I. The IPCC Report “Global Warming of 1.5°C”
and the imperative to immediately suppress fossil fuel production
The
much-awaited report from the U.N.’s top climate science panel describes the
enormous gap between where we are and where we need to be to prevent dangerous
levels of global warming. The 2015 Paris climate accord committed industrial
nations to reduce their emissions sufficiently to keep global temperatures
within a 2°C rise over pre-industrial levels. In the final accord, highly
vulnerable island nations and faith communities represented at the UN pressed
the authors to include the 1.5°C limit as an aspirational target in the final
draft of the accord with 2°C as the backup target.
Soaring GHG
emissions over the past five years, rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations,
ice-cap retreats, intensified storms, summer forest fires reaching even above
the Arctic circle, and die-offs of the world’s coral reefs have all raised
concerns about what even a little bit more warming would bring. Parts of the
planet including the Arctic and many inland areas, have already warmed beyond
1.5°C. California is on fire most of the year. The worst hurricanes are twice
as severe (more precipitation, slower passage, greater wind speeds) as they
used to be. This is just a short start. Climate breakdown occurring much more
quickly than expected is one reason why climate scientists now think that the
goal just five years ago of limiting warming to 2°C “increasingly seems disastrous in this
context.”[2]
The Paris
pledges were never sufficient even to keep warming below 3°C let alone 2°C. Few
of the signatories have even managed to meet the low bars they set for
themselves and the world’s largest countries including China, the U.S., and
Canada have us on track to a 4-5°C warming. As CO2 concentrations continue
growing, preventing runaway warming is going to require ever deeper, truly
draconian cuts in emissions, which will mean greater economic disruption. IPCC
estimates already show us needing to achieve a near vertical drop in emissions
in the early 2020s. Every day we delay getting off of fossil fuels increases
the probability that we won’t be able to save ourselves.
The 2018 IPCC
special report painted a stark portrait of how quickly the planet is heating up
and called on governments to take immediate steps to suppress emissions:
If emissions
continue at current rate, atmosphere will warm by as much as 2.7° Fahrenheit,
or 1.5° Celsius, above preindustrial levels by between 2030 and 2052. Further,
warming is more extreme further inland of large water bodies. [To keep temperatures
from rising beyond 1.5° degrees] anthropogenic CO2 emissions [must] decline by
about 45% worldwide from 2010 levels by 2030 . . . [This] would require rapid
and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure
(including transport and buildings), and industrial systems. . . . These
systems transitions are unprecedented in terms of scale . . . and imply deep
emissions reductions in all sectors, a wide portfolio of mitigation options and
a significant upswing in those options.[3]
Preventing
ecological collapse requires transforming the world economy at a speed and
scale that “has no documented historic precedent.”[4] What would this take?
Myles Allen, Oxford University climate scientist and an author of the report
said, “It’s telling us we need to reverse emissions trends and turn the world
economy on a dime.” To prevent 2.7 degrees of warming greenhouse emission must
be reduced by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and by 100 percent by 2050.
Use of coal as an electricity source would have to drop from 40 percent today
to 1-7 percent by 2050.[5]
Drew Shindell
of Duke University, another author of the report said: “It would be an enormous
challenge to keep warming below a threshold” of 1.5 degrees . . . What might
that look like? In part, it would include things such as no more gas-powered
vehicles, a phaseout of coal-fired power plants and airplanes running on
biofuels,” he said. “It’s a drastic change,” he said. “These are huge, huge
shifts . . . This would really be an unprecedented rate and magnitude of
change.”[6] In response to the report, United Nations Secretary General António
Guterres warned world leaders to “Do what the science demands before it’s too
late.”[7]
II. Capitalist priority to growth and profits
over people and planet
Given this
unprecedented existential crisis one might expect governments would responsibly
meet this climate emergency with emergency plans to prevent ecological collapse
-- bold proposals for “deep emissions reductions in all sectors,” for
“far-reaching transitions in energy, land, infrastructure, and manufacturing”
and so on. After all, the 2018 IPCC 1.5 C report makes clear that on present
trends we could be facing the collapse of agriculture in California, the Great
Plains, India, China, and much of Africa along with mass famine, submerging
cities, destruction of the world’s last forests and worse, possibly as soon as
2040, well within the lifetime of many leaders today and certainly their and
our children.
What’s more,
the solution to our climate crisis is astonishingly simple and doesn’t require
any new tech breakthroughs. The first step is to stop doing what we’re doing:
immediately begin shutting down fossil fuel production, stop new drilling, stop
producing and registering fossil fuel-powered vehicles, drastically curb air
travel, ration fossil fuels, curtail manufacturing and construction. The second
step is to force through an immediate transition to renewable energy across the
economy (and do what we can to enable this transition around the world).
A. Where are the bold proposals?
Yet we hear
no bold proposals to meet the challenge from any governments -- not from
European socialist parties, not from Canadians or Australians (the leading
exporters of the world’s dirtiest fuels), certainly not from the Chinese (the
world’s largest polluters who, moreover, are now abandoning the limits on
coal-burning they just imposed last year in order to restore growth in the face
of the trade war),[8] let alone from the Trump administration. Trump’s response
to his own government’s prediction of a 4°C warming by 2100 is “the planet’s
fate is sealed” so we may as well abandon Obama’s federa fuel-economy standards
for cars and light trucks and “burn baby burn.”[9] To the extent we hear any
proposals at all, it’s just renewed calls for more of the same carbon taxes,
the same fantasy tech fixes like carbon capture and storage that have
manifestly failed to staunch emissions to date.[10] Why is that?
The reason
why no government dares take the obvious steps to save the humans is because no
one has come up with a magic fix to suppress emissions without suppressing
economic growth and profits. Given capitalism, economic growth and profit
maximization must be systematically prioritized over all other considerations including
emissions reduction or companies will fail, the economy will collapse, and mass
unemployment will be the result: global warming may kill us in the long run but
economic collapse will kill us in the short run. This is the ultimate
contradiction of capitalism: We have to destroy our children’s tomorrows to
hang onto our jobs today.
