, it appears that rising electrical demand will delay the transition away from gas and coal even further. According to a recent report by the Washington Post’s Evan Halper, power utilities in Georgia, Kansas, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Wisconsin, and a host of other states are feeling the proverbial heat from exploding electricity consumption. Analysts in Georgia have, for instance, increased by 17-fold their estimate of the generation capacity that the state will require 10 years from now.

Buy the Book

Such an imbalance between energy demand and supply is anything but unprecedented and the source of the problem is obvious. As successful as American industry has been in developing new technologies for generating energy, it has been even more successful at developing new products that consume energy. Much of the current rise in demand, for instance, can be attributed to companies working on artificial intelligence (AI) and other power-hungry computational activities. The usual suspects — Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft — have been on data-center building sprees, as have many other outfits, especially cryptocurrency-mining operations.

Northern Virginia is currently home to 300 football-field-sized data centers, with more on the way, and there’s already a shortage of locally generated electricity. To keep those servers humming, electric utilities will be crisscrossing the state with hundreds of miles of new transmission lines plugged into four coal-fired power stations in West Virginia and Maryland. Plans were once in the works to shutter those plants. Now, they’ll be kept operating indefinitely. The result: millions more tons of carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrous oxides released into the atmosphere annually.

And the digital world’s energy appetite will only grow. The research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that if Google were to deploy generative AI in response to every Internet search request, a half-million advanced data servers consuming 30 billion kilowatt hours annually — the equivalent of Ireland’s national electricity consumption — would be required. (For comparison, Google’s total electricity consumption now is “only” about 18 billion kilowatt hours.)

How are Google and Microsoft planning to weather an energy crisis significantly of their own making? They certainly won’t back off their plans to provide ever more new services that hardly anyone asked for (one of which, AI, according to its own top developers, could even bring about the collapse of civilization before climate change gets the chance). Rather, reports Halper, those tech giants are “hoping that energy-intensive industrial operations can ultimately be powered by small nuclear plants on-site.” Oh, great.

It’s the Wealth, Stupid

The problem doesn’t lie solely with data servers. During 2021–2022, companies announced plans to construct 155 new factories in the United States, many of them to produce electric vehicles, data-processing equipment, and other products guaranteed to suck from the electrical grid for years to come. The broader trend toward the “electrification of everything” will keep lots more fossil-fueled power plants running long past their expiration dates. In December 2023, the firm GridStrategies reported that planners have almost doubled their forecast for the expansion of the national grid — probably an underestimate, they noted, given the rise in demand for charging electric vehicles, producing fuel for hydrogen-powered vehicles, and running heat pumps and induction stoves in millions more American homes. Meanwhile, increasingly hot summers could trigger a 30%-60% increase in power use for air-conditioning.

In short, this sort of indefinite expansion of the U.S. and global economy into the distant future is doomed to fail, but not before it’s crippled our ecological and social systems. In its 2024 Global Resources Outlook, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) reported that humanity’s annual consumption of physical resources had grown more than threefold in the half-century since The Limits to Growth was published. Indeed, resource extraction is now rising faster than the Human Development Index, a standard measure of well-being. In other words, overextraction and overproduction while producing staggering wealth aren’t benefiting the rest of us.

UNEP stressed that the need to deeply curtail extraction and consumption applies mainly to wealthy nations and the affluent classes globally. It noted that high-income countries, the United States among them, consume six times the mass of material resources per person as low-income ones. The disparity in per-person climate impacts is even greater, a tenfold difference between rich and poor. In other words, wealth and climate impact are inextricably linked. The share of recent global growth in gross domestic product captured by the most affluent 1% of households was nearly twice as large as the share that trickled down to the other 99%. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the 1% also produced wildly disproportionate quantities of greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, societies with a wide rich-poor divide have higher rates of homicide, imprisonment, infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse, and teenage pregnancy, according to British epidemiology professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. In a March commentary for Nature, they wrote, “Greater equality will reduce unhealthy and excess consumption, and will increase the solidarity and cohesion that are needed to make societies more adaptable in the face of climate and other emergencies.” In addition, their research shows that more egalitarian societies have significantly less severe impacts on nature. The higher the degree of inequality, the poorer the performance when it comes to air pollution, waste recycling, and carbon emissions.

The message is clear: curtailing ecological breakdown while improving humanity’s quality of life requires banishing the material extravagance of the world’s richest people, especially the growing crew of global billionaires. That would, however, have to be part of a much broader effort to rid affluent societies of the systemic overextraction and overproduction that threaten to be our global undoing.

Phase Out and Degrow

Old-fashioned computer simulations and present-day realities are, it seems, speaking to us in unison, warning that civilization itself is in danger of collapse. Growth — whether expressed as more dollars accumulated, more tons of material stuff produced, more carbon burned, or more wastes emitted — is coming to an end. The only question is: Will it happen as a collapse of society, or could the reversal of material growth be undertaken rationally in ways that would avoid a descent into a Mad Max-style conflict of all against all?

Increasing numbers of advocates for the latter path are working under the banner of “degrowth.” In his 2018 book Degrowth, Giorgos Kallis described it as “a trajectory where the ‘throughput’ (energy, materials and waste flows) of an economy decreases while welfare, or well-being, improves” in a fashion both “non-exploitative and radically egalitarian.”

In the past few years, the degrowth movement has — how else to put it? — grown, and quickly, too. Once a subject for a handful of mainly European academics, it’s become a broader movement challenging the injustices of capitalism and “green growth.” It’s the subject of hundreds of articles in academic journals, including the new Degrowth Journal, and a stack of books (including the captivating Who’s Afraid of Degrowth?). A 2023 survey of 789 climate researchers found almost three-quarters of them favoring degrowth or no-growth over green growth.

In a 2022 Nature article, eight degrowth scholars listed policies they believe should guide affluent societies in the future. Those include reducing less-necessary material production and energy consumption, converting to workers’ ownership, shortening working hours, improving and universalizing public services, redistributing economic power, and prioritizing grassroots social and political movements.

Could such policies ever become a reality in the United States, and if so, how? Clearly, the private businesses that dominate our economy would never tolerate policies aimed at shrinking material production or their profit margins (nor would the federal government we know today). Nevertheless, if more enlightened lawmakers and policymakers ever took control (hard as that may be to imagine), they might indeed head off the societal and environmental collapses now distinctly underway. The most effective pressure points for doing so would, I suspect, be the oil and gas wells and coal mines that now power such destruction.

As a start — unbelievable as it might seem in our present world — Washington would have to nationalize the fossil-fuel industry and put a nationwide, no-matter-what cap on the number of barrels of oil, cubic feet of gas, and tons of coal allowed out of the ground and into the economy, with that cap ratcheting briskly downward year by year. The buildup of wind, solar, and other non-fossil energy would, of course, be unable to keep pace with such a speedy suppression of fuel supplies. So, America would have to go on an energy diet, while the production of unnecessary, wasteful goods and services would have to be quickly reduced.

And yet the government would need to ensure that the economy continued to satisfy everyone’s most basic needs. That would require a comprehensive industrial policy directing energy and material resources ever more toward the production of essential goods and services. Such policies would rule out AI, bitcoin, and other energy gluttons that exist only to generate wealth for the few while undermining humanity’s prospects for a decent future. Meanwhile, price controls would be needed to ensure that all households had enough electricity and fuel.

