CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #29, jUNE 28, 2021

 

29.  Climate Memo Mondays, June 28, 2021

The Great Adaptation:  Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe

by Romain Felli.  Translated by David Broder.  Verso, 2021.

Publisher’s description:

Bottom of Form

How capitalism wants us to adapt to climate change rather than stop it.
The Great Adaptation tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to its consequences, rather than combating its causes. Since the 1970s, neoliberal economists and ideologues have used climate change as an argument for creating more “flexibility” in society, for promoting more market-based solutions to environmental and social questions. This book unveils the political economy of this potent movement, showing how some powerful actors are thriving in the face of dangerous climate change and even making a profit out of it.

 

Laurence Shoup.  “The Council on Foreign Relations, the Biden Team, and Key Policy Outcomes: Climate and China.”  Monthly Review (May 2021).

Key Policy Outcomes: Climate and China

In the aftermath of the disastrous Trump years, there are numerous needed foci for the Biden administration, including the climate crisis, growing geopolitical conflict with China, COVID-19, economic recession, the need for democratic renewal, and confronting the ongoing racism and misogyny in U.S. society. I will focus on two key existential threats, the climate crisis and the growing conflict with China.

The Biden Administration and Green New Deal Proposals (pp. 13-15).

     Almost fifteen years ago, the Green Party formulated the concept of the Green New Deal, aiming to achieve zero carbon emissions through creating sustainable green energy infrastructure while at the same time providing full employment at living wages, reducing economic inequality, and providing a “just transition.” Green candidates have had the Green New Deal as part of their platform in state and national elections since 2010. Due to the ongoing failure of the mainstream media to cover Green ideas and candidates, the Green New Deal concept only gained national attention when some Democratic Party officials recognized its value and began to advocate for a first-step version in 2018. But the Democrats, true to their neoliberal ideology, generally refused to go beyond advocating for market-based approaches.

     The partial exception was Senator Sanders, who endorsed the idea of public ownership of utilities, correctly arguing that the country needed to remove the profit motive from the distribution of essential needs like energy. This approach pinpointed the problem: it is the expand-or-die capitalist system that is primarily responsible for the climate crisis, which, if not confronted, will soon result in a planet uninhabitable for humans and other forms of life. But most other Democrats and virtually all Republicans refuse to cross the borderline between private enterprise and public ownership. They recognize that to do so would mark the end of business as usual, an end to the markets-above-all capitalist system that created the climate crisis in the first place. Continued plutocratic rule would be placed in question.
     Proper policy implementation of a robust Green New Deal must reflect the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to overcome the concentrated private power that caused it. Rather than market-based profiteering as a false solution, real answers are to be found in cooperation and collaboration to overcome the crisis and advance the common welfare through governmental institutions. There is a largely unknown U.S. history of public investment and government ownership to advance the public welfare during times of crisis, a history that can help convince people that it can be done again today as well as tomorrow. Just reviewing the history of nationalization in the United States since the First World War one can find numerous instances of government takeover, ownership, and management of enterprises in the national interest. For example, during the First World War, arms manufacturers, telephone, and railroad companies were nationalized by the Woodrow Wilson administration. During the Depression and the Second World War period, energy monopolies, railroads, coal mines, trucking companies, and even some department stores were all nationalized. Steel mills were nationalized during the Korean War. The savings and loan scandal during the 1980s provides yet another example. These governmental actions to put companies and industries under democratic control assured that production and distribution standards were met to serve the public interest. They involved a form of class politics; the interests of the corporate rich to make more profits were superseded by the needs of common welfare. Since the current mode of private ownership is incompatible with the need to prevent ecological collapse and assure the survival of humanity, it is urgently necessary to have a bold, robust Green New Deal, which would involve the nationalization and reconstruction of key parts of the U.S. economy along sustainable lines.
     The most recent and fully developed iteration of the Green New Deal is represented by the 2020 Green Party presidential campaign of Howie Hawkins. He proposed a two-part solution to the climate crisis that he estimated would cost $42 trillion over ten years, funded by progressive taxation, reduced military spending, public borrowing, and public money creation. The first part is Hawkins’s Green Economy Reconstruction Program. This would result in a 100 percent clean energy system by 2030, and would involve a reconstruction of all economic sectors of the U.S. economy for sustainability. Implementation would require social ownership of key sectors of the economy in order to democratically plan an inclusive federal public works project for everything from agriculture to manufacturing to housing to transport. The second part is focused on social justice and is called the Economic Bill of Rights, which includes guarantees for full employment at living wages, income above the poverty line, a decent home, comprehensive free health care, good public education, and secure retirement for everyone.¹⁴
    A smaller Green New Deal, but a still substantial program of public investment costing an estimated $16.3 trillion over ten years, was put forward by Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in the 2020 campaign. Sanders’s program involves some social ownership only in the electric power sector of the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, Sanders falsely stated that “greed,” not capitalism, was “at the very heart of the climate crisis.” Sanders did, however, stress that his program would provide millions of green jobs, social justice for those previously left out, cuts in military spending, and sharp reductions in carbon emissions.¹⁵
      In sharp contrast to Hawkins and Sanders is the Biden program, with only $2 trillion in spending projected so far. Nevertheless, Biden has been attacked by Republicans for his Green New Deal light program, which only proposes to eliminate coal, oil, and natural gas as electric energy sources by 2035. Another promise is to conserve 30 percent of the nation’s land and water by 2030. Biden aims for net zero emissions only by 2050 (almost thirty years from now, when an intensified climate crisis may make such promises moot); in contrast, the Hawkins and Sanders programs are focused on major changes by 2030. It is clear that Biden and his team are not taking the climate crisis seriously enough. The Biden plan is obviously not large enough to save our livable planet for humanity and other life forms. Also unclear is whether there will be enough activist and public pressure to force Biden and his team to expand their program to make it conform to the scale of the immense problem now facing humanity and our planet.
     The Biden team wants to continue with a modified neoliberalism, at a time when this ideology has demonstrably failed. The vast spending to keep the economy afloat and the obvious shortcomings of a public health care system based on private ownership and private profit illustrate this in the starkest terms. The scale of infections and deaths from COVID-19 in the United States is a form of social murder by the private profit “health care” system. Countries with a more collectivist governmental approach to public health (for example China, Taiwan, Cuba, Vietnam, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Australia, New Zealand), and not encumbered by the myths of “freedom,” have done a much better job of keeping the virus under control and saving lives than the United States. A new public health approach in the United States would prize equality, social justice, and health care for all over private profit for the few.