That’s why
from the very first climate negotiations around the Kyoto Protocol in the
1990s, all efforts to contain emissions have been subordinated to maintaining
economic growth. Year after year, decade after decade, for 21 straight years to
COP21 at Paris in 2015, UNFCC annual summit negotiations invariably collapsed
in failure and acrimony. Despite the pleas of climate scientists, desperate
submerging Pacific islanders, Africans, Indians and others who contribute few
emissions but suffer disproportionately from global warming-induced drought and
crop failures, no industrial nation has been willing to accept binding
emissions limits because they all understand that caps would suppress economic
growth.
As George
Bush Sr. infamously told the 1992 Climate summit, “The American way of life is
not negotiable.” And if America will not accept binding emissions caps, why
should China? Facing growing protests over their do-nothing annual summits, the
only thing negotiators at Paris could agree on was to stop holding their
embarrassing annual farces (henceforth they agreed to meet every five years
instead) and contrive another “agreement” in which industrial countries pledged
to reduce their emissions somewhat some day but are under no legal obligation
to do so -- prompting James Hansen, the world’s foremost climate scientist, to
complain that
It’s a fraud
really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: “We’ll have a 2C warming target
and then try to do a little better every five years.” It’s just worthless
words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be
the cheapest fuels out there, they will continue to be burned.”[11]
B. Halting global warming requires degrowth,
substantial de-industrialization
If there’s no
magic tech fix then phasing out fossil fuel consumption has to mean shutting
down or at minimum, drastically retrenching companies, beginning with the
fossil fuel producers like Peabody Energy (coal), Exxon Mobil, Chevron, but
continuing down the petrochemical food chain through the fossil fuel dependent
industries. After all, it’s easy to blame the fossil fuel companies for global
CO2 emissions.[12]
Environmental
groups have focused too narrowly on fossil fuel producers, their pipelines and
such, while ignoring the downstream industrial and personal consumers. Not to
put too fine a point on it but the oil producers don’t burn the oil. We burn
the oil producing, processing, transporting and refrigerating food, driving our
cars, building our homes, heating and cooling our homes, manufacturing this and
that, jetting off on vacations, and so on. Fossil fuels are pervasive. As this
table shows, fossil fuel emissions are produced across the entire economy.
Total U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions by
Economic Sector in 2016
Transportation
28.5%
Electricity 28.4%
Industry 22%
Commercial
& Residential 11%
Agriculture 9%
If governments
in the industrialized economies had listened to climate scientists in the 1980s
and taken steps then to radically suppress emissions, perhaps we wouldn’t be in
the desperate fix we find ourselves in today. But they didn’t. They dithered,
stalled, insisted on market “solutions” that were really designed to fail with
the result now, after decades of “green captalism,” we find ourselves facing an
existential crisis that admits of only one proximate solution: state
intervention to slam the brakes on emissions by shutting down the emitters.
If we’re
serious about suppressing fossil fuel emissions, then we have to drastically
retrench and in some cases completely shut down thousands of downstream fossil
fuel-dependent companies in transportation, petrochemicals and plastics,
manufacturing, construction,[13] agribusiness, tourism and more in the U.S.
alone. In cases like plastics, disposable products and others, we would have to
virtually abolish entire industries because there’s just no other way to
suppress their emissions and make them sustainable.
C. Why carbon taxes fail
Three years
on from Paris nothing has changed: Soaring emissions, shocking increases in CO2
concentrations, arctic fires and floods notwithstanding, governments,
economists, even climate scientists continue to proffer the same old
market-based fake solutions: steeper carbon taxes, unproven, impossibly
expensive “carbon removal” technologies, and fantastical geoengineering
schemes.[14] Everything but the obvious: “deep emissions reductions in all
sectors” at “unprecedented speed and scale.”
The UN IPCC
scientists themselves called for steep increases in carbon taxes, pushing
governments “to set a price high enough to spur truly deep as reductions in
carbon emissions.”[15] This approach is hopelessly untenable. Why? Both cap and
trade schemes and carbon taxes grew out of the Reagan-era Milton Friedmanite
hostility to government “command and control” and the preference of Reagan,
Clinton and subsequent governments for market approaches to all problems.
The idea was
to incentivize businesses and consumers intead of imposing state-mandated
quotas or rationing. The carbon tax idea was straightforward: tax fossil fuels
and consumers and companies will seek non-fossil fuel alternatives. As taxed
coal-fired power plants and fossil-fuel powered motor vehicles became more
costly to operate relative to untaxed (and even subsidized) renewable energy
and electric cars, over time coal and gas-fired power plants and petrol-powered
motor vehicles would fade from the scene. The theory seemed compelling, even
obvious, in the abstract.[16] In the real world, carbon taxes don’t work. The
whole idea was doomed from the start.[17]
The problem
is the economics: If the tax is too light, it fails to suppress fossil fuels
enough to help the climate. But if it’s heavy enough to really suppress them,
then companies and consumers balk and resist the tax -- because without any
safety net for businesses and consumers, the entire burden falls on them, so
they rationally resist to save profits and jobs. Thus to date, the only carbon
taxes that have proven acceptable to governments and the voting public are
those which are too light to do the job.
More than 40
governments including EU, California and British Columbia have imposed taxes on
carbon but none has put more than a trivial dent in emissions.[18] A report
from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found
that the average carbon price across 42 major economies was around $8 per ton
in 2018 (that’s equal to 7 cents on a gallon of gasoline) -- “far below the
level that the IPCC scientists say is necessary to address climate change.”[19]
No government will set a price high enough to spur truly deep reductions in
carbon emissions because they all understand that this would force companies
out of business, throw workers out of work, and possibly precipitate recession
or worse. What government wants that?