My colleague Larry Edwards and I have been arguing for years that such a framework, what we’ve called “Cap and Adapt” is a necessity not for some distant future, but now. Similar federal policies for adapting to material resource limitations worked well in World War II-era America. Unfortunately, we live — to say the least — in a very different political world today. (Just ask one of this country’s 756 billionaires!) If there was ever a chance that a national industrial policy, price controls, and rationing could, as in the 1940s, be passed into law, that chance has sadly vanished — at least for the near future.

Fortunately, though, the international situation looks brighter. A burgeoning, vigorous movement is pushing for the two initial actions that would be essential to avoid the worst of climate chaos and societal collapse: the nationalization of, and a rapid phaseout of, fossil fuels in the affluent world. Those could turn out to be humanity’s first steps toward degrowth and a truly livable future. But the world would need to act fast.

And no excuses, okay? We’ve been given fair warning.

Copyright 2024 Stan Cox

Via Tomdispatch.com

“It’s a huge challenge,” admits Luis Aguirre-Torres, the director of sustainability for Ithaca. “That’s 6,000 buildings in the next seven years, and 10,000 vehicles. We need to improve infrastructure. But we also have to make sure that climate justice is at core of our policy.”

Ithaca is only one example of the cities in the United States that are out in front of federal policy on climate change. “Cities have been taking the lead and been a huge part of the progress, especially during the Trump administration,” points out Julia Peek, director of communication and mobilization at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. “Cities are doing incredible work to become energy efficient, reduce pollution, increase resilience, and connect with affected communities.”

Cities and localities have taken the lead because, frankly, the federal government has failed to develop a consistent approach to a clean energy transition. The Obama administration pushed hard to support the Paris climate deal in 2015, only for the Trump administration to pull out of the agreement as soon as it took office. The Biden administration began with its own vision of “building back better” then encountered fierce resistance to its decarbonization plans not only from the Republican Party in Congress but a couple members of its own party as well.

Then, in a surprise turnaround, the Democratic Party managed to achieve consensus within its ranks to salvage key elements of the administration’s climate agenda as part of an Inflation Reduction Act that narrowly passed the Senate on August 7 on its way to approval in the House and the president’s signature on August 16.

This is “a historic and hopeful moment in the decades of U.S. climate inaction,” tweeted Rebecca Leber, who covers climate change for Vox. “The Senate just passed $370 billion more to fight climate change. It’s on track to becoming the first law to address fossil fuel pollution across the entire economy.”

The Inflation Reduction Act, framed as an effort to address rising prices, reduce federal debt, and provide targeted economic assistance, contains within it a raft of clean-energy provisions from climate justice block grants to the creation of a national green bank. It’s not as much as the $550 billion included in the failed Build Back Better legislation, but it’s still the largest federal investment in clean energy in U.S. history. Despite some disheartening concessions to fossil fuel companies, the Act has many sustainability advocates feeling hopeful.

“I see the climate crisis as awful but also the greatest opportunity in human history for wealth creation and better health outcomes,” observes Susie Strife, directs all of Boulder County’s sustainability efforts. “It is clever to frame this as a great economic opportunity, for us to be the leaders of this future we want to have. Let’s be clear: the United States has been an international disgrace: for the children growing up on this planet and for generational justice overall. As the country with the greatest cumulative impact of carbon in history, we need to show leadership.”

To understand how the Green New Deal has played out at a local level and what role the Inflation Reduction Act can play in that process, reporter Rebecca Leber sat down with local sustainability experts Luis Aguirre-Torres, Julia Peek, and Susie Strife in early August, just as the bill was making its way through Congress.

Where Climate Action Comes Alive

The Green New Deal was a short manifesto about the urgency of embarking on the environmental and economic transformation of the United States. It was full of bullet points and broad proposals, such as “invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century” and provide all Americans “with access to clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and nature.”

The original bill was a call to arms, but it was also largely abstract.

“Cities are where so many policies come alive,” explains Julia Peek, who mobilizes efforts among the 250 cities that are part of the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. “Either people have clean, safe, affordable, livable homes or they don’t. Either they can get around their cities or they can’t. Either their communities are safe and resilient and they have the infrastructure they need, or they don’t.”

Cities are sites of innovation, where policies are tried out, improved, and shared with other cities in ways not so easily replicable at the state or federal level. “We can showcase what is possible in our local communities,” Susie Strife points out. “We can pilot local services and show what’s possible to other communities and to the feds.” Sustainability directors are part of this process, she continues, by providing “residents, businesses, policymakers, and other stake-holders actual models for how to acting responsibly, how to respond resiliently in the face of climate change, how to achieve local climate goals through direct emission reduction, and how to build partnerships across communities and organizations to leverage higher impact strategies and system change.”

In the past decade, Luis Aguirre-Torres adds, “we’re seeing cities taking leadership roles” in this process of moving from “red-light policies”—for instance, banning oil exploration in nature preserves—to more transformative actions. After the Paris agreement, he adds, as the conversation moved from ambition to concrete pledges, the message from Washington to cities was “’do what you can.’ Now, finally, the federal government is saying ‘we’ll help you out’ and some states are saying that, too.”

A number of cities—like Portland, Maine—have begun bulk purchasing of clean energy equipment, like heat pumps. Now, Aguirre-Torres continues, it’s becoming possible to imagine a national level bulk purchasing program. All of the examples of Green Banks at the state and local level have similarly contributed to the creation of something comparable at a national level through the Inflation Reduction Act.

Cities are also where climate justice becomes real. In 2019, when the City of Ithaca Common Council passed its resolution on the local Green New Deal, it was a moment, relates Aguirre-Torres, not only when “we said ‘let’s fight climate change, but also let’s address historical inequities, racial injustice, and economic inequality. There was a time when I was about to receive an award from the U.S. president on work we were doing on climate change and, on the same day, I got arrested for ‘lingering while brown’ in Washington. In 12 hours, I got a huge lesson on race relations in America and how disconnected they were from the fight on climate change. So, when I took this job to help Ithaca design a policy to be carbon neutral by 2030, I wanted to make sure that sustainable prosperity would be shared by everyone in the community.”

Cities have begun to hire climate justice directors. “We just hired our first climate equity strategist for Boulder County,” Susie Strife reports. “She has 30 years of deep community engagement and climate justice activism. She’s going to catalyze the work that needs to be done in those communities.” One idea that has come out of this new effort is to create a climate justice lobbying organization.

At the federal level, the Biden administration initiated the Justice40 program, according to which 40 percent of climate-related spending should be directed toward underserved communities. At the Energy Department, Shalanda Baker heads up the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity where she focuses on implementing energy justice.

These federal initiatives, Aguirre-Torres argues, “need to match the efforts happening at the local level—in Vermont, Ithaca, Seattle, Ann Arbor. In some cases, we need a more specific definition of what climate justice means at the local level and to get beyond ethnicity to include the undocumented and the formerly incarcerated. Now there is a line of funding and that’s great. But more important than the money is the intention, and the aligning what we’re doing at a local level with what the federal government has been proposing for several years without any clear idea of how to operationalize it.”

The Backlash Begins

One measure of the success of municipal clean energy transitions is the backlash it has generated.

“Preemption” is one of the tactics the fossil fuel industry has used to push back. When cities like Tucson, Arizona began to look at ways to change building codes to move away from natural gas to other sources of heat, the state legislature passed a law that prevented municipalities from adding new regulations concerning natural gas utilities.

