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===== Green New Deal Dossier: Older Items =====

==== Data for Progress (2017) ====

By Sean McElwee et al.\\  
https://www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal/#introduction
  * bring job growth and economic opportunity, with particular focus on historically disadvantaged and vulnerable communities
  * a broad and ambitious package of new policies and investments in communities, infrastructure, and technology to help the United States achieve environmental sustainability and economic stability.

"Accomplishing a Green New Deal requires millions of new living- wage jobs that provide dignity to families and renew our vision of America in the 21st century. It will grow the economy and revive our belief in a good American job. The goal is to create 10 million new jobs over the first 10 years through employment and training programs associated with Green New Deal grants and projects."

"A Green New Deal will produce immense demand for new goods and services that the private sector can provide. ... A Green New Deal creates signals that encourages private capital to move into these new and expanding markets, and new businesses will generate demand for more workers."

CLEAN & RENEWABLE ENERGY

✔ 100% Clean and Renewable Electricity by 2035\\ 
All electricity consumed in America must be generated by renewable sources, including solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, sustainable biomass, and renewable natural gas, as well as clean sources such as nuclear and remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture.

✔ Zero Net Emissions from Energy by 2050\\ 
We must end all emissions from fossil fuels. The full U.S. economy can and must run on a mix of energy that is either zero-emission or 100 percent carbon capture by mid-century.[3] This includes residential, commercial, and industrial electricity; thermal energy; and transportation.

ENERGY EFFICIENCY

✔ 100% Net-Zero Building Energy Standards by 2030\\ 
Buildings can stand and operate for over 100 years, and current building standards are not in line with goals for deep decarbonization. Yet buildings also have the highest potential for low-cost emission reductions of all sectors. We must start constructing and retrofitting to the highest performance standards now to avoid locking in outdated technology and to reach these goals by mid-century. New technological innovation every year will push the potential of building and industrial efficiency, helping American citizens and businesses lower energy costs and be more competitive.

TRANSPORTATION

✔ 100% Zero Emission Passenger Vehicles by 2030\\ 
The technologies already exist; we only need to scale-up charging infrastructure and consumer incentives to transition 100 percent of sales to zero emission passenger and light duty vehicles by 2030, followed with a swift phase out of internal combustion engines.

✔ 100% Fossil-Free Transportation by 2050\\ 
To reach decarbonization goals, we must transition away quickly from the use of fossil fuels in aviation, heavy duty vehicles, and rail. Not everything can be electrified, meaning we must innovate and scale up the next generation of biofuels and carbon-neutral fuels.

CLEAN AIR, CLEAN WATER, RESTORE LANDSCAPE, ZERO WASTE, URBAN RESILIENCE ...

See also https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-best-new-deal-is-a-green-new-deal/


==== Washington State Initiative 1631 - Carbon Emissions Fee Measure ====

(Defeated in November 2018 Referendum)\\ 
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1631,_Carbon_Emissions_Fee_Measure_(2018)

A "Yes" vote supported the initiative to do the following:
  * enact a carbon emissions fee of $15 per metric ton of carbon beginning on January 1, 2020;
  * increase the fee by $2 annually until the state's greenhouse gas reduction goals are met; and
  * use the revenue from the fee as follows:
    * 70 percent to the clean air and clean energy account for investments related to air quality and energy
    * 25 percent to the clean water and healthy forests account for investments related to water and forests
    * 5 percent to the healthy communities account for investments related to communities

==== Movements (Finally) Get Visionary Again ====

By George Lakey //Yes// 1/28/19\\ 
https://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-green-new-deal-movements-finally-get-visionary-again-20190128

Here’s the vision: a nation of 100 percent clean energy, a just transition to a more democratic economy, and massive public sector investments. Much as green jobs are needed, the vision goes further to include a web of economic policies, such as free higher education, that make possible the huge changes needed to make our country both sustainable and fair.