The carbon tax “blueprint for
destroying the world economy”
--
Heritage Foundation
Given
relentlessly growing emissions, and given the failure of modest carbon taxes to
suppress fossil fuel production to date, the desperate IPCC climate scientists
called on governments to impose truly draconian taxes -- on the order of $135
to $5,500 per ton, even $27,000 per ton -- whatever it takes to suppress fossil
fuel consumption enough to keep global warming below 1.5° Celsius.[20]
The
pro-market Heritage Foundation, not surprisingly, skewered this recommendation
arguing that taxing industries by anything like these numbers “would bankrupt
families and businesses and trigger a global economic disaster.” The IPCC plan,
they said is “a blueprint for destroying the world economy.”[21] Given
capitalism, they’re right, of course. In a world of abstract models, the carbon
tax strategy works perfectly. But in the real world, with real investors and
real employees -- and without a rationally planned, carefully managed wind-down
and phase-out combined with guaranteed state support for the investors and
guaranteed “just transitions” for the affected workers, the imposition of
draconian carbon taxes would bankrupt some of the largest companies in the
world, precipitate a stock market crash, throw millions out of work, and most
likely “destroy the world economy.” Voters intuitively understand this.
That’s why
they just voted down the carbon tax in Washington state. And if voters won’t
pass Washington’s trivial $15 a ton tax (equal to 13 cents on a gallon of
gasoline), why would scientists think they would pass a tax of $135 (or $1.20
on the gallon), let alone $5,500 a ton ($48.95 a gallon!)?[22] To ask the
question is to answer it. Imposing the entire cost of driving out fossil fuels
onto companies and consumers without providing them alternatives and a safety
net is hardly a winnable plan. Just the opposite: it’s guaranteed to turn
people against the whole project.[23] And yet if we don’t in effect drive the
fossil fuel companies out of business, our goose is cooked. So what to do?
D. FDR’s “command-and-control” economy that
worked
If
governments really wanted to suppress emissions they could simply ration fossil
fuels like FDR did during WWII when he rationed private consumption to divert
maximum supplies to the war effort. They could inaugurate a crash program to
phase out fossil fuels. They could simply order America’s private companies to
shut down private vehicle production and change their production output from
fossil fuel vehicles to, say, electric cars, public transit, wind turbines,
solar power plants, just as FDR ordered GM, Ford and other companies to stop
producing private cars and start producing tanks, bombers, fighter planes,
artillery, machine guns, ammunition, just as he ordered Packard to build
fighter aircraft and PT boat engines, just as he ordered Chrysler to build
diffusers to process uranium for atomic bombs.
And so on.
FDR’s virtual takeover of the commanding heights of American industry during
WWII was tantamount to a temporary nationalization but his “command and
control” was accepted by labor and capital and it succeeded – brilliantly --
providing the industrial base to win the war.[24]
We would no
doubt require the declaration of an emergency comparable to WWII to win the
approval of Congress and the American people. WWII certainly qualified as an
emergency. Even so, fascism killed tens of millions but it did not threaten the
extinction of life on earth. Global warming threatens extinction. Is saving the
humans, not to mention the whales, less of an emergency than saving General
Motors or Boeing or Apple?
If Roosevelt
could turn the economy on a dime to meet the emergency of WWII, why can’t we do
the same today? If we don’t organize an emergency industrial shutdown and
retrenchment of unnecessary production, superfluous manufacturing, superfluous
electricity usage, wasteful over-consumption, nature is going to do it for us
in a most unpleasant manner.
Yet today we
can’t get a fair public debate on the need for state intervention in the
economy because since the age of Thatcher and Reagan, Milton Friedman’s maxim
“capitalism good, government bad” has been the reigning ideology of Republicans
and Democrats, Tories and Labour alike. Since the 1980s Friedmanite economists
and their Koch-funded think tanks have produced a relentless stream of
propaganda “proving” that “command and control” or almost any “government
intervention” is “bad” and “can’t work.”[25] Reagan told us businesses don’t
want to be ordered about and told what to do like FDR did. They want to be
“incentivized.”
Since the
1980s Republicans and Democrats alike have steadily whittled away and gutted
government regulation and control wherever possible,[26] clearing the way for
Trump’s coup de grâce at the EPA this past year. In the process, their “market
solutions,” like carbon taxes, have completely failed to staunch emissions.
III. THE ECOSOCIALIST PATH TO 1.5°C
SUSTAINABILITY
We
ecosocialists have a practical answer. We accept the science that to prevent
runaway global warming “greenhouse emission must be reduced by 45 percent from
2010 levels by 2030, and by 100 percent by 2050.” We agree with the IPCC that
this will require “deep emissions reductions in all sectors.”
We agree that
it will require “far-reaching transitions in energy, land, infrastructure, and
manufacturing,” that it will require “systems transitions” (indeed, more than
they imagine). And we understand that this must all be done at “unprecedented
speed and scale.” “We understand that we desperately need to “do what the
science demands before it’s too late.”
But we also
understand that imposing drastic cuts in fossil fuel production has to
translate into industrial shutdowns and retrenchments across the economy. There
is just no way around this. We reject the carbon-tax-to-collapse scenario.
Instead, we propose a strategy of rationally planned, democratically managed,
wind-down and phase-out of fossil fuels and a coordinated transition to
renewable energy that avoids economic collapse and guarantees reemployment for
the affected workers. Our strategy is based on a three-point plan.
An Emergency Plan to meet the Climate
Emergency:
1. Declare a
State of Emergency to suppress fossil fuel use: Ban all new extraction, ration
gasoline and diesel, ban production of new fossil-fuel vehicles. Nationalize
the fossil fuel industry to phase it out. We do not call for expropriation. We
propose a government buyout at fair value (fair to both owners and society).
Nationalization will need to extend beyond fossil fuel producers to dozens or
hundreds of industrial fossil-fuel dependent industries from pipelines,
refineries, distribution networks to power generation, autos, aviation,
petrochemicals, some manufacturing, tourism and others whose business is
irreversibly based on fossil fuels and who without a governemnt buyout would be
bankrupted.
2. Institute
a new federal Public Works Administration-style jobs program (on the model of
the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Core and other
programs set up under FDR) to re-employ every worker in the fossil fuel-related
industries at equivalent pay and benefits in other useful but low-emission
work. Those workers in coal, oil, plastics, toxic chemicals and so on deserve
jobs, just not the jobs they have now.