“Interest groups for the natural gas industry, worried about losing energy customers, have now promoted bills in half the country to strip cities of basic powers to set greener building codes and help phase out fossil-fuel pollution,” Rebecca Leber wrote in Vox in September 2021. “These ‘preemption’ laws have swept through 20 state legislatures; three more states have bills pending this year.”

Susie Strife ties these preemption laws to disinformation campaigns run by the fossil fuel industry, which sets up Facebook groups that appear to represent civic groups but are simply vehicles “to misinform communities about the cost of electrification. The feds are still allowing the fossil fuel industry to get away with this stuff. It has to be regulated. I love the grassroots movements that are stopping the PR firms from helping the fossil fuel industry spread disinformation.”

Once, at his Ithaca home, Luis Aguirre-Torres relates, a canvasser knocked on his door with a flyer condemning the city’s Green New Deal. “He started to tell me about Communists coming to town with these ideas and these people from south of the border who decided to implement these ideas,” he says. “This is progressive Ithaca, and yet you still have campaigns of misinformation rooted in racism and discrimination.”

The fossil fuel companies and their PR firms have a lot of money at their disposal. On the other side, “our incredible sustainability staff don’t always have the tools to wage a complex PR campaign to explain that what they’re doing will help everyone,” Julia Peek reports. “They can be outspent by lobbying firms with Astroturf campaigns. But the more ambitious and controversial cities are going to be, the more likely they will be a target of the fossil fuel industry or other industries that pour in money to create a ‘community group’ to shut it all down.”

The Climate Crisis Is Already Here

At the same time that cities are moving forward with more-or-less ambitious plans to transform their energy and infrastructure, they have to deal with the very real impacts of climate change. In a March 2022 Gallup poll, one in three Americans reported that they’d had to deal with extreme weather events in the last two years. A few months later, one in three Americans found themselves living under extreme heat alerts.

Boulder County has had to deal with more than its fair share of climate-related disasters. “At the end of December 2021, we experienced an unprecedented urban firestorm that was put out by snow the next day,” recalls Susie Strife. “The Marshall Fire was the most destructive wildfire in Colorado history, destroying 1,100 homes and leaving so many people displaced. It was the tenth or maybe the ninth most destructive fire in U.S. history now. We’re not alone. Many cities are experiencing climate-related disasters, which are extraordinarily draining in terms of all the social, economic, and emotional costs that linger long after the fires are put out and the media has moved on. Since I moved to Colorado in 2001, Boulder County experienced six major wildfire events and a once-in-a-500-year flood event. These extreme events due to changing climactic conditions are becoming our new normal.”

So, instead of marshaling resources to put toward a more sustainable future, cities have had to respond to current emergencies. “We’re trying to become more proactive in our adaption approach,” Strife continues. “We’re trying to help communities understand the risks they face, mapping that knowledge by neighborhood and giving them more resources to adapt to those climate vulnerabilities.”

“This is where the rubber hits the road,” Luis Aguirre-Torres adds. “Local governments need to be empowered to implement hazard mitigation. But we’re a bit late to the fight.”

Paying for the Green New Deal

Whether it’s hazard mitigation or transitioning existing infrastructure away from fossil fuels, cities need money to address the climate crisis.

“The City of Ithaca budget is $80 million a year,” Aguirre-Torres explains. “Our climate action plan will cost $2 billion to implement. Multiply that by the number of cities in the country and, according to a Bank of America report, that’s $5 trillion a year until 2050.”

One method of accessing additional funds for a Green transition has been Green banks. The Connecticut Green Bank, established in 2011 as the first such financing authority of its kind, provides credit to homeowners, businesses, non-profits, municipalities, and institutions to install solar panels, retrofit buildings, and build EV chargers. Between 2012 and 2020, the bank mobilized nearly $2 billion of investment into Connecticut’s clean energy economy. Other states, counties, and even cities have created their own such banks.

“The Connecticut Green Bank, the model everyone wants to follow, has a mission of removing the reliance on subsidies and incentives and aggregating otherwise high-risk, small-scale projects,” explains Aguirre-Torres. “It helps local and national institutions by derisking participation in the clean energy transformation.”

The Inflation Reduction Act authorizes $27 billion for a National Climate Bank, with $8 billion set aside for disadvantaged communities. “With this national Green bank, a relatively small amount of money can leverage a lot more,” Julia Peek notes. “It will help get projects off the ground that would not attract private capital or might not qualify for federal grants.”

Ithaca, which is also working on creating a regional Green Bank, has already tapped into private capital to make up the shortfall in funding for its plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030. The city effectively turned its problem, namely carbon emissions, into an asset. “We said that we have a huge opportunity—400,000 metric tons of opportunity!—for people who want to come in and helps us with this,” Aguirre-Torres adds. “Suddenly the money started flowing and new partnerships were formed. We’ve secured $105 million from private investors, along with soft commitments that take us to half a billion dollars.”

Another tactic for raising money has been to sue the fossil fuel industry for damages. “Boulder County, San Miguel county, and the city of Boulder filed a lawsuit in 2018 against Exxon and Suncor Energy, some of the dirtiest fossil fuel companies out there, to force them to pay their fair share of the mess they helped to created,” explains Susie Strife. “Communities have huge price tags related to climate impacts. According to an analysis we did in 2017, it will take hundreds of millions of dollars just to repair all the roads that have buckled from high heat. For 50 years, these companies knew the danger of the products they’ve been selling. Instead of acting responsibly, they chose to conceal this information in order to continue to profit. They should pay their fair share so that the costs don’t fall disproportionately on taxpayers.”

Strife compares the lawsuit to those mounted against tobacco and opioid peddlers, which also deceived the public and have had to pay damages to their victims. “The case is proceeding through the courts,” she adds, “though the companies are trying to delay case from moving forward. The case is now on hold at the Supreme Court. The lawsuit is an example of what local governments can do. We need to use every tool at our disposal. If we win, it will be a huge precedent in holding industry accountable for climate change damages.”

“These cases are taking off all around the world,” Rebecca Leber reports. “So, this legal strategy is clearly on the radar of oil and gas companies.”

Action at the Federal Level

The Inflation Reduction Act includes a number of incentives and penalties to nudge individuals and industry toward a clean energy future. For instance, auto companies can access $2 billion in funding to retool for EV production and electric vehicle purchasers will be eligible for $7,500 in tax credits. Wind and solar production will get a boost as will other, more controversial technologies like hydrogen and small-scale nuclear reactors. On the stick side, oil and gas companies will face penalties for excessive methane production in their operations.

One critical provision is $500 million for heat pumps and critical minerals processing under the Defense Production Act. “When the president invoked the Defense Production Act,” Luis Aguirre-Torres relates, “I was excited but there was no money in it. Now finally we will have $500 million, which will also mean jobs. We’re finally finding a way of getting everyone to the table. I would have loved it if we didn’t have to give up all of these concessions, but we brought people to the table.”

Julia Peek is particularly energized by the climate justice provisions in the Act. “I’m excited about the $1 billion for grants and loans for energy efficiency and resilience in affordable housing. A lot of money is going to urban forestry, to decarbonizing heavy-duty vehicles, equitable mobility, cleaning up ports, and other ways to improve air quality in frontline communities. The Act will also build domestic clean energy industries that should produce well-paid, family sustaining jobs across the country. At the same time, there are giveaways to the fossil fuel industry that sacrifice some frontline communities because that is still how American politics works. Those fights will continue.”

Susie Strife singles out climate justice block grants for community projects in the Act. “Communities of color and underserved communities deserve these resources and decision-making power,” she notes. “They have so many ingenious ideas to implement, but they have been left out.”