This combination, broad and inclusive, sets it apart from the ineffective strategy of single-issue environmentalists who keep expecting that fear of climate change is going to force an end to fossil fuel emissions. Fortunately, there is an alternative. Just as holistic health has taught us the value of a bigger view of human well-being, so also a big-picture strategy for our very complex society can energize us....

Sunrise spokesperson Stephen O’Hanlon says the movement understands that the Green New Deal depends on a major groundswell of pressure through action at the grassroots. That’s where nonviolent direct action campaigning comes in. Study groups and training workshops are now spontaneously forming around the country that explore this type of campaigning to overcome roadblocks erected by those in power invested in preserving the status quo. Both new and veteran activists are studying the lessons from successful campaigns stretching back a century—especially the those that apply to this political moment of polarization and rising turbulence and violence.

==== The Green New Deal Must Put Utilities Under Public Control ====

By Jackson Koeppel et al. //In These Times// 1/31/19\\  
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21708/green-new-deal-community-ownership-electric-utilities-renewable-energy

While the Green New Deal should encompass a massive range of initiatives, a cornerstone must be a program to free communities from the unjust power of investor-owned utilities—not only for de-carbonization, but in order to transform our economy so it serves everyone. Modeled after the original New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration, such a program could give communities the much-needed finance and capacity to kick out their investor-owned utilities in favor of community-run, renewable-powered utilities.


==== The Green New Deal: How We Will Pay For It Isn't 'A Thing'... ====

By Robert Hockett //Forbes// 1/16/19\\ 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rhockett/2019/01/16/the-green-new-deal-how-we-will-pay-for-it-isnt-a-thing-and-inflation-isnt-either/#23cfc8254d7f

"The short answer to ‘how we will pay for’ the Green New Deal is easy. We’ll pay for it just as we pay for all else: Congress will authorize necessary spending, and Treasury will spend. This is how we do it – always has been, always will be. The money that’s spent, for its part, is never ‘raised’ first. To the contrary, federal spending is what brings that money into existence...." (A primer in Modern Monetary Theory follows, although the author doesn't mention MMT explicitly.)


==== Message to Davos Elites: Act As If Our House Is on Fire ====

By Greta Thunberg //Common Dreams// 1/25/19\\ 
[[https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/25/my-message-davos-elites-act-if-our-house-fire-because-it]]

"Either we choose to go on as a civilization or we don't. That is as black or white as it gets. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival."


==== Pelosi’s Actions on Climate Fall Woefully and Inexcusably Short... ====

Interview with Varshini Prakash of the Sunrise Movement //Democracy Now!// 1/7/18\\ 
[[https://truthout.org/video/pelosis-actions-on-climate-fall-woefully-and-inexcusably-short-of-what-we-need/]]

We were very glad to see that Nancy Pelosi mentioned the climate crisis in her address, but calling it a crisis and an existential threat and treating it like one are two very different things. So, essentially, Nancy Pelosi is reviving a 10-year-old committee, the Select Committee for the Climate Crisis, but we find that it’s actually woefully and inexcusably short—falls short of what we need in this moment in terms of climate ambition in this crucial juncture in history.

Namely, it falls short in three ways, some of which you already mentioned. It doesn’t include anything about creating a draft, sort of a blueprint, for a plan for a Green New Deal over the next year, ahead of the next presidential election. It doesn’t include any provision that actually bars people who are taking money from oil and gas executives and lobbyists, who are jeopardizing my generation’s future, from sitting on the committee, something that, frankly, we find to be a conflict of interest. And thirdly, it doesn’t include any power to subpoena, which actually renders this committee less powerful than the one we had even a decade ago.


==== Gearing Up for a Green New Deal ====

By Peter Rugh //The Indypendent// 12/17/18\\ 
[[https://indypendent.org/2018/12/gearing-up-for-a-green-new-deal/]]

Democratic Party leaders have embraced a business-friendly, neoliberal approach to climate change, just as they have just about everything else. It’s a logic that says you can’t offer Americans health coverage without giving away billions to insurers through a heavily-subsidized “marketplace.” You can’t provide relief to homeowners holding underwater mortgages without first bailing out the big banks. No social progress is possible without being mediated through the market, without someone on Wall Street making a buck.

