OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #164, FEBRUARY 5, 2024.

 

OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #164, FEBRUARY 5, 2024.

John J. Berger.  Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth.  2023.

     From my New Deal perspective (I was born in 1932), one of Berger’s most important chapters is #14, pp. 283ff., “New Laws and Politics,” where he discusses “current barriers to the kind of fair and comprehensive policies that would speed us toward a safe, stable earth and a more just society.”  They especially include the flood of secret money into “super PACs” used to influence elections and legislation permitted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, and by implication the rigging of the tax code to allow a few people to be billionaires and trillionaires and turn our democracy into plutocracy.

        Governments will never be able to enact effective climate-protection programs and social and economic justice until secrecy, concentration of wealth, and gross economic inequality are ended.   Those reforms possess historical precedence in the Democratic Party’s New Deal of the 1930s, which produced a massive social and economic turnaround from the Great Depression.  And the world is “in a situation even more perilous than the Great Depression or World War II.”   We need a similar scale and intensity of response “to reverse climate change: a concerted nationwide industrial effort to produce millions of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, carbon capture machines, and zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs).”  The US mobilized in 1930s and 1940s against Depression and War.  “We must do the same for the climate crisis.”
           Today we again urgently need a national, science-based, climate plan to coordinate and fulfill the many city and state programs already in action and the Green New Deal of H. Res. 109.  As important, as in the New Deal it would reorganize government at the top (FDR “created sixty-nine new federal offices”).  The Plan “might be titled America’s Energy Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future.  “A necessary early step in mobilizing the nation is the creation of a powerful cabinet-level Climate Protection Department ” with separate agencies;  such as Climate Emergency Agency, Clean Transition Redevelopment Agency,  and Civilian Climate Corps.

     Seven major federal actions are needed now to curb CO2: all new power plants, new buildings, and vehicles must use zero-emission renewable-energy technologies.   The railroads must be rebuilt to clean and high-speed specifications. And airlines must reduce their emissions annually by 5 percent.  A national green bank should be established to finance these mandates.  And a national carbon-credit plan must be established. 

      He discusses a national carbon-tax, argues that the federal carbon-tax bill H.R. 763 must be greatly strengthened, and he presents cost projections needed to reach net-zero carbon by 2050.   And he rejects the industry-supported Climate Leadership Council (CLC) proposals that would not phase out fuels or subsidies, among other liabilities.

    He concludes with a reminder that international collaboration is essential to the success of any individual national plan.     (pp.283-305).