“Biden came into office and he inspired everyone by describing all that his administration was going to do on climate,” Aguirre-Torres recalls. “I’m so sick and tired of being inspired! People don’t pay rent or put food on the table with inspiration. We need an opportunity. I’m excited about the Inflation Reduction Act because it’s clever. It’s groundbreaking from the policy-making point of view because it turns this crisis into an opportunity to reduce inflation. That’s brilliant.”

The scale of the problem is simply too big for cities alone to solve the problem, Susie Strife argues. They need federal assistance. “This year and last we put more carbon into the atmosphere than any other year,” she points out. “This makes it much less likely to achieve the 1.5 Celsius limit. Even if we stop emissions today, and we know that’s not happening, it’s only a 50 percent chance of achieving that goal by 2050. And we also have to deal with legacy emissions. We have to remove gigatons of carbon that’s built up in our atmosphere over the years. Doing all that can’t happen at a local level without resources, without market signals, and without national leadership.”

What’s Next?

Cities are innovating around the Green economy, and now the federal government is providing several hundred billion dollars in support. But there is still the problem of connecting the two.

“A lot of local governments just don’t have the capacity to identify, seek out, and apply for these grants,” Julia Peek explains. “They don’t have staff capacity to handle the money. If they don’t have capacity to administer the grants, they won’t even apply for them.”

Even with the Inflation Reduction Act, there is a place for more regulations and executive actions. “Like clean car standards,” Susie Strife suggests. “It’s silly that you can still go into a car dealership and buy a combustion car! Biden’s executive order that 50 percent of cars by 2030 will be electric, that’s a huge game-changer.”

There has even been some pressure on the president to declare a climate emergency, which 200 U.S. cities and counties have already done. Such a declaration would enable the president to take stronger measures like blocking oil exports and ending offshore drilling.

“There has to be a plan behind a declaration of a climate emergency,” Luis Aguirre-Torres explains. “It’s when you exhaust all other possibilities. Even though I believe that we live in a climate emergency, it’s a complicated matter for the president to assume powers over Congress. I don’t think it’s the time to do so. But the time may come after the November elections.”

As the United States addresses the climate crisis at all levels from the federal government down to the cities, what can individuals do to speed the process?

“Talk to people,” Julia Peek urges.

“And not just your friends,” Aguirre-Torres continues. “Talk with people who disagree with you. We have this program to have 1,000 conversations that reflect what the community feels. Don’t assume that what people think or feel about climate change is hardwired into their brains.”

“Also do what lights you up,” Peek adds. “It doesn’t matter what you do, we need you!”

Susie Strife agrees. “We need everyone with whatever skill you have; communication, marketing, filmmaking, visuals, therapy. The climate movement needs those skill sets. And we need to be electing local climate champions, including state treasurers that are climate-friendly.”

“And let’s not forget the power of sharing a common goal,” Aguirre-Torres says. “John F. Kennedy did it when he said that we’d land on the moon and no one had a clue about how we were going to do that. We needed a COVID vaccine and we needed it fast, and suddenly we worked together on something that seemed impossible. When we start to move together in the right direction, we can make things happen.”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus

The full draft bill was released on Wednesday night.

The bill falls slightly short of President Biden’s goal of a 50% reduction in annual carbon dioxide emissions over 2005 levels by 2030. The US spewed out 6 billion metric tons (mt) of carbon dioxide in 2005, so Biden’s goal is to get down to 3 billion mt in 8 years. The US produced 4.87 billion mt of carbon dioxide in 2021, so we have a long way to go. Emissions were actually up 6% last year.

So this bill, if it can get past the Senate parliamentarian and pass both the House and the Senate (chances are excellent), will reduce US CO2 by 2.4 billion metric tons a year to 3.6 mt per year.

Manu Raju, Ella Nilsen and Tami Luhby at CNN report that the bill retains electric vehicle (EV) tax credits (“up to $4,000 for a used electric vehicle and $7,500 for a new EV”). Manchin had been dead set against this measure, but apparently was mollified by a cap on income level for receiving the benefit. The transformation of the Big 3 in Detroit into electric vehicle powerhouses is a prime goal of President Biden, and one can only imagine that horses were traded for Manchin’s acquiescence on this one.

As for fighting inflation, green energy does that, as Mark Lewis argued in the Financial Times. Gas, oil and coal are inflationary. It is harder and harder to find new deposits, so prices have to go up to fund exploration and drilling and transportation of the fossil fuels. Solar and wind energy are inherently deflationary. So too are electric vehicles, which have rapidly fallen in price and will fall still further, perhaps to as little as $6,000 in ten years. Driving your gasoline car is expensive. Driving an electric car is cheap. When I had leased one I just plugged it in at home and didn’t even notice a difference in my electric bill — though I also have solar panels; my May electricity bill was minus $5.

Or take solar, where, Lewis says, “over 2010-19 the average cost of utility-scale installations fell by 80 per cent.”

The average cost of a new gas or nuclear plant did not fall 80% over that period; it went up.

As wind turbines have gotten bigger and more efficient, the cost of wind-generated electricity has also fallen significantly.

The future is clear, or even just the present.

Johanna Neumann writes at Environment America,

“During the first quarter of 2022, renewable energy sources provided a whopping 97.4% of new domestic electrical generating capacity and 24.4% of actual generation. Fully, 100% of the new electricity generation capacity brought online in the United States in March 2022, came from renewable energy sources.”

The industry is overwhelmingly voting with its feet, in a rush toward renewables. That’s because renewables are just cheaper to install and use for electricity generation per kilowatt hour. Deflationary. Even in the absence of big federal intervention before now, regulations and goals set at the state level in places like California and New York have been important.

In fact, because renewables and EVs are deflationary and increasingly unbeatable in market competition, my guess is that we will still get to a 50% reduction in CO2 by 2030, even if the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t get us there by itself. 20% of Americans live in California and New York, and those states are going green fast.

President Biden’s big build-out of offshore wind through federal licensing of waters off the coasts will also have a huge impact and that was happening before this bill. It could be providing electricity to 20 million of the 122 million American households by 2030.

Although other countries have set ambitious carbon reduction goals, this legislation makes the US a global leader in actually backing those goals with massive government spending and credits to businesses that go green. Up until now, the US government was notable mainly for its refusal to take the climate emergency seriously, and for a failed president, Trump, who actually pulled the US out of the Paris Climate accords and wanted to dirty up, and heat up, the atmosphere to the boiling point.

Some member states of the European Union have reduced carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels quite substantially, as with Germany, but much of this progress has been through carbon regulation and taxes rather than spending billions to goose the green energy sector.

In fact, the likelihood is that Biden, who spent his life as a senator, played a central behind-the-scenes role in turning Manchin around and keeping the Democratic Party Senators together on this pared-down version of Build Back Better. Biden’s legislative accomplishments, not to mention his administrative ones, will likely end up being very impressive for the first two years of his presidency.

in matters of climate, every ton of CO2 you don’t put into the atmosphere is a decrease in how hard life will be for our grandchildren. They will have reason to be grateful to President Biden and the Democratic Party if this bill becomes law.

( Clean Energy Wire ) – The German government has launched a new push to make the country an international leader in sustainable aviation. “With a joint effort by industry, science, politics and society, Germany can become an international pioneer on the road to climate-neutral aviation,” said a government paper published at the start of the Berlin International Airshow (ILA). “In a ‘business as usual’ scenario, global air traffic volume doubles every 15 years.