The last time the Dems controlled the House with Pelosi at the helm, they passed cap-and-trade legislation, which would have set a threshold on the amount of greenhouse gas that could be emitted nationally and established an energy market wherein players could trade pollution permits. The measure never went up for a vote in the Senate but nonetheless is indicative of the party’s general approach to climate change. It’s all gung-ho to help the planet but has to ensure that there is money in it for it for bankers and corporations first.

The trouble with market-driven approaches to social change, and with climate change in particular, is that markets, while constantly fluctuating themselves, don’t take to change all that well at all. They are sensitive beasts, prone to myopia.

The closest thing to a large-scale state investment in climate adaptation and prevention the Democrats have mustered came in the form of President Obama’s 2009 post-bailout stimulus package. Billions in tax credits and subsidized loans were provided to green entrepreneurs. The stimulus helped the renewable energy industry scale up and become price competitive with fossil fuels. From 2009 to 2017, the cost of solar in North America fell from over $350 to $50 per megawatt hour, according to the Lazard investment bank while the cost of coal hovered around $100 per megawatt hour. But the next investment in a green economy will have to be in the trillions, not billions, and speed is of the essence.


==== The Green New Deal Goes Viral: What’s Next Is Up to Us ====

By Ted Franklin //System Change Not Climate Change// 12/6/18\\ 
https://systemchangenotclimatechange.org/article/green-new-deal-goes-viral-what%E2%80%99s-next-us

Every once in a while, an idea that has been blowing in the wind for years catches fire and starts a conversation that might change the world. It’s happening now with the “Green New Deal,” an elastic slogan that has become the rallying cry of climate activists who are targeting 2020 as the year Americans might embrace a plan for massive transformation of the economy to avert climate disaster, combat inequality, promote social justice, and lay the groundwork for a more just and peaceful world....

The quasi-magical arrival of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez on the political scene has given climate activists new hope that a program big enough to address the danger will become an actual subject of national debate in the time frame necessary to give us a fighting chance against climate catastrophe. Her proposal for a Select Committee for a Green New Deal (an essential and brief read, so go back and click on the hyperlink if you haven’t already read it) is gaining momentum as the highly energized progressive base of the Democratic Party confronts the triple obstacles of the Republican neofascist party, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the establishment progressives who are now running to the left but still beholden to corporate interests.

The young people of the Sunrise Movement are prepared to be disruptive in the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam War activists, and ACT-UP. They are asking, “What is your plan?” and they are not interested in answers that evade the massive shake-up the scientists say is necessary....

The Ecoleft—from ecological socialists to frontline climate and environmental justice warriors—has an unprecedented opportunity to lead in this debate because we actually have ideas big enough to address the root cause of climate change and its connection to many other growing crises in Earth’s life systems including loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, and vanishing forests. We also have ideas big enough to provide a framework for liberating society from capitalism’s insane drive to push nature and millions upon millions of human beings into an abyss. Along with the Sunrise Movement, we get to ask apologists for the capitalist system, “What is your plan?” and measure their answers against what science tells us must be done....


==== Bernie Sanders' 12/3/18 Town Hall ====

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0IgDgyHEfc

On December 3, Senator Sanders was joined by actress and activist Shailene Woodley, author and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben, CNN host and author Van Jones, Union of Concerned Scientists Director of Climate Science Dr. Brenda Ekwurzel, Congresswoman-Elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Earth Guardians Youth Director Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, Scientific Director and CEO of Ecologic Institute Dr. Camilla Bausch, and Dale Ross, mayor of Georgetown, Texas.