3. Launch an
emergency state-directed crash program to phase-in renewable electric
generation, replace fossil-fuel powered transportation with electric
propulsion, discourage individually-owned vehicles where possible and encourage
their replacement with public transit, shared vehicles, bicycles and other
non-fossil fuel modes of transportation. Develop emergency plans to retrench
industries including air travel, shipping, and other large CO2 emitters. And
develop emergency plans to shift from fossil-fuel dependent factory farms to
fully organic agriculture.
A. The argument for nationalization
If fossil
fuel companies can’t reverse their suicidal growth-to-bust trajectory, then
what alternative is there but to nationalize them, socialize them, put them
under public ownership to phase them out?[27] We say to Democrats, Republicans,
capitalists, and pro-fossil fuel trade unions too, “If you have a better
strategy to save the planet, where is it?” As Juliana vs. United States (the
Our Children’s Trust suit which is now working its way through the courts)
contends, the federal government has a responsibility to preserve a habitable
planet to maintain “life, liberty, property” for the next generations.
The
plaintiffs argue that preserving a habitable planet requires that the
government immediately begin enforcing strict limits on CO2 emissions,
immediately develop plans to phase out of fossil fuel production, and ban all
further extraction (Section 7 p. 80ff).
Since the
companies can’t put themselves out of business, the only way to effect the
phase-out of fossil fuels without precipitating economic collapse is for the
government to nationalize the companies so we can dismantle them and redeploy
their capital and labor with as little economic pain as possible. For too long,
the environment has been systematically sacrificed on the altar of profits,
jobs -- kicking the can down the road till we kick it and ourselves over the
cliff. We can save the fossil fuel industrial complex for few more decades till
we collapse, or we can reverse these priorities and save the planet. That’s the
choice before humanity today.
Of course
politicians will holler about the cost. The cost is significant but affordable,
a bargain actually. The ten largest American oil and gas companies claim a
combined value in 2018 of $968.1 billion (Exxon Mobil is valued at $344.5
billion, Chevron $239 billion, ConocoPhilips $79.3, and the others from $68 to
$33 billion).[28] The two major coal companies have trivial net worth (Peabody
at $3.6 billion, Arch at $1.5 billion). But the IEA says that in truth, the
world’s fossil fuel industries are worth a fraction of their claimed value
because most of their assets – the oil and gas and coal in the ground -- are
fast becoming valueless “stranded assets” as electric utilities and vehicle
manufacturers shift to renewable power and because of growing political
pressure to “leave it in the ground.”[29]
Given their
looming existential profits crisis, the companies might actually welcome a buyout.
But if society is to pay a fair price for those companies, their nominal retail
value would have to be discounted by the harm their production has already done
to people and planet. On any fair assessment, that would leave these companies
owing the government, not the other way around. Yet even at their current
retail value, just under a trillion dollars, by the standards of wasted U.S.
expenditures, this is affordable.
President
Trump just gave away $2.3 trillion in tax cuts to the rich this year alone.[30]
Just rescinding that inexcusable giveaway would cover the cost of nationalizing
the entire fossil fuel producing industry and leave enough left over to buy up
the bulk of America’s fossil fuel-burning industries as well including Boeing,
the major airlines, the American auto industry, the worst polluting chemical
industries, and leave billions to spare. Boeing’s net worth is $95 billion, the
seven largest U.S. airlines have a combined market capitalization of $130
billion, the American auto industry, Ford, GM and Tesla (excluding Chrysler
which was bought by Italy’s Fiat in 2011), has a combined value of $277
billion, the big dirty three of Dow-Dupont, Monsanto, and 3M combined are worth
$225 billion.
The
government could buy all these companies, even without discounts for their
social and environmental crimes, for a paltry $727 billion. Add in the bulk of
private and shareholder-owned gas and electric utility sector, 20 companies
with a combined market value of $557 billion, and the government could buy up
all of America’s fossil fuel producers and the bulk of its fossil fuel-burners
for $2.26 trillion and still have some pocket money left after rescinding
Trump’s tax giveaway to the rich.[31]
Further, we
could rescind the dozens of other needless tax cuts and handouts to the rich
since the days of Reagan. We could impose the fines on the banks that Obama and
Trump failed to impose.[32] We could restore the progressive tax structure we
use to have before Reagan. And we could use these funds to rebuild our
infrastructure, fund the transition to renewables, upgrade and properly fund
our destitute public schools,[33] fund a comprehensive health care system for
all, properly fund our skinflint Social Security system, and build a decent
society. Finally, we can’t build a decent society for anyone if we don’t gut
the imperial war budget (nearly three-quarters of a trillion a year).
According to
the most recent study, by the end of 2019, the U.S. government will have spent
a staggering $5.9 trillion on its illegal criminal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq
and Syria since September 11, 2001[34] -- wars that were never fought for
democracy and certainly not in for defense since none of those countries
attacked us but were, instead, imperial wars to protect “our” oil under “their”
sand.[35]
Thus, we
categorically reject, in advance, any argument that the government cannot
afford to buy out the fossil fuel producers and dependent industries to save
the humans. On the contrary, we maintain that even at a retail value of $2.25
trillion, this buyout of fossil fuel producers and burners is a bargain –
barely more than a third of what the U.S. has squandered (so far) on its oil
wars in the Middle East since 2011.[36] Plus, since the U.S. military is the
largest institutional GHG emitter, cutting the military budget would also slash
emissions from this sector.
B. The argument for a new Public Works
Administration-style jobs program
Under
capitalism, closing and retrenching companies means throwing workers out on the
street. We’re socialists. We don’t accept that. If capitalists won’t provide
the jobs then it’s the government’s responsibility to do so. We, the voting
public, assert our ownership of the government, not the corporations. Today we
face an existential threat to our survival and the only way to prevent collapse
is to slam the brakes on the industries that are destroying us. It’s not the
workers’ fault if the industries they work in need to be closed or cut back to
save our children and theirs.