This further intensifies the need to act now.” The government said it wants to boost the use of new “post-fossil” and renewable fuels, more efficient technologies, the use of alternative propulsion systems, as well as alternatives to flying short and medium distances. The paper stresses that the non-CO2 effects of flying – mainly caused by airplanes’ condensation trails – have to be taken into account to ensure climate targets can be met.

“A key objective of the German government’s joint paper on climate-neutral aviation is the climate-neutral production, operation and maintenance of aircraft, which we are consistently working towards, for example, in the areas of hybrid and electric propulsion systems and modern hydrogen technologies,” the paper states.

The government is focusing its research and development support on technologies that can contribute to lower aviation’s climate impact, it adds. The government also said it will work on the European and international level towards a joint framework to support the market ramp-up of sustainable aviation fuels, which will involve blending quotas, but also questions regarding emissions trading and other instruments such as the finance taxonomy.

Aviation’s share of emissions is on the rise as the sector recovers from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and progress on low-emission flying has been slow.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) last year presented a strategy for future emission-free aviation, while the country’s aviation industry tabled a joint master plan to bring air transport more in line with climate protection and commit companies in the sector to the goal of CO2-neutral air transport in late 2020.

Via Clean Energy Wire

Morrison’s rival, victorious Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese, proclaimed that Australia could become a “renewable energy superpower.” He also said, that there is now an opportunity to end the culture wars over climate change. He added, “Australian business know that good action on climate change is good for jobs and good for our economy, and I want to join the global effort.”

Morrison was blithely nonchalant about the climate emergency and very dedicated to Australia’s coal industry. If you count the coal they export, the 25 million Australians have one of the highest per capita carbon dioxide emission rates in the world.

From October of 2019 through March of 2020 (an Australian summer), the country experienced unusually high temperatures, setting the stage for an unprecedentedly catastrophic bush fire season.

Morrison did not seem particularly upset about the raging fires, which licked at Sidney suburbs, did a billion and a half US dollars in property damage, and killed or displaced an estimated three billion animals, leaving the iconic koala bear on the doorstep of extinction.

Like an antipodean Ted Cruz, Morrison packed his family into a jetliner and went off on holiday in Hawaii after the bush fires had begun raging. The outcry forced him to apologize and to admit that human-fueled climate change contributed to the calamity. Increasing surface temperatures have dried Australia out, making massive bush fires more likely. Critics said that Morrison just never understood the urgency of action on the climate.

A poll of 15,000 Australians conducted by YouGov this past January found high levels of public anxiety about Morrison’s lackadaisical pace in addressing the climate emergency.

Some 60% of respondents had doubts about whether Morrison’s vague commitment to reach net carbon zero by 2050 is enough. And 41% of those polled were positively convinced that net zero by 2050 was “too little, too late.” Not to mention that the measures Morrison was willing to take could not have resulted in net zero by 2050 anyway.

Not only did a big majority of the country think Morisson wasn’t doing nearly enough on climate, 70% believe that there are great economic benefits to be had by Australia if it goes green.

This sentiment hurt the Liberal-National coalition badly in this week’s election, which shrank dramatically in the Lower House to only 55 seats. Some coalition members of parliament defected and ran as independents, with a climate friendly platform. The Green Party won only a single seat in 2018, but this year it looks to have four seats in the lower house,

It is not clear that Labor Party can reach the requisite 76 seats in the Lower House needed to form a government on its own. If it falls short, it will have to seek allies, either among the pro-environment Liberal-National defectors who ran as independents, or among the Greens.That could give the anti-climate-change agenda a pivotal importance for the government of incoming Prime Minister Albanese.

In November 2018, the Green New Deal became a rallying cry for climate activists when members of the Sunrise Movement occupied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and adopted the slogan as their unifying message. A few months later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who had joined the young activists in Pelosi’s office, brought this message to Congress when she partnered with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) to introduce their Green New Deal resolution. More manifesto than binding legislation, the resolution laid out a vision of an equitable clean energy transition for the United States.

In drawing from the language and history of FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s, climate activists have hoped to join together two strands of the progressive movement: environmentalism and economic justice. The United States needs to radically reduce its carbon footprint and, at the same time, create well-paying jobs, especially for those workers leaving economic sectors associated with dirty energy. As with FDR’s program, the Green New Deal relies on government direction and funding to advance this major economic transformation.

Since the original resolution, other Green New Deal bills have emerged on education, housing, and cities. U.S. cities, too, have established Green New Deal initiatives, and many civic organizations continue to champion the GND as a radical vision for a reoriented U.S. society.

Yet many of the actual components of a clean energy transition have stalled in Congress even though the candidate who promised such a transition won the presidential election in 2020. Although some very modest climate-related provisions can be found in two successful pieces of legislation supported by the Joe Biden administration—the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, both in 2021—the bulk of the clean energy provisions have been bundled into Build Back Better. Originally a $3.5 trillion Democratic proposal, this bill was whittled down to $2.2 trillion and then effectively killed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in late 2021.

“Build Back Better is seen by many as the biggest step in the direction of the Green New Deal,” relates Brett Fleishman, the head of global finance campaigns at 350.org. “Joe Biden had expected to arrive at COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021 with the bill signed in his back pocket so he could slap it down on the table and start a bidding war with the Chinese. But that didn’t happen.”

May 30, Fleishman continues, will be the next deadline to make a push to win Manchin’s support for a smaller bill that includes higher taxes on the rich and a prescription drug provision. The West Virginia senator is also likely to insist on increased fossil fuel production, at least in the short term. Complicating the picture, large-scale government spending programs have recently become more difficult because of rising prices and inflationary concerns.

The climate provisions in Build Back Better “are not 100% dead,” agrees Rajiv Sicora, Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY). “But as my boss says, they’re on life support. The truth is, we’re not going to have federal climate legislation at the scale that we need without making a lot more noise, without being a lot more disruptive, and without finding ways to counter the power of the fossil fuel industry and other corporations that are lobbying furiously against it.”

Saul Levin, a Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), notes that the Biden administration has not done much to meet its climate change promises. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law had a lot of good things in it,” he points out. “But every study suggests that it will create more greenhouse gas emissions than it will reduce. Climate change is getting worse because of that law and without the Build Back Better plan. From my own personal perspective, it would be an international disgrace for the Democratic Party not to pass substantial climate legislation.”

While policy-makers squabble about Build Back Better, climate change continues to contribute to major wildfires, droughts, and other disasters across the United States.

“How many climate-related disasters will it take for us to understand that this is a serious issue?” asks Susie Strife, who manages all of Boulder County’s sustainability efforts, policies, and programs with a special focus on clean energy, finance, and climate action. “There’s clearly a disconnect between what local governments and state governments are doing, and the push for national federal policy and change. Doing nothing puts us in a much more precarious position, and it’s more expensive.”

In response to the war in Ukraine and a surge in gas prices, the Biden administration announced at the end of March the release of a million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And instead of restricting fossil fuel production, the United States has been scrambling to persuade other countries to boost output to substitute for the loss of banned Russian imports, particularly for European partners. These developments contrast sharply with the latest IPCC report, which appeared at the beginning of April. Although pessimistic about recent trends in carbon emissions, the report stressed that halving emissions by 2030 was still within reach.

Against this backdrop, in mid-April, these three experts gathered for a conversation facilitated by Brett Fleishman about the promises, polices, and prospects of the Green New Deal in the United States. Expressing concern about the urgency of the moment, they offered concrete suggestions about how to achieve at least parts of the GND vision.