==== With a Green New Deal, Here’s What the World Could Look Like... ====

By Kate Aronoff //The Intercept// 12/5/18\\ 
https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/green-new-deal-proposal-impacts/

==== What Is The Climate Equivalent Of 'Medicare For All'? ====

By Nathan J. Robinson //Current Affairs// 10/30/18\\ 
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/10/what-is-the-climate-equivalent-of-medicare-for-all

"The most serious place to start, as far as I can tell, is with the various “Green New Deal” proposals. I am not wild about that name, in part because I don’t like “green” branding generally and in part because I think it sounds more like a jobs program than a climate change plan (and while jobs programs are good, I think we need to be up front about the fact that we are trying to stop warming, not just employ people in environmentally-friendly ways). These are minor criticisms, though. If it’s what we’ve got, it’s what we’ve got....

"The most serious existing plan, as far as I can tell, is the Data for Progress proposal authored by Greg Carlock, Emily Mangan, and Sean McElwee. Despite calling itself a “greenprint” (must we?), it’s a thorough plan for transitioning to a low-carbon, sustainable economy....

"Everyone should read it, and then adopting the plan should be a “litmus test” for candidates. As far as I can tell, this piece of the left’s agenda has still been missing; I don’t think the DSA, for example, has a climate plan in the same way they have a healthcare plan. (I apologize if I’ve overlooked it.) It is difficult to fix climate change, obviously, but it’s not difficult to fix the lack of an agenda for fixing climate change. That’s long overdue, and serious leftists should refine a plan, give it a catchy name (Green New Deal or otherwise), and then never, ever shut up about it, which is the only way you get things done politically...."


==== Meet the Scholar Crafting the 'Green New Deal' ====

//E&E News// 11/27/18\\ 
[[https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060107485]]

A policy group is being formed to support an energized progressive movement that's taken Capitol Hill by storm under the leadership of Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). It's called the New Consensus. The 501c(3) nonprofit is in the process of being formed to provide a policy platform that will underpin the ambitious — and increasingly politically popular — Green New Deal aimed at weaning the United States off fossil fuels, boosting renewables and clean energy jobs, and building a "smart" grid.

Front and center will be Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a 29-year-old Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar who will serve as the group's policy director working to flesh out details of the plan. ...



==== Why the Best New Deal Is a Green New Deal ====

By Greg Carlock and Sean McElwee //The Nation// 9/18/18\\ 
https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-best-new-deal-is-a-green-new-deal/

==== What’s the ‘Green New Deal’? The surprising origins ... ====

//Grist/Huffington Post// 6/30/18\\ 
https://grist.org/article/whats-the-green-new-deal-the-surprising-origins-behind-a-progressive-rallying-cry/

"The man who popularized the phrase that left-leaning Democrats now use to describe a vision for a radical government spending plan to combat climate change is a self-described centrist 'free-market guy' with a New York Times column.

"It was Thomas Friedman who in 2007 started calling for a “Green New Deal” to end fossil fuel subsidies, tax carbon dioxide emissions, and create lasting incentives for wind and solar energy. At the dawn of the global financial crisis, the “New Deal” concept that Franklin D. Roosevelt coined 76 years earlier to describe the labor reforms and historic spending on infrastructure and armaments that pulled the United States out of the Great Depression proved attractive....

"Friedman’s version focused on policies that compelled the “big players to do the right thing for the wrong reasons.” He liked a lot of what Obama enacted — including $51 billion in “green stimulus” and a $2.3 billion tax credit to clean energy manufacturing — even after the administration shelved the Green New Deal rhetoric after the midterm election....

“'The more the market does on its own, the more sustainable it is,' he said. Even as the Trump administration dismantles Obama’s climate legacy, Friedman feels the battle shouldn’t be for more aggressive government intervention to wean the economy off fossil fuels, but on messaging that focuses on the patriotic, nation-building aspects of greening the economy.

“'We are the true patriots on this,” said Friedman. 'We’re talking about American economic power, American moral power, American geopolitical power. Green is geostrategic, geoeconomic, patriotic, capitalistic.'..."