They deserve
jobs, different jobs, better jobs. If society is going to abolish their present
jobs then it owes them new jobs with comparable pay and benefits. This is not
only morally right but it’s also the only way we can win the support of those
workers in the struggle for the common good.
There’s no
end of low-carbon work that needs to be done: infrastructure repair and
upgrades, a vast expansion of renewable energy, transitioning to fully organic
farming, a massive expansion of public transit, commuter biking, development of
share-vehicle commuting, environmental restoration, housing upgrading, heating
and environmental retrofitting, upgrading and improving our schools, expanding
medical care, expanding services and facilities for our retired workforce and
more.
If capitalists
can’t figure out how to make a profit doing it, then society through our
government must employ them – just as FDR’s New Deal public works programs of
the 1930s built tens of thousands of projects -- dams, electric utilities,
airports, highway systems, bridges, tunnels, new railways, gorgeous train
stations, glorious city halls and post offices, incredibly beautiful parks,
beautiful public schools, modern hospitals, public universities and more.[37]
FDR’s construction programs built the bulk of this country’s national
infrastructure that we still rely on today.
If in the
midst of depression, the government could afford to provide full-time
government-funded jobs for tens of millions of workers from 1933 through the
1940s, becoming the nation’s largest employer by far, our immensely wealthier
society and government can easily afford to re-employ the millions of workers
from the fossil fuel-based industries to construct a permanently sustainable
economy.
C. The imperative of economic planning and
democratic management
After they
wrecked the economy and plunged us into the Great Depression in 1929, America’s
capitalists couldn’t pull themselves together to restore economic growth. In
1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaigning on a state-interventionist, help-the-poor
“NewDeal,” won a landslide victory over “do-nothing” Hubert Hoover who was
deservedly blamed for letting the Depression get as bad as it did and reviled
for his failure to intervene to rescue the economy and the citizenry.
President
Roosevelt turned the government into the biggest economic engine and the
biggest employer in U.S. history, creating a state-directed capitalism,
organizing a powerful state planning apparatus, setting up federal employment
programs, and superintending construction of a the country’s first basic social
safety net – transformations that that
handed him three more landslide victories in 1936, 1940 and 1944. Roosevelt and
Congress established the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB) in 1933 to
organize public works programs to put people back to work, revive the economy,
and modernize our infrastructure. This was the first and so far only national
planning agency in U.S. history. It evolved from public works planning to
broader social and economic planning and then to mobilize and direct resources
for the war effort. Regional planning groups were created in New England and
the Pacific Northwest.
Most states
established planning agencies while planning boards emerged in many cities.
Capitalist ideological hostility to economic planning per se – they couldn’t
stand the threat of a good example -- eventually forced Congress to abolish the
national board in 1943. But NPRB legacies included wartime and postwar
planning, the first version of the G.I. Bill of Rights, the Second (Economic)
Bill of Rights (a manifesto for postwar liberalism), an institutionalized
policy planning process via the Council of Economic Advisors, and the annual
federal budget process established by the Employment Act of 1946.[38]
The
existential crisis we face is, to say the least, far more dire and urgent than
the Great Depression. And here again, capitalism has no solution to the crisis
it created because the capitalist solution to everything is the same growth
that got us into this crisis in the first place. That’s why we argue that the
only way to brake the drive to collapse is to socialize the commanding heights
of the economy. We don’t need to nationalize the entire economy. Small
producers, worker co-ops, family farmers, mom & pop shops, restaurants and
so on, aren’t killing the planet.
Large
corporations are killing the planet. They can’t help themselves. To preserve a
habitable world we need to take them under public ownership so we can
rationalize, reprioritize and restructure production to create a permanently
sustainable, if somewhat less industrialized, economy.
D. System change not climate change
It is perhaps
conceivable, taking FDR’s war-emergency industrial reordering as a precedent,
that the three-point plan just described for fossil fuels buyout-nationalization,
state-directed emergency transition to renewables, and creation of a large
federal jobs program, could be enacted within the framework of capitalism,
though the result would be a largely state-owned economy.
Roosevelt
created his state-directed capitalism with only modest, if increasing, ruling
class resistance because, first, he revived a broken capitalism from the depths
of the worst depression in history and saved it from communism, secondly, he
never needed to actually nationalize the industries he effectively took over
because he was paying their owners hansomely to expand and grow their
companies, if by producing different products, and thirdly, this was all just a
temporary encumbrance, limited to the duration of World War II.
We face the
opposite problem: We face a booming capitalist economy at the top of its form
with a powerful entrenched ruling class in full command of their economy and
their state. What’s more, we need to nationalize industries not to grow them
but to phase many of them out, or at minimum to transform GM from an automaker
into, say, a wind-turbine maker or a train manufacturer, and permanently. Given
the “unprecedented scale” of the the problems we face, given the “far-reaching
transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure . . . and industrial
systems” we need to make, and given the speed with which we need to make these
changes, it’s difficult to imagine how this could be done within the framework
of any capitalism.
Private
ownership of the means of production, profit maximization, and market
competition have been the leading drivers of global ecological collpase and
pose the main barrier to the rational rerorganization, restructuring and
reprioritization of the economy we need to make to save the humans. The depth
and urgency of our climate crisis cries out for something like an immediate
transition to ecosocialism. We don’t have many decades left before its too late
to bother trying.
The IPCC
climate scientists tell us we have just a dozen years or so to rein in our
growth-to-bust economic system and come up with an effective
pollution-suppression plan and mechanisms to staunch CO2 emissions. Ocean
scientists tell us we need a Five-Year Plan to save the oceans.[39] We need
global plans to save the oceans, save the forests, save species from going
extinct.[40]
This requires
generalized large-scale economic planning. The problems we face with respect to
the environment and the climate, can’t be solved by private corporations
competing in an anarchic market.[41] Saving the world requires the sort of
large-scale economic planning that only governments can do. We need to replace
market anarchy with rational planning and management of a mostly, though not
necessarily entirely, publicly-owned economy.[42]
E. Planning for the common good requires
democracy.