Pushing Joe Manchin

Although several Democrats were unhappy with elements of Build Back Better, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin emerged as the bill’s principal opponent. The bill passed the House of Representatives on November 19, 2021. One month later, Manchin released a statement outlining his opposition to the bill, based on its costs in light of overall government debt and surging inflation. Despite his later declaration that the bill was “dead,” Manchin remains open to a radically reduced version that focuses on “climate change, prescription drug prices and deficit reduction.” Most recently, he has sought to build momentum for a bipartisan energy bill that would boost domestic fossil fuel production and avoid the Democratic-only budget reconciliation process.

Manchin’s reputation as a deficit hawk is not the only reason for his opposition to Build Back Better. Not only did he make his fortune from a coal business, he protected that business and the coal industry more generally through his actions as a politician. The Biden administration’s efforts to transition away from coal and other dirty sources of energy—through Build Back Better and other measures— directly challenges Manchin’s financial and political interests.

“We’re all inside of a house that’s burning down and there’s a person standing there with a fire extinguisher,” Saul Levin says. “The House did its job, and it’s come down to Senator Manchin. The House does not have leverage over Manchin. Speaker Pelosi doesn’t have much leverage over Manchin. The question is: will President Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) do their jobs and hold their party together? And the answer so far has been a resounding no.”

“The Biden Administration and the leadership of the Democratic party in Congress did not have a plan to deal with Manchin,” reports Rajiv Sicora. “We could have loaded up Build Back Better with even more good things for the people of West Virginia, and gone directly to them to make the case for how the bill would improve their lives—the kind of organizing approach that Bernie Sanders would have pursued as president.” At this point, the White House is waiting on Manchin rather than putting pressure on him.

The fight has expanded beyond the congressional floor. “A bunch of activists blockaded Joe Manchin’s coal plant this weekend,” Levin reports. “If I were Joe Biden, I’d use the Antiquities Act to take over coal fields all over West Virginia to establish national monuments and then do a live broadcast each time saying that ‘Joe Manchin is killing the coal industry’—over and over again until he stops.”

Defense Production Act

The Biden administration has other options besides Build Back Better to advance elements of the Green New Deal. One of those is through the Defense Production Act where, in the name of national security, the president can declare an emergency that provides the executive with powers to force companies to produce key commodities. Ordinarily, the Act is invoked during wartime. But activists have long argued that the climate crisis should put the United States on just such an emergency footing.

“Our team—Congresswoman Bush and Rep. Jason Crow (D-WI) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)— introduced a bill a little less than a week ago called the Energy Security and Independence Act,” reports Saul Levin. “It basically calls for $150 billion for various investments in the renewable energy supply chain. Two-thirds of that was for the Defense Production Act.”

He continues, “Joe Biden could say right now that because of the emergency in Ukraine as well as the climate emergency, we’re going to redirect hundreds of billions of dollars to making strategic investments to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels from Russia and Saudi Arabia. The money could cover public transit and vehicle electrification, but also heat pumps and other measures to reduce utility costs.”

The bill is designed to provide Biden with the congressional backing to invoke the Defense Production Act and deploy $100 billion through that mechanism. It has, Levin reports, attracted support across the Democratic Party. Even if it doesn’t pass, he adds, it will help shape the messaging around the urgency and the resources needed to address a clean energy transition.

Green New Deal for Public Schools

The Energy Security and Independence Act is only one of a number of Green New Deal-adjacent bills in the House.

In July 2021, for instance, Jamaal Bowman introduced the Green New Deal for Public Schools Act. It would provide $1.43 trillion over 10 years to overhaul America’s public schools through healthy green retrofits, hiring more educators, expanding social services, and updating curricula. “The bill provides enough funding for every school in the country to get to zero carbon emissions through a combination of a comprehensive retrofit to reduce energy use, install solar on site and electrify the building, and get rid of all the toxic materials that are currently threatening so many young people, particularly students of color and low-income students in rural communities,” Rajiv Sicora explains. “The funding would also cover climate resilience efforts such as building out broadband infrastructure and EV charging stations, and garden and tree planting,” according to The Washington Post.

It’s not just about upgrading public schools. The bill imagines young people taking greater control of the green transition. “My boss is passionate about putting young people at the center of our response to this crisis,” he continues. “Right now, we have a youth mental health crisis in no small part because of climate change and what they’ve been going through during the pandemic.”

“But imagine you’re a public-school student in a community where your school has been ignored and experienced disinvestment,” he adds. “Then, suddenly, your school becomes the epicenter of this new process. And you’re able to study the retrofit to your building. You’re participating in a community garden. You’re seeing how the electric school bus is procured. And you’re watching how climate-friendly food is coming into the school for lunches.”

The bill would have various knock-on effects. For instance, Sicora continues, “investing in curriculum development would bring in more educators and expand community partnerships with all sorts of groups. The bill would create over a million jobs a year to carry out all the retrofits and to fill the new educator positions.”

Green New Deal for Cities

In October 2021, Rep. Cori Bush introduced a bill called the Green New Deal for Cities Act that would earmark $1 trillion to build back better at the local level. The money could be spent on a number of different environmental initiatives—”replacing lead pipes, retrofitting water infrastructure, building bike lanes, installing electric vehicle charging stations, testing soil and water for contaminants, and phasing out fossil fuel infrastructure, among other options”—as well as to compensate for historic environmental injustice.

“The name is a bit misleading,” Levin notes. “The bill actually would fund a Green New Deal in every city, county, state, territory, and tribe. It’s based on the American Rescue Plan around COVID and the way dollars were distributed around the country for people to do masking and hand sanitizing at different phases of the pandemic. We need the same thing on an even greater scale for dealing with climate change and for uprooting environmental racism, which is so pervasive all over the country.”

The bill is based on the notion that every community in the country needs federal support, even if they’re already run by politicians who are pushing a clean energy transition. Such politicians “are nitpicking around the edges of the climate problem because they don’t really have the resources, for instance to expand public transit in the way that’s needed,” Levin notes.

Green Champions in Congress

There are so many Green New Deal-related bills in Congress that progressive legislators have created a “Green Champions” checklist to track congressional support for the 10 top bills.

“Most people don’t have time to read through all these bills,” Saul Levin points out. “And there are hundreds of bills introduced every year called the Climate Act or the Environmental Justice act and so on. Most of them are just not very good at all. They’re not ambitious enough or don’t focus on justice or on internationalism.”

After choosing the best bills, he continues, “we spent about six months bothering offices, saying, ‘Hey, you signed onto the Green New Deal for Public Housing, why aren’t you signed up to the Green New Deal for Public Schools. From there, we steadily built up support for all of those bills. We started with just four members of Congress supporting every bill and now we’re at 24.”

What started out as a checklist has now become a pledge. There are now 45 organizations that support the Green Champions pledge, from Sunrise Movement and the Climate Justice Alliance to Black Lives Matter, March for Our Lives, and the American Federation of Teachers.

“Instead of running for Congress as a progressive candidate supporting the Green New Deal, the question is now: do you agree to be a climate champion by signing onto these other nine bills?” Levin continues. “The candidates running for office are not just pledging to support all 10 bills, they’re also promising not to take money from the fossil fuel industry.”

