Written by Les
Levidow
Green New Deal
(GND) agendas have gained significant support as means to reconcile
environmental sustainability and a net-zero economy with socio-economic equity.
Their transformative vision has attracted proposals such as more public goods,
workers’ cooperatives and caring activities. Such proposals stimulate people’s imaginations
around pilot schemes prefiguring alternatives to a profit-driven, inequitable
high-carbon economy.
Green Parties
have elaborated a Green New Deal as an ideal wish-list of such measures, variously
called truly green, greener or green-socialist.
Green Parties initially have done so with little regard to significant allies,
which hopefully would be attracted.
By contrast, multi-stakeholder
alliances became a difficult matter in 2019, when GND agendas were
promoted within major political parties such as the US Democratic Party and UK
Labour Party. They have undergone internal conflicts over decarbonisation
pathways, partly expressing conflicts within the labour movement.
Fossil fuel
industries have sought system continuity through decarbonisation technofixes,
with political support from their sector’s trade unions, thus associating
workers’ secure livelihoods with fossil energy. This agenda complements capitalist frameworks
of Green Keynesianism and Green Growth, seeking to reconcile perpetual economic
growth with environmental sustainability.
This false promise helps to soften or defer societal conflicts over an
economically disruptive transition.
By contrast, some public-sector trade unions and
environmentalist allies have sought a socio-economic transformation. This would go beyond the fossil fuel industry
and GDP-driven growth, towards an economy of sufficiency. Such alliances have been coordinated
internationally by Trade Unions for Energy Democracy.
Those divergent
agendas have conflicted over decarbonisation technofixes. Their false promises
have provided an investment imperative for dubious low-carbon remedies, or an
alibi to await their feasibility before abandoning fossil fuels, or both at
once. This dominant agenda imagines the
nation as a unitary economic space needing technoscientific advance for a
global competitive advantage.
Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS), Credit:
Cathy Wilcox,
https://twitter.com/cathywilcox1/status/1263601201179836416
Disputes over
such technofixes express rival societal visions of a low-carbon future. This
conflictual process has shaped what counts as Green and Deal, with somewhat different
outcomes for a GND in the US and UK. In
its 2019 election manifesto, the UK Labour Party’s GND accommodated the
technofix agenda of the natural gas industry.
Similar
tensions will arise around any decarbonisation process, regardless of whether
it is called a Just Transition or Green New Deal. To go beyond false promises will depend on
political struggles to disrupt the hegemonic cross-class alliance, to create
different alliances and to gain state support for their agendas.
Labour
movement groups have been leading GND local alliances along those lines,
sometimes for decarbonisation retrofits of houses (as in Leeds and
Glasgow). Such alliances test strategies
to confront dominant neoliberal agendas, while also developing eco-localisation
alternatives. These seek means to
localise production-consumption circuits, increase public goods, enhance
socio-economic equity, and minimise resource burdens.
What practical implications for Green Parties? To be politically effective, their GND agendas
need an early engagement with activists seeking to undermine false
techno-solutions for high-carbon sectors.
At the same time, this effort needs to develop and test alternatives
bases for livelihoods.
Read the full article: “Green New Deals: what shapes Green and Deal?, Capitalism NatureSocialism (CNS), https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2062675
Les Levidow is a Senior Research Fellow at the Open University. He is a supporter of the Green Left. Contentious fixes and practical alternatives will be analysed in his forthcoming book, Beyond Climate Fixes: From Public Controversy to System Change.
Seems good idea...power to workers with responsibility of planet and personal care
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