Rational
planning requires democracy. Polls show that 69% of Americans (85% of those
ages 18-29), 71% of Chinese, 87% of Europeans, nine-in-ten Ugandans,
Tanzanians, South Koreans, Chileans, and Brazilians want binding limits imposed
on CO2 emissions.[43] Corporations don’t want binding limits. Well, why don’t
we get to vote on such questions? We don’t need to be experts. Corporate boards
aren’t composed of experts. They’re composed of major investors and politically
influential VIPs who solicit experts to advise them, then vote to decide what
they want to produce and sell, and hire engineers to figure out how to get it
done.
Why can’t
society do the same – but in the interest of the common good? We need to establish
democratic institutions to plan and manage our social economy -- planning
boards at local, regional, national and international levels. We have plenty of
examples from the Paris Commune to Polish Solidarity in 1980. We have the
example of FDR’s National Resources Planning Board -- established by an elected
president and congress. And as Greg Palast and co-authors describe in their
book on regulation of public utilities, we have a working prototype right now:
Unique in the
world . . . every aspect of US regulation is wide open to the public. There are
no secret meetings, no secret documents. individuals, industrial customers,
government agencies, consumer groups, trade unions, the utility itself, even
its competitors. Any and all citizens and groups are invited to take part:
Everyone affected by the outcome has a right to make their case openly…In
public forums, open to all citizens, the principles of social dialogue and
transparency come to life. It is an extraordinary exercise in democracy–and it
works.[44]
We see no
reason why this cannot be scaled up to the whole economy. If the major U.S.
political parties offer no solution to the climate crisis, if they abdicate
their responsibility to preserve a habitable planet for our children, then its
up to the American left to provide vision and leadership in this struggle --
and right now that looks to be the DSA, the Democratic Socialists of America
(of which I am a proud member). As Maria Swart wrote to members on October
23rd:
Limiting
global warming below 2 degrees is going to take a monumental mobilization of
people from all walks of life, demanding that our lives matter more than
corporate interests. Neither Republicans or Democrats have risen to the task of
leading this effort. In the absence of their political leadership, we must rise
to the occasion.
IV. FROM FDR TO AOC: THE GREEN NEW DEAL
Congressional
Representative-elect (D. New York) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (aka AOC), the
self-confident 28 year-old DSAer who won office on the Democratic ticket, has
risen to the occasion, drafting a proposed Plan for a Green New Deal that she
hopes will be taken up by the new Congress in January 2018. The Plan (and the
draft legislation) she writes, shall require the achievement within 10 years
from start of excution the following:[45]
100% of
national power generation from renewable sources,
building a
national, energy-efficient, “smart” grid,
upgrading
every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy
efficiency, comfort and safety;
decarbonizing
the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries;
decarbonizing,
repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure;
funding
massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse gases;
making
“green” technology, industry, expertise, products and services a major export
of the United States, with the aim of becoming the undisputed international
leader in helping other countries transition to a completely carbon neutral
economies and bringing about a global Green New Deal
AOC’s Green
New Deal does not stop with decarbonization. She writes that “The Plan . . .
shall recognize that a national, industrial, economic mobilization of this
scope and scale is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the
United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to
everyone participating in the transformation. In furtherance of the foregoing,
the Plan (and draft legislation) shall:
provide all
members of our society, across all regions and all communities, the
opportunity, training and education to be a full and equal participant in the
transition, including through a job guarantee program to assure a living wage
job to every person who wants one
take into
account and be responsive to the historical and present-day experiences of
low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, rural and
urban communities and the front-line communities most affected by climate
change, pollution and other environmental harm;
mitigate
deeply entrenched racial, regional and gender-based inequalities in income and
wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other
investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low
income, deindustrialized or other marginalized communities
include
additional measures such as basic income programs, universal health care
programs and any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote
economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism; and
deeply
involve national and local labor unions to take a leadership role in the
process of job training and worker deployment.”
What's said and not said
To be sure,
the process of “decarbonization” outlined above is abstract, lacks specifics,
and is far from fully worked out. Most obviously, it’s hard to imagine how the
government could decarbonize fossil-fuel producers and industrial consumers
without taking them into public hands. What's not said is that decarbonization
has to translate into shutdowns and retrenchments of actual companies. How does
one decarbonize ExxonMobil or Boeing or Delta Airlines or Duke Energy? These
companies live and breathe fossil fuels. But there’s no mention of shutdowns
and retrenchments.
There's no
mention of buyouts or nationalization. There’s no explicit call for a National
Planning Board to reorganize, reprioritize and restructure the economy.
Further, there's no acknowledgement that an infinitely growing economy is no
longer possible on a finite planet. There’s no acknowledgement of the
imperative need for economic de-growth, substantial de-industrialization and
not just in fossil fuel-based industries.
"Decarbonization": a
self-radicalizing transitional demand
And yet, the
audacity and breadth of the technical and socio-economic transformations here
envisioned call to mind nothing so much as the economic and social revolution
that FDR’s New Deal brought about (albeit within the framework of capitalism),
and goes beyond him in some respects. Occasio-Cortez may be just 28 but she is
a bold, feminist, anti-racist, and socialist-inspired successor to FDR.
With this
Green New Deal she's taking the global warming discussion to a new level,
changing the conversation and challenging the political economy. She's not
calling for cap and trade or carbon taxes or divestment or any other market
"solutions." She's issuing a full-throated call for
"decarbonization," in effect throwing the guantlet down to capitalism
and challenging the system because, as we know, there is no way to decarbonize
an economy based on endless growth, endless resource consumption, and thus
inevitably, endless pollution and CO2 emissions. Thus the push for
decarbonization must inevitably raise
the question of nationalization because, how else can government enforce the
retrenchments and shutdowns needed to save the planet without precipitating
economic collapse?
The
nationalization of the coal and oil producers, the obvious first targets, would
in turn raise the question of what to do about all the industries that are
based on fossil fuels -- autos, aviation, petrochemicals, plastics,
construction, manufacturing, shipping, tourism, and so on. And consideration of
how to decarbonize those industries would in turn raise larger questions about
who should decide what gets produced, or not -- private companies or society as
a whole, through democratic processes. Thus the push for decarbonization is
simultaneously a push for democratization.