==== 'Yellow Vest' protesters and Green New Dealers: Enemies or Comrades? ====

By Carl Pope //Salon// 12/5/18\\ 
https://www.salon.com/2018/12/05/yellow-vest-protesters-in-paris-and-green-new-dealers-at-home-future-comrades/

"The 2018 version [of a Green New Deal] promoted by Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others tilts left of center, with a stronger emphasis on equity, employment and wage issues. But at its heart the Green New Deal is first and foremost about the end of the month as well as the end of the world....

"The climate movement, because of its roots in environmentalism, with its skepticism about 'growthmania,'' has had a hard time consistently embracing and implementing climate solutions as steps towards equity and prosperity. But the fires around the Arc de Triomphe should remind us that if we want entire societies to decarbonize, we have to bring entire societies into the economic future as well."


==== As Cuomo Touts Green New Deal for New York, Critics Warn of 'Empty Rhetoric' ====

By Jessica Corbett //CommonDreams.org// 12/17/18\\ 
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/12/17/cuomo-touts-green-new-deal-new-york-critics-warn-empty-rhetoric-just-dangerous


==== Rob Urie: Democrats Killed the Green New Deal ====

//Counterpunch// 2/1/19\\ 
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/01/democrats-killed-the-green-new-deal/

Four decades of neoliberal economic policies have exacerbated class tensions as well as environmental destruction leaving a large ‘precariat’ that neither can, nor should, pay for environmental resolution. Given the distribution of the spoils, it is more than reasonable to force the cleanup costs on those who (1) caused the problem and (2) benefited from its creation. In this sense, a government funded program of resolution is the best the rich could hope for.

Framed as economic stimulus (a ‘New Deal’) that funds a transition to less immediately destructive economic production, any such program could be shifted toward mitigating economic calamity for hundreds of millions of people as the scale of the retrenchment needed to avoid full-on environmental crisis becomes evident. ‘Green growth’ is either cover for planned degrowth or evidence that environmental resolution has been subverted....

Most citizens want environmental resolution, economic justice and the basic services of civil society like education, health care and retirement security. The state is an available vehicle for providing these through the power of the Federal purse. Federal expenditures would mean that resources would not have to be taken from those who have them— the rich. And yet the rich and the ‘leadership’ of the American political establishment are shouting: No! to a Green New Deal. This refusal illustrates the stakes....

The American political establishment has no intention of moving a real program of environmental resolution forward. Doing so would end its hold on power. My suggestion is to organize citizen-experts to craft a program outside of official channels in anticipation of another capitalist crisis. A combination of political insistence and official incapacitation could yield the political moment needed to insert the program into the frame of the state ahead of the capitalist response.


==== Wayne Price: GND vs. Revolutionary Ecosocialism ====

//Black Rose Anarchist Federation// 1/4/19\\
https://blackrosefed.org/green-new-deal-ecosocialism/

Unlike his fellow DSA member (and Democratic politician) Ocasio-Cortez, [Richard] Smith raises a program which explicitly demands government take-overs of the fossil-fuel producing companies. (He notes, “Others have also argued for nationalization to phase-out fossil fuels.”) He also calls for the nationalization of industries which are dependent on fossil fuels: “autos, aviation, petrochemicals, plastics, construction, manufacturing, shipping, tourism, and so on.” These nationalizations would be part of a plan for phasing-out fossil fuels, phasing-in renewable energy, shutting down fossil-fuel production, shutting down or modifying industries which rely on fossil fuels, and creating large government employment programs. This means changing from an economy built on quantitative growth, accumulation, and profits, to one of “degrowth [and] substantial de-industrialization.”

This program may seem revolutionary. “It’s difficult to imagine how this could be done within the framework of any capitalism…. Our climate crisis cries out for something like an immediate transition to ecosocialism.”