Lessons from the Climate Frontlines

Boulder County in Colorado is one of the most committed regions of the country to a clean energy transition. It has also been the site of several major climate-related disasters. At the very end of 2021, the Marshall Fire broke out there, ultimately destroying more than a thousand homes. It was the worst fire in Colorado history.

“We have experienced tremendous wildfires,” reports Susie Strife, “as well as a 500-year flood event. My own children witnessed many of these events from our own backyard. Boulder County and California, which have become the epicenters of these climate-related catastrophes, ironically house a lot of the national labs and the researchers—climate modelers, scientists, engineers—that are doing the work to understand how we can get to a decarbonized economy.”

In response to the state of the emergency declared during the Marshall Fire, the federal government provided tens of millions of dollars in emergency funding. An even more costly flood in 2013 elicited hundreds of millions of federal funding.

“What happens when a community experiences a climate-related disaster, any disaster really, is an all-hands-on-deck-all-the-time response,” Strife continues. “No matter how much support you get, it diverts attention, resources, and staff. I was astonished to see how amazingly organized Boulder County was in its response to the Marshall fire. But that’s a sad fact to share. We’re getting good at disaster response.”

“These unprecedented events—the Marshall Fire, the 2013 flood, a firestorm in December that was put out by snow—are taking us away from being proactive to mitigate the climate crisis,” she continues. “We don’t have the time and resources, because we’re continuing to respond to these disasters. It’s bizarre: a lot of the federal funding and potential statewide funding that comes to us doesn’t require us to build back better in a more resilient manner.”

Even with these climate-related emergencies, Boulder is in a better situation than a lot of other cities. “We’re a bit of a unicorn,” Strife notes, “because we’ve had a lot of support in the past. In 2010, we received a $25 million grant to jumpstart our transition to a clean energy economy, though that was really more about jobs. We’ve been able to leverage that funding over time to showcase our success. We were then able to pitch to the voters the first ever sustainability tax, and that has provided a really good stable resource for us.” Passed in 2016, the tax raised $387,000 for disbursal as grants to the country’s towns and cities in 2020.

Even with this funding, however, Boulder county hasn’t met its climate goals. “In a dream scenario, the Feds would back the regulations and the policies for a decarbonized economy, and also help us staff up to full capacity,” she continues. “But

every community is not where Boulder is, and we still need the local capacity-building. To reach carbon neutrality by 2030, local governments are ready and primed, but we would need quite a lot of investment and help in staffing and capacity.”

Mobilizing Local Power

To move their agenda at a federal level, climate activists have had to marshal support from various sectors. One of those has been the labor movement, which has been attracted to the job-creating potential of the Green New Deal. Recent organizing victories at Starbucks and Amazon suggest that unions are making a comeback.

“To the extent that we can, the climate movement should be looking for opportunities to partner in creative ways with the resurgent labor movement,” Rajiv Sicora notes. “We need to be fighting the same fight. It can’t just be lowest common denominator stuff. Retrofitting every public school in the country is one example. I was just talking to someone from Seattle where teachers are leading this fight in coalition with the climate movement, and brought the building trades on board to demand that the latest bond renewal include $19 million to put solar on school rooftops. This is a huge area of potential cooperation, with teachers and climate activists and parents and young people coming together.”

Saul Levin agrees. “We’ve talked to Chris Smalls and Derek Palmer, who organized the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, about what they think about climate change,” he reports. “They told us that people get hurt and are dying at Amazon all the time because they’re being forced to work during tornadoes, hurricanes, and other climate events. A lot of these new unions are being formed by young people who are savvy and are seeing the climate crisis hit them in their own lifetime.”

Localities are also trying to amplify their voices at the state and national level. “We often act in coalitions to lobby at the state and federal level for climate protective policies,” reports Susie Strife. Early on, she was involved in compiling greenhouse gas inventories to get a better understanding of what was needed at a local level. At this point, though, it’s no longer necessary to do more such inventories. Instead, she has worked with other local partners to create Colorado Communities for Climate Action, an umbrella lobbying organization that mobilizes the collective power of 40 local governments.

“That collective lobbying power is very well respected at the state legislature,” she reports. “While our mission does include federal lobbying we’ve been pretty deflated in the last several years, especially during the Trump administration. Local governments have long played the role of showcasing what’s possible when it comes to deep cuts in emissions and establishing standards, policies, and regulations regarding reductions.”

Next Steps

The panelists were all acutely aware of the challenges of pushing a large federal program for clean energy transition at a time of war and inflation.

“Obviously, we do have to care about the impact of gas prices on working class people,” points out Rajiv Sicora. “This is something that the mainstream environmental movement hasn’t always been good at, to say the least. But that’s changing. We are putting the well-being of working-class Americans at the forefront of our thinking. We have answers, and we have alternatives, which the Biden administration should be exploring instead of scrambling to get more fossil fuels online that are not going to magically bring down the price of oil. For instance, they need to subsidize public transport. In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu has a fantastic Green New Deal platform, with free public transit as a centerpiece.”

The funding for such initiatives can come from the federal budget. But revenue can be raised in other ways.

“The fossil fuel industry is making very healthy profits,” Sicora points out. “Right now, the solution is not to appeal to their patriotic duty, which is what the Democrats are doing, to drill more. Instead, we need to crack down on the windfall profits of the fossil fuel industry and invest those profits to bring relief directly to people and accelerate the green energy transition. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have a bill that does that specifically for the oil industry, and provides rebates to people. And my boss has a bill with Bernie Sanders that takes an economy wide approach, because it’s not just the oil industry. If you’re making windfall profits, we’re going to tax that at 95 percent as a temporary emergency measure.”

“I’m particularly excited about the Green New Deal for schools and also building a workforce for decarbonization,” replies Susie Strife. “Finding folks who are ready and able to electrify homes has been challenging. There needs to be some deep preparation for communities who will potentially get any of the stimulus funding to start thinking through what’s possible. I’m also excited about building a climate youth corps, like the one in the original Build Back Better legislation. We need to get people back out helping to regenerate our land. It’s a win-win if you can do carbon sequestration and involve youth as part of solution.”

New York’s new governor, Kathy Hochul – forced to deal with every political leader’s nightmare, a weather disaster, after just one week in office – called the rain “far more than anyone expected.” In fact, despite many residents getting caught unaware, the potential for high-end flooding was amply predicted by the National Weather Service. A flash flood watch for the New York City area for Wednesday afternoon was issued by the local National Weather Service office an amazing 48 hours in advance: at 3 p.m. Monday. The watch warned that “widespread 3 to 5 inches of rain is forecast with locally higher amounts possible.”

Both long- and short-term predictions by climate scientists have been largely spot on. Although the behavior of hurricanes is often unpredictable, scientists have done an excellent job identifying conditions leading to major hurricanes.

Hochul ‘s comments reflect not only appalling ignorance and lack of interest in the existential issue of our time. Her lack of interest is equaled by an electorate that while caring about climate always marks it low in political priorities. In addition even when Congress acknowledges the climate crisis it becomes bogged down in squabbles over the budget. The net result is often money to ease the damage of hurricanes—such as levees– but little for the basic causes of climate change.

When Ida came ashore it was arriving on a land far more prepared for terrorists—and then only left or purportedly radical insurgents. Just as authorities are reluctant to hurt white supremacists, so also is mainstream middle class culture reluctant to enact policies that would make a real difference.

Why is it that when it comes to climate even professed believers can at best engage in reactive thinking while the military or the terror warriors often receive more than they request? Meanwhile Ida demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to self-intensify, to spin off storms so potent that forecasters had to issue simultaneous flood and tornado warnings. And most impressive the hurricane reversed the flow of the mighty Mississippi. Even old man river could not roll through this one.