AOCs’ Plan is
first of all, a definitive break with the Reagan-Thatcher-Friedman “capitalism
good, government bad” doctrine which holds that the best role for governmenti
is to “get out of the way and just incentivize the private sector.” Instead,
the Plan calls for robust expansive government to drive the needed changes, for
two reasons: (1) scale and (2) time: First, “The level of investment required
will be massive. Even if all the billionaires and companies came together and
were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment,
the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be
sufficient.”
Besides,
“private companies are wary of making massive investments in unproven research
and technologies; the government, however, has the time horizon to be able to
patiently make investments in new tech and R&D, without necessarily having
a commercial outcome or application in mind at the time of the investment.”
Second: “The speed of investment required will be massive. Even if all the
billionaires and companies could make the investments required, they would not
be able to pull together a coordinated response in the narrow window of time
require to jump-start major new projects and major new sectors.”
AOC
explicitly rejects the Reganite assertion of the superiority of the private
sector and the efficacy of incentives: “We’ve also seen that merely
incentivising the private sector doesn’t work – e.g. the tax incentives and
subsidies given to wind and solar projects have been a valuble spur to growth
in the US renewables industry but, even with such investment-promotion
subsidies, the present level of such projects is simply inadequate to
transition to a fully carbon neutral economy as quickly as needed. . . we’re
not saying there isn’t a role for private sector investments; we’re just saying
that the level of investment required will need every actor to pitch in and
that the government is best placed to be the prime mover.”
Secondly, AOC
explicity makes a powerful case for state planning: She calls for a new Select
Committee “with a 360° view” to serve the specific function of “examin[ing]
emerging issues that do not fit clearly within existing standing committee
jurisdictions or cut across jurisdictional boundaries.” The Select Committee
requires “a mandate to develop a plan for the transformation of our economy to
become carbon neutral.”
Having its
own Select Committee “ensures constant focus on climate change as the standing
committee deals with that and many other issues of the day -- such as wild
fires in California, infrastructure, clean water issues, etc. First, they would
put together the overall plan for a Green New Deal - they would have a year to
get the plan together, with the plan to be completed by January 1, 2020. The
plan itself could be in the form of a report or several reports. Second, they
would also put together the draft legislation that actually implements the
plan.”
This is not
yet FDR’s Planning Board. It has no power to nationalize industries, nor is it
clear that it would even have the power to order companies like GM to stop
producing, say, SUVs, and start producing wind turbines or high-speed trains à
la FDR. But as our climate emergency steadily worsens, it will become
increasingly apparent that such government planning and direction is essential,
and that nationalization via buyouts is the only way to enforce decarbonization
while also forestalling capitalist opposition as best we can.
Of course all
this sounds wildly utopian in our present political context and this Plan is
certain to go nowhere under Trump and a Republican Senate. But a vigorous
campaign for this Plan will show why capitalism cannot solve the worst crisis
it has ever created and encourage demands for government intervention,
government planning to suppress emissions.
After all, polls have long shown that citizens
want and expect the government to lead the fight against climate change by
limiting CO2 emissions, in effect to “do what the science demands before it’s
too late.” Let’s hope that with a developing vision and a monumental
mobilization around this Green New Deal and around fossil fuel nationalization,
we can derail the capitalist drive to ecological collapse and build an
ecosocialist civilization to save the human race.
[1] Author's
Note: Thanks to David Klein, Nancy Holmstrom, Bill Tabb, William Neil, Marie
Venner, Zack Eldrege, and Ted Franklin for their helpful suggestions and
criticism. I remain solely responsible for the remaining errors and
inadequacies of this paper.
[4] Ibid.
Also Coral Davenport, “”Major report describes a strong risk of crisis as early
as 2040,” New York Times, October 7, 2018.
[5]
Davenport, “Major report” op cit.
[6] Mooney
and Dennis, “Climate scientists struggling,” op cit.
[7] Somini
Sengupta, “Projection on climate is ominous. Now what?” New York Times, October
10, 2018.
[11] Oliver
Milman, “James
Hansen, father of climate change awareness, calls Paris talks ‘a fraud’”,
Guardian, December 12, 2015. And not just Hansen. The “Paris pledge” drew
blistering condemnation from scientists around the world. See Tom Bawden, “COP21:
Paris deal far too weak to prevent devastating climate change, academics warn,”
Independent, January 8, 2016.
[12] As does,
for example, Tess Riley, “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global
emissions, study says,” Guardian, July 10, 2017.
[13] The
construction industry is the largest single consumer of (petrochemical-derived)
plastics and plastic packaging, accounting for about a third of all plastics
production. Though not always visible in buildings, they’re used in a wide and
growing range of applications including weather insulation, piping, window
frames, protection and finishes. The majority of construction waste is also
plastic. Roma Saini, “Plastic
waste! Why all the fuss?,” Willmot Dixon Interiors, February 14, 2018.
[15] Brad
Plumer, “U.N. climate report urges putting a price on carbon,” New York Times,
October 9, 2018.
[16] It might
seem surprising that leading oil companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron, BP
officially support carbon taxes. They do so because they understand that at
some point governments are going to impose some kind of tax on carbon emissions
and they want the best deal they can get if they have to be taxed at all.
They’ve deeply resisted “cap and trade” schemes, effectively dooming them
everywhere, because cap and trade would impose a limit to growth. They see
carbon taxes aas the lesser evil. So long as carbon taxes are modest, they pose
no existential threat to their business because they impose no cap on
production, no limit to growth. They’re just another cost of doing business,
like other taxes, and one that can be passed on to the consumer. Meanwhile,
growth can continue. BP’s 2018 Energy Outlook projects that global energy
demand will grow by a third between now and 2040. BP and the other oil giants
aim to cash in on that growth. That’s why the day after the IPCC report was
released, ExxonMobil contributed a million dollars to jumpstart a carbon tax
program. They’re not fools. They’re not looking to put themselves out of business.
They’re looking to maximize returns, to grow their business while posing as
good corporate citizens, paying their taxes (if they have to), contributing to
the “solution.” Yet while rhetorically
supporting carbon taxes, they simultaneously spend millions to defeat
carbon taxes whenever they come up for a vote, as they did with success in
Washington this last election. See: Ben Gamen, “Big
oil companies want a price on carbon. Here’s why,” The Atlantic, June 1,
2015: . Richard Smith, Green Capitalism: The God That Failed (London: WEA
Press, 2016), pp. 59-64. Ed Crooks, “ExxonMobil
gives $1m to campaign for a carbon tax,” Financial Times, October 9, 2018.
[17] See my
discussion of this in Green Capitalism, pp. 61-64.
[19] Plumer,
“Putting a price on carbon,” op cit.
[20] Plumer,
“Putting a price on carbon,” op cit.
[22] Thanks
to Professor David Klein for the ton-gallon conversions.
[23] Climate
scientist James Hansen has proposed a variation on this theme, his “carbon tax
and dividend” plan. Under this plan, consumers would pay a $1 tax per gallon on
gasoline but they would receive a “dividend” check for the amount they were
taxed back from the government at the end of the year. Painless! Great! The
folly of this scheme is that if there’s no pain there’s no gain. The average
American driver consumed 656 gallons of gasoline in 2016. If he or she were to
get a refund of the $656 carbon tax, what’s to prevent them from spending that
refund on, say, a new flat-screen TV (the production of which produces lots of
CO2 emissions), or a Jet–Blue round trip flight to Cancun, $268 from NYC (far
more emissions than their car produces in a year) either of which they could
easily afford with that tax refund? No pain -- but no gain either.
[24] Arthur
Herman, Freedom’s Forge (New York: Random House, 2012); A.J. Baime, The Arsenal
of Democracy (Boston: Mariner, 2015).
[26] For
example, President Obama’s much-ballyhooed program to “double vehicle fuel
efficiency by 2025” was a con job, custom designed to service Detroit’s desire
to build humongous cars by including a gaping loophole based on “vehicle
footprints” which let the Big Three and others build ginormous gas-hog trucks
and SUVs – Sierras and Ticonderogas and Denalis and Armadas and Suburbans that
get worse gas mileage that Cadillac land yachts of the 1950s – but still meet
their “fleet mileage” targets (As I noted elsewhere, “Your typical 1955
Cadillac coupe DeVille got 12.9 mpg in city driving whereas your typical 2013
Cadillac Escalade gets 10 mpg in the city. . . and this is after six decades of
Detroit’s fuel economy “’improvements’”: Green Capitalism: the God That Failed,
p.131). Thus Obama let the industry push gas-hogs at the expense of gas-sippers
while his “drill baby drill” program to frack the whole country conveniently
supplied so much cheap gas that Americans all but abandoned small cars in favor
of giant overaccessorized gas-hogs which have become the biggest sellers. In
result, U.S. vehicle fleet mileage actually declined under Obama. Brilliant.
Worse, it “incentivized” Detroit to abandon producing actual cars altogether.
By spring 2018, Detroit auto companies announced they would stop producing
economical small cars to focus on producing their profitable luxury hogs. So
much for “win-win” market solutions. Roger Ferris, “The
steadily disappearing American car,” CNBC News, April 6, 2018.
[27] We’re
hardly original here. Others have also argued for nationalization to phase-out
fossil fuels. See Carla Skandier, “Nationalize
the fossil fuel industry,” In These Times, November 17, 2017; and “Quantitative
easing for the planet,” The Next System Project, August 30, 2018; and Peter
Gowan, “A
plan to nationalize fossil fuel companies,” Jacobin, March 2018. This plan
differs in several respects from those: First, Skandier and Gowan focus
exclusively on the fossil fuel producing industries: coal, oil and gas. We
contend that any nationalization of producers would inevitably also require
nationalization of most of the industrial consumers in transportation,
petrochemicals, some manufacturing (autos, Boeing etc.), services (airlines,
likely some tourism, ) distributors, and so on. Secondly, whereas Gowan looks
to hiring freezes, voluntary redundancies, and welfare state and union-run
retraining schemes “to smooth out the transition as much as possible,” we call
for nothing less than iron-clad government-funded job guarantees at comparable
pay and benefits. Given the need for immediate and rapid shutdowns and
retrenchments, nothing less than this has a chance of winning worker support in
those industries. Thirdly, this plan insists on a parallel and coordinated
emergency phase-in of renewables to replace the industries we need to phase
out. Fourthly, this plan calls for transitioning to broad democratic planning.
[29] Julian
Ambrose, “IEA warns $1.3 trillion of oil and gas could be left stranded,”
Telegraph, March 20, 2017.
[32] Ben
Protess et al., “Trump administration spares corporate wrongdoers billions in
penalties,” New York Times, November 3, 2018.
[33] Firoozeh
Dumas, “Why I dread returning to an American public school,” New York Times,
November 10, 2018.
[35] Though
in truth, any savings here should be paid out in reparations for the hundreds
of thousands of people the U.S. military murdered and the countries we’ve
wrecked.
[36] Gordon
Lubold, “U.S. spent $5.6 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia,” Wall
Street Journal, November 2017
[37] Nick
Taylor, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation
to Work (New York: Bantam, 2008). Joseph Maresca, WPA Buildings: Architecture
and Art of the New Deal (Atglen, PA: Schiffler Publishing Ltd., 2016).
[38] Marion
Clawson, New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981). Jess Gilbert, Planning Democracy (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2015).
[40] Damian
Carrington, “Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970,
report finds,” Guardian, October 29, 2018.
[41] Richard
Smith, “How did the common good become a bad idea? The eco-suicidal economics
of Adam Smith,” in idem, Green Capitalism op. cit.
[42] Smith,
“Six theses,” op cit.
[44]Greg
Palast, Jerold Oppenheim, and Theo MacGregor, Democracy and Regulation: How the
Public can Govern Essential Services (London: Pluto Press, 2003), pp. 1-4.