Yet Smith contradicts himself; he does not present his perspective as a revolutionary program. While he proposes socialization (in the form of nationalization) of much of the corporate economy, he does not call for taking away the wealth and power of these main sectors of the capitalist class. “We do not call for expropriation. We propose a government buyout at fair value….The companies might welcome a buyout.” There will be “guaranteed state support for the investors….” Further, “it is perhaps conceivable, taking FDR’s war-emergency industrial reordering as a precedent, that the…plan…for fossil fuels buyout-nationalization…could be enacted within the framework of capitalism, though the result would be a largely state-owned economy. Roosevelt created [a] state-directed capitalism….”

While a revolutionary approach is often derided as absurdly “utopian” and fantastic, this reformist program is itself a fantasy. It imagines that the capitalist class and its bought-and-paid-for politicians—who have resisted for decades any efforts to limit global warming—would not fight tooth-and-claw against this program. They are supposed to accept the loss of their industries, their mansions, their social status, their private jets, their media, their political influence, and the rest of their domination over society—for the sake of the environment! In all probability, to prevent this, they would whip up racism, sexual hysteria, and nationalism, subsidize fascist gangs, urge a military coup, distort or try to shut down elections and outlaw oppositions. All of which has been repeatedly done in the past, and is partially being done right now (if still on a minor scale—so far)....


==== David Schwartzman: Green New Deal - An Ecosocialist Perspective ====

By David Schwartzman (DSA, Washington DC) //[[https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-4W_M2a7yXyOEhwd3ZkQTBER2lzdUVqUFB6RHB4Q1JLelg0|Capitalism Nature Socialism]]// 8/18/11\\

Saying or even demonstrating with great eloquence that capitalism must be replaced by socialism is the mere beginning for political intervention, not a strategy. I hope here to begin to confront this deficiency in order to reignite a discussion on socialist strategy in the 21st century. One present symptom of the lack of strategy is to summarily reject the possibility of a Green New Deal (GND) with a critique of so-called Green Capitalism (Smith, 2010). Here I will rather propose a consideration of the struggle for a GND as a nexus of class struggle with the potential of opening up a path to ecosocialist transition on a world scale. 

Can we draw lessons from the experience of the success of the New Deal during the Great Depression of the 1930s as we consider ecosocialist strategy and a potential Green New Deal approach to dealing with the current economic crisis facing capitalism today? 

Contrary to popular belief, FDR’s New Deal was implemented to save capitalism, and its most progressive initiatives only came as a response to fierce class struggle, including the resurgence of the industrial worker movement, which resulted in the formation of the Congress of Industrial Unions in 1936....

While the Pentagon pretends to go "green," it remains the servant of the imperial system protecting fossil fuel and strategic metals flowing into the MIC, the Military Industrial (Fossil Fuel, Nuclear, State Terror) Complex. The immense power of the MIC is the biggest obstacle to implementing an effective prevention program that has a plausible chance of avoiding C3 [catastrophic climate change]. The avoidance of C3 requires an end to coal and fossil fuel addiction, giving up the nuclear option, and a rapid conversion to a high-efficiency solar energy infrastructure. To summarize, the MIC is at present the biggest single obstacle to preventing C3 because:

  -It is the present core of global capital reproduction with its colossal waste of energy and material resources.
  -The fossil fuel and nuclear industries are integrated within the MIC.
  -The MIC has a dominant role in setting the domestic and foreign policy agenda of the United States and other leading capitalist countries.
  -The Pentagon is the ‘‘global oil-protection service’’ for both the U.S. imperial agenda (Klare 2007) and the transnational capital class itself (e.g., Robinson 2004).
  -The MIC’s Imperial Agenda blocks the global cooperation and equity required to prevent C3.

Nevertheless, what the struggle for a GND can accomplish is very significant, indeed critical to confronting the challenge of preventing C3. Humanity cannot afford to wait for socialism to replace capitalism to begin implementing this prevention program.

See also Schwartzman, [[https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/100-renewables-wishful-thinking-or-an-imperative-goal-9879a8947d1b|100% renewables: Wishful Thinking or an Imperative Goal?]] Medium, 10/24/18; and Schwartzman and Schwartzman, //[[http://theearthisnotforsale.org|The Earth is Not for Sale]]: A Path Out of Fossil Capitalism to the Other World That is Still Possible//, Chapter 7 on Degrowth and the GND.

==== Critiques of Pollin: A Facebook Thread ====

A Conversation on Robert Pollin's //New Left Review// article on GND (see above) 9/22/18

M_: This essay is not without interest. But it seems that we have an economist writing from on high so to speak. NO mention of the military and the environment, agriculture and the environment, no notion of political realities today, just that if we do this and this and this, there is a viable path to stabilizing CO2 emissions at an earth sustainable level. No notion of land and income and wealth expropriation and redistribution. Not a word about tourism, automobiles, public transit in the vast western US. Just that with clean energy investments, employment will rise, making it easier for workers and peasants to get a bigger share of the pie. No notion of changing the nature of work. And many other things. He seems to be speaking ex cathedra, so to speak. Doesn't he travel around, look at reality in places large and small, in the US at least? Yes, let's put solar panels all over the deserts. But what about the desert landscape? Well. to hell with it I guess.

J: I agree with your critique, M_. I haven't completed reading the article yet, but it's very notable from the start that (with some minor caveats) Pollin takes for granted the existing ensemble of use-values that energy "production" and consumption serves. (In passing he does criticize the luxury consumption of the rich.) But no big deal, as a mix of wind, solar, geothermal, and appropriate scale hydro electricity generation, especially if coupled with energy efficiency innovations in industrial equipment, building heating/cooling, and consumer goods design, can eventually meet the high levels of energy demand required to fulfill these use-values. (And yes, Pollin focuses mostly if not exclusively on electricity generation, which is only one part of the picture, and just assumes that technological progress in electricity transmission and battery storage will allow for continuing high levels of energy consumption without relying on fossil fuels -- and/or nuclear power -- as a complement to clean renewable sources.)  [[fb-pollin|Read the rest]]


==== Louis Proyect: Vain Hopes in a Green New Deal ====

By Louis Proyect //The Unrepentant Marxist// 11/21/18\\ 
https://louisproyect.org/2018/11/21/vain-hopes-in-a-green-new-deal/\\ 

Turning to the question of the feasibility of making America Green without abolishing capitalist property relations, I want to draw an analogy with the last great revolutionary struggle in the USA, namely the Civil War.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the leader of a bourgeois revolution which pitted the northern industrialists against another section of the bourgeoisie—the cotton plantation owners of the South who required slave labor to maintain their class domination.

Now, 158 years later, the petrochemical sector constitutes the same kind of reactionary grip on American society that will smash any challenge to its exploitation of fossil fuels and wage labor. What cotton and chattel slavery were to Lincoln’s day, carbon-based commodity production and wage slavery are to our epoch. It is not just Exxon that is determined to keep producing oil. You have the fracking corporations who have helped to make the USA the primary energy producer in the world today. On top of that you have the automobile companies who have zero interest in public transportation based on alternative energy sources. Or the airline industry that will never replace jets with dirigibles. Then there are the industries that either produce plastic or use it, such as at least 80 percent of the manufacturers of the commodities for sale at Walmart and that are now helping to destroy all living creatures in the world’s oceans. Let’s not forget about the companies producing chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that are key to industrial farming. Will they be ready to be replaced by sustainable organic agriculture?

American capitalism of the modern era cannot co-exist with environmentally sustainable practices. One or the other will have to triumph. If American capitalism succeeds, civilization will be the loser. As Rosa Luxemburg once put it, the choice is between socialism and barbarism. Sitting in at Nancy Pelosi’s office will not change that equation unfortunately.

See also [[https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/11/why-world-war-ii-not-the-new-deal-ended-the-great-depression/|Why World War II, Not the New Deal, Ended the Great Depression]]
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