If scarce resources are not devoted to bold climate initiatives, where is the money going. Fred Kaplan provides an informative list. These include a new destroyer, upgraded tanks, state of the art fighter jets. Two things are clear.. Army, Navy, and Air Force are well cared for. Secondly the titans of our corporate economy need not fear the military budget. Modern capitalist economies are recession-prone, and government spending has been a countercyclical requirement. Nonetheless, F-15s are not going to take American airline’s share of cross country travel. Thirdly the items that dominate the military budget are high tech -— great for the engineers among us and a good that even without the Russian threat demands continual upgrades. Add to this the fact that the military sector of the economy is heavily concentrated, thereby allowing military contractors to extract monopoly profits.

Historically the arms race intensified as well as reflected Cold War tensions. The portrayal of an affluent democratic society able to exploit nature was forged and strengthened against the background of an evil Soviet empire. That experience left a potent residue. Spencer Ackerman puts it well: “But, ultimately, all of these things that both parties, that the leaders of the security services and intellectuals created, maintained and justified, so readily, against the threat of a foreign menace, seen as civilizational, seen as an acceptable substitute for a geopolitical enemy that had served as a rallying purpose throughout the 20th century — the war on terror is kind of a zombie anti-communism in a lot of its political caste and association.” Such narratives were especially necessary in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union and public support for a peace dividend.

The case against these priorities has never been greater. Resources have more vital uses. International collaboration on climate issues is a necessity. They are so devastating that using some of these weapons in battle is unthinkable. Nonetheless support for the military and the “American Way of Life” is deeply ingrained even among many who accept climate change. It is time to bury the zombie anti-communists.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Now this News: “Joe Biden on the Climate Crisis”

Raw crude oil is just sludge, it is useless until it is refined. Then it becomes gasoline, diesel and other fuels.

Hurricane Ida was the fifth-largest such storm ever to hit the United States, causing an estimated $80 billion in damages and shutting down 95 percent of Gulf of Mexico oil production. Hurricanes are becoming more destructive because of human beings burning coal and gasoline and natural gas, putting billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. CO2 is a powerful heat-trapping gas that keeps the heat of the sun’s rays from radiating back out into space as they normally would. Hence, it causes the oceans to warm. Warm water feeds the ferocity of hurricanes and cyclones.

The Louisiana refineries mainly supply the southeast of the U.S.,including Louisiana itself, which means that many residents not only lack electricity but also gasoline to drive generators or to fuel their cars for supply runs.

This paralysis of America’s fourth-largest port, as I have argued, is a prime national security issue.

Imagine if the Biden cabinet were briefed by U.S. intelligence that a set of foreign terrorists had a plot to knock out a fifth of U.S. refining capacity, to halt all oil production in the Gulf, and to impose a black out lasting two or three weeks on one of America’s major ports!

I can’t tell you how many orders would be given to the generals at the Pentagon, to the intelligence field officers, and to the NSA to swing into action. Congress would pass a huge supplement to the military budget. Washington pull out all the stops to halt the plot.

And yet, the climate emergency is plotting to inflict that sort of damage on U.S. cities regularly. There is only one way to stop climate terrorism.

It is to stop burning coal and gasoline now.

Louisiana alone has six coal-fired electricity plants. Why? Coal is dirty and expensive and burning it puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that intensify hurricanes. The over 200 remaining coal plants in the U.S. fluctuate in their output but they account for between 20% and 25% of American electricity. Coal is the deadliest fossil fuel, producing more CO2 than any other, and the Biden plan to engineer the closing of these plants needs to accelerate.

As for gasoline, electric cars don’t use it.

Congress needs to drop subsidies for fossil fuels and raise taxes on gasoline cars, as well as increasing the tax credits for going electric.

Some 58% of new car sales in 2020 were SUVs.

Well there is a great new SUV, the Ford Mustang Mach-e. I’m not really sure why they called it a Mustang, since it isn’t really related to the sports car in design or styling. It is, however, very fast. It goes 0-60 in 3.5 seconds. I went and drove one the other day, and it handles nicely and looks great. It also has a range of about 300 miles on a charge, so there is much less range anxiety. Most people don’t drive 300 miles a day very often. It is obviously more for middle class drivers because the Select starts at $42,000, though there is a nice $7500 federal tax credit. But large numbers of Americans spend that on a car. In fact, “the estimated average transaction price for a light vehicle in the United States was $37,876 in 2020.” That is more than the Mach-e will be if you figure the tax credit.

If we Americans can switch rapidly to electric cars and switch to generating our electricity from wind, solar and hydro in this decade, we will not only reduce our CO2 emissions but we will pave a path for the rest of the world to make this transition quickly, as well. That step will keep the seas from heating up even more. They hotter they are, the more destructive will be the hurricanes they breed and the more dangerous petroleum rigs, pipelines and refineries.

Karl Marx may have been wrong that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. But there is no doubt at all that petroleum contains the seeds of its own destruction, and of ours.

Addressing the climate emergency is not woolly-minded futurism. It is a national security emergency.

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Bonus Video:

Raiti’s Rides: “Is the 2021 Ford Mach-E an electric Mustang that’s worth the price?”

Perhaps no aspect of the American political economy is more iconic that the auto. Not merely a mode of transportation it has reshaped communities and occasioned or been closely tied to economic growth.. But the emergence of car culture has depended on more than sovereign consumers. Major subsidies were necessary.

Saving the planet requires more than conversion to evs, important as that it. It also demands a society much less dependent on the auto. The Bipartisan Compromise fails both tests. Conferees removed electric vehicle infrastructure subsidies and dramatically trimmed public transportation appropriations..

The Interstate Highway System received an estimated 500 billion in 2016 dollars, but the real story of the system’s finance is the dedicated source of financing in the form of the Highway Trust Fund, repository of gasoline taxes. For many years the trust fund was not allowed to serve any other mode of transportation.

This is especially important because the auto is a classic example of an exclusive good whereas public transit systems are inclusive. With the auto, first users have a great advantage while those who come along later face increasing disadvantage. With inclusive goods such as public transit more users lead to more scheduled vehicles and greater convenience. There is a clear case for public transit subsidies, not only to make up for years of underinvestment but also to get this virtuous circle started. The sums allocated for transit are hardly equal to the demand here nor is there commitment to a continuing funding source.

How big a change this infrastructure agreement makes should also be measured against that perennial metric, so presciently labeled by Dwight Eisenhower, the military industrial complex. That figure stands at a staggering 779 billion, but this crude sum hides an equally remarkable story. Military affairs scholar Fred Kaplan points to a curious phenomenon. Although other domestic causes must nickel and dime for their appropriations from Congress, the military often receive even more than their often already inflated requests. Kaplan , among other factors, cites a desire to keep centrist Democrats happy and increasing tensions with China.

I would add another long- term factor. Military spending throughout the post WWII era has played an important countercyclical role, stimulating an economy in which inequality leads to bouts of underconsumption. Building an extra aircraft carrier leads to more demand wthout undermining private profit making opportunities in the way public housing would. Not surprisingly housing support is removed from the bipartisan package. Only one problem—resources used to build the aircraft carrier might better have been used to speed production of our still under funded public transit systems.. And the climate is unwilling to wait.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Forbes Breaking News: “JUST IN: Schumer Says Final Agreement Reached On Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill