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Seizing the Future

The streets of New Orleans are running with saltwater and grime. Mardi Gras beads thrown up by overflowing sewers speckle the muck like shiny soap suds. A Category 4 hurricane—officially named Maggie, informally known as Katrina 2—has smashed through the city’s defenses.

On CNN, the president looks grim but satisfied. “We saw this coming and we prepared. But we can do better.” A Coastal Protection Plan softened the blow: restored wetlands and porous concrete diverted and absorbed a lot of the floodwaters in New Orleans. But the storm’s violence was overwhelming. A well-planned evacuation has saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Electric buses conveyed well-fed, hydrated city residents to temporary retreat camps. The death toll is sixty-five: some residents simply refused to evacuate.

Two days after the flooding subsides, hardy residents and unionized relief workers—many hired through a job guarantee program—are repairing roads, buildings, and power lines. Relief vans deliver reused bus batteries to emergency shelters to bolster damaged emergency microgrids while the larger power system is repaired. The Chinese government has sent a small relief crew with an innovative system for grid repair. They’re joined by conservation workers from around the country, trained in disaster relief and accustomed to bussing from one extreme weather hotspot to another.

The disaster has caused a national revolt. In Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, activists have chained themselves to bulldozers in the country’s last coal pit. Climate justice organizers are decrying slow resiliency investments in Black and Indigenous communities. In cities and towns across the country, militant teachers have joined their students on a new round of climate strikes, angry that the US power sector isn’t on track to hit net zero carbon until 2036. It’s 2027, and solar panels and wind turbines aren’t going up fast enough. The protestors want to try harder to hit the 2030 net zero carbon target set in the heady first 100 days of the Green New Deal, in spring 2021. Polls say the majority of Americans agree.

Looking ahead, coastal, drought-ravaged, and wildfire-scorched communities around the country are having hard conversations. Is it time to retreat? What would it take to stay? Americans are realizing that large-scale climate migration is both international and domestic. Everyone now recognizes what the climate movement has been saying for years. In the twenty-first century, all politics are climate politics.

If the scenario above is disorienting, it’s because we rarely see climate narratives that combine scientific realism with positive political and technological change. Instead, most stories focus on just one trend: the grim projections of climate science, bright reports of promising technologies, or celebrations of gritty activism. But the real world will be a mess of all three. Climate disasters are coming—but we can withstand the coming storms and prevent far worse ones from happening. Whether we arrive at the relatively bright scenario described above will come down to politics—material struggle and bold ideas. If we get it right, we’ll withstand the disasters that are too late to prevent and keep worse ones from happening, while improving living conditions for most people at the same time. We call our vision a radical Green New Deal to signal the depth and breadth of the change we need.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that we need to roughly halve global carbon emissions by 2030 to have a decent chance at keeping warming below 1.5° Celsius—the limit that scientists and activists agree we should aim for to prevent catastrophe. Getting there just might be doable. We can absolutely keep global heating to 2° Celsius—the maximum level that the world agreed on in the Paris Agreement in 2016—although we’re currently not on track to meet it. Halving global emissions, given that billions of people live in countries far poorer than the United States and some economies will decarbonize more slowly, means that the United States needs to zero out emissions as fast as humanly possible. We don’t know exactly how fast climate breakdown will happen—how quickly coral reefs die, glaciers melt, seas rise, and storms strengthen. What we do know is that the less heating, the better. The faster we act, the better.

Carbon pollution, moreover, is just the most urgent indicator of a broader ecological crisis: mass extinction, polluted freshwater, widespread contamination from plastics, systemic soil exhaustion, insect Armageddon, ecosystem collapse—the list goes on. All these are threats to the vitality of the living world around us and to countless human lives.

But despite the erudite self-loathing of so much climate writing in the liberal press, the enemy isn’t us. Humans aren’t tainted by original sin—apples are nutritious and low-carbon, have another. Nor are we doomed to self-destruction. We’re creative, complicated beings stuck in a capitalist economic system where a tiny number of people direct most major investments to maximize profits, and they shape government action accordingly. That system externalizes costs onto communities and ecosystems, and prioritizes the gilded retirement of CEOs over the long-term habitability of the planet, and the lives of those on it.

Ultimately, capitalism is incompatible with environmental sustainability. That said, we have just over a decade to cut global carbon emissions in half. We don’t imagine ending capitalism quite that quickly. In any case, you don’t need to share our overall analysis to read the climate science the same way we do: we need drastic change now. As we’ll argue through this book, the most effective way to slash emissions and cope with climate impacts in the next decade is through egalitarian policies that prioritize public goals over corporate profits, and target investments in poor, working class, and racialized communities. Today’s champions of a Green New Deal remind us that in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s, during the New Deal and subsequent war mobilization, the federal government put millions of people to work on socially beneficial projects, directing investment toward public works and astonishingly rapid arms building. The point isn’t to repeat the past, but to remember what concerted public action can do.

We know that the scale and speed of change we’re proposing can seem overwhelming. More gradual measures might have worked if we had started decades ago. But we didn’t. By the time climate science was getting regular press in the late 1980s, market fundamentalism had taken over mainstream politics. The results have been dismal. In the past four decades, the rich have gotten richer, wages have stagnated, the cost of living has climbed, and the prison population has skyrocketed. Half the country is poorer now than it was in 1980, and 90 percent of Americans are now poorer than they were before the 2008 crash.¹ Meanwhile, carbon emissions have risen unabated, while US fossil fuel extraction has experienced a golden age. Worldwide, over half of the carbon pollution ever released was emitted after 1988. So much for the “end of history.”

We’re now witnessing a deep unraveling of American life, which is especially stark for young people and people of color. It’s visible in the form of rising student debt, bankruptcies driven by medical bills, and an ongoing housing crisis punctuated by evictions, foreclosures, and utility shut-offs. And then there are the waves of climate-linked disasters: In 2017, Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston; then Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, killing 2,975 people. In 2018, the deadliest wildfire in California history tore through the state’s northern forests, killing eighty-five people and destroying thousands of homes—just a month after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that climate effects would be worse than anticipated. Far deadlier storms, droughts, and heat waves have ravaged communities across the Global South. The climate crisis is entwined—objectively, and in our everyday lives—with a broader crisis of capitalism. Gradualism won’t cut it.

Radical change only happens when millions of people are organizing, striking, and marching, shaping politics and the economy from below. Tackling the climate crisis will require action from unions, social movements, Indigenous peoples, racial justice groups, and others to take back public power from the elites who’ve presided over the climate emergency. That’s why the Green New Deal must combine climate action with attacks on social inequalities. Only then can we build enough public support and grassroots organizing to break the stranglehold of the status quo, and give people reasons to keep fighting for more. Who will march for green austerity? For all its flaws, the original New Deal excelled in creating a positive feedback loop between public spending on collective goods and mass mobilization, thus overcoming anti-socialist hostility from the business class and political elites. A Green New Deal would likewise have to make climate action viscerally beneficial, turning victories into organizing tools for yet greater political mobilization—and for ongoing liberation. Done right, investments in climate action could facilitate real freedom for everyone, the kind that only economic security for all makes possible.

While climate narratives often look decades into the future, this short book’s focus is tighter—the pivotal 2020s. We can’t address every topic—food systems and migration are especially big omissions. With limited space, we explore a handful of core climate battlegrounds with fresh eyes. We call for winding down fossil extraction and private utilities, putting both under democratic, public control. We tackle labor, a longtime sticking point for environmental action, arguing for a commitment to guaranteed green jobs and making the case for a larger transformation of work. We connect clean energy to housing, transit, and recreation, arguing for a housing guarantee and dramatically expanded options for leisure. And we show how a radical Green New Deal in the United States can strengthen commitments to egalitarian climate action around the world, starting with solidarity with the communities at the frontlines of the mining for renewable energy inputs.

We know that in this same timeline, Republican intransigence and entrenched antidemocratic mechanisms like the Senate and electoral college are real obstacles. In a best-case scenario, a Democratic nominee supportive of massive climate investment would be elected in late 2020, and we’d see major Green New Deal legislation passed during the first 100 days of the new administration. But even a progressive president would face hostility from courts, corporate-backed legislators, giant corporations, and their own party apparatus. We change that political math not by negotiating in the Beltway, but by building power beyond it—through elections and in the streets. Only mass mobilization will turn out demoralized voters of every color and push a slim Democratic Senate majority to eliminate the filibuster or use budget reconciliation. Only pressure from below can force judges, regulatory agencies, and state and local politicians to go along with a Green New Deal.

~

This book is rooted in our reading of the science and social science on climate change, our hands-on research, and our personal and political biographies. Collectively, we’ve spent years researching, writing, and undertaking labor and political organizing. Two of us are children of Latin American immigrants; inspired by Latin American social movements, we’ve lived and worked all over the continent, learning from the achievements and limits of the Left in power.

We’ve all come to the climate fight by different routes. We all see climate change as a grave threat to human flourishing, a clear indictment of our current political and economic system—and an opportunity to do things differently. For most of our lives, climate politics have felt stuck in a loop of abstract reports telling us the window of opportunity is closing and the apocalypse looming. The Green New Deal is the most ambitious and exciting plan we’ve ever seen in mainstream politics. We want to help articulate its vision—and flesh out some details.

While US action is urgent, it’s not enough. Climate breakdown and capitalism are global. But as US residents, this is the political system we have at least some leverage over. The United States is also the belly of the beast. It remains the world’s second-largest carbon emitter, behind China. In per-capita terms, US emissions are over twice as high. And our aggregate historical emissions—over one-fifth of the global total—eclipse every other country’s. The United States has been the single greatest obstacle to global climate action for decades, and today, it’s poised to increase fossil fuel extraction more than any other country.² A Green New Deal that turns US climate politics around would be transformative. If the United States joined (and prodded) Europe and China in prioritizing climate-friendly green investment, more than half the global economy would be invested in climate action. Our chapter on the Green New Deal’s global implications focuses on how US-based movements might connect to worker and community struggles elsewhere.

A final caveat: This book is full of “shoulds,” and even the occasional “must.” Please forgive our enthusiasm. We don’t mean to lecture, but to enrich debate with clear arguments for what we might accomplish. We hope that in the best case scenario we’ll only be a little bit wrong.

The Road to the Green New Deal

We can start by learning from recent climate policy failures. Many Democratic leaders still simultaneously argue that we should blame the lack of climate action on unwavering Republican climate denial, and that bipartisan compromise is the best hope for getting climate legislation passed. Their track record doesn’t inspire much confidence.

When Barack Obama entered office in 2009 amid the biggest financial crisis since the Depression, he had incredible power to act. But in the early months of his administration, Obama chose to restore the system that had caused the crisis rather than to change it. We know he bailed out the banks instead of nationalizing them, even as 9.3 million households lost their homes. In this context, Obama’s team also nixed the idea of a federally built clean energy grid on the grounds that government shouldn’t crowd out private actors. They rejected proposals for federal green banks that would fund low-energy building upgrades, clean energy build-out, and high-voltage transmission wires.³ Instead of using budget reconciliation maneuvers to push a truly progressive package through the Senate by majority vote, Obama reached across the aisle to get a handful of Republicans to support a compromise stimulus—the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Nearly a quarter of the $820 billion stimulus went into tax cuts.

The Obama administration did pour $90 billion into clean energy measures through the stimulus package. It included clean energy research and development, subsidized wind and solar build-out, and allocated billions for high-speed rail (most of which wasn’t built). Thanks to Fox News, the bankruptcy of stimulus-funded Solyndra grew infamous, while few knew that the same stimulus established Tesla with billions of public dollars. ARRA really was good for wind, solar, and batteries. So centrists defend Obama’s green stimulus on the grounds that it was better than it gets credit for. What they never consider is that he didn’t try to make green investment viscerally popular, by tying his clean industrial policy to a transformative government jobs program and housing rescue.

On the contrary, Obama’s team fastidiously avoided anything that smacked of socialism. In the eyes of top advisors like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner, this precluded nearly all major public interventions into the economy. Recall that in late 2008 and 2009, the federal government and Treasury had poured trillions of public dollars into rescuing Wall Street and real estate, effectively putting the government in charge. Obama chose not to use that power to implement Left populist policies that would have helped millions struggling to survive, building the appetite for more aggressive action. He fired Van Jones, his “green jobs czar,” to appease the conservative media mere months after taking office. He declined to directly hire millions of workers to make needed infrastructure repairs and restore ecosystems. (In 1934, FDR temporarily hired four million workers to relieve devastating unemployment.) Instead of directly stemming foreclosures through aggressive government action, Obama implemented convoluted and ineffective programs. And he signed onto the Bush administration’s wildly unpopular bank bailout, emphasizing continuity for Wall Street’s benefit. He wouldn’t even restrict bonuses for bank executives saved by bailouts. As he told financial CEOs in early 2009, “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” Frankly, he should have put unemployed people to work in a solar-powered pitchfork factory.

As the sociologist Theda Skocpol shows, the administration’s striving for elite compromise also helped doom the 2009 Waxman-Markey climate bill. Grassroots green groups were sidelined, while a handful of NGOs and fossil fuel executives haggled behind closed doors, wasting what was left of the precious political opening created by the crisis.⁴ Although the bill made major concessions to the fossil fuel industry and other business interests, it still collapsed in the Senate in 2010.⁵

In his second term, Obama accelerated regulations to make the economy more energy efficient and shut down coal plants. He signed the Paris Agreement, a modest achievement hyped as a major victory. The low-carbon pledges made by signatory countries failed to match the Agreement’s stated goal of keeping warming below 2º Celsius. The biggest bottleneck in global climate politics remained the United States.

Fundamentally, the limits of Obama’s climate policies reflected the broader failures of the United States center-left’s neoliberal turn, premised on the idea that bipartisan consensus could pass reasonable policies to advance the common good—without the common people getting in the way. As historian Adam Tooze observes, “Obama’s administration never built the constituency of Democrats-for-life that was shaped by Roosevelt’s New Deal.”⁶ This failure made it all too easy for Trump to win the electoral college by promising to bring manufacturing jobs back to the rust belt, which had never really recovered from the 2008 crash—or, for that matter, from Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Four-and-a-half million Obama voters, half of them people of color, stayed home in November 2016.⁷ And now Trump is threatening a climate apocalypse. Can a return to mild progressivism really stem the tide of authoritarian, conservative oligarchy?

Brad DeLong, an economist who helped lead the Democrats’ neoliberal era, recently admitted that project’s failure: “Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract more Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition.” DeLong’s message for his centrist friends? “The baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.”⁸

Today’s young climate activists have seized the baton and turned it into a torch. In that, they’re joining the broader wave of movements that have shaken the post-Katrina, post-2008 world, declaring that business as usual must end if we’re to have a future.

In late 2018, the charismatic democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez upset a longstanding Democratic congressman in a New York primary, got elected to Congress, and immediately made the Green New Deal a priority. Before she was even sworn in, she joined Sunrise Movement protesters sitting in at Nancy Pelosi’s office. A month later, Ocasio-Cortez and climate stalwart Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) released a resolution calling for a Green New Deal.⁹

The resolution calls for massive public investment to get the US economy to net zero carbon in the 2030s (the exact timeline is ambiguous). Connecting the climate crisis to economic misery, it calls for a job guarantee, wherein the public sector would provide a job to any US resident who wants one. The resolution also echoes legislation in California and New York State by prioritizing clean energy and resiliency investments in racialized and working-class communities, and it calls for expanding and improving access to a huge range of social services through programs like free public college tuition and Medicare for All. Other issues, like housing and agriculture, are mentioned in passing. Environmental and climate justice movements, progressive greens, and some major labor unions have organized around these ideas for decades. Their arguments were finally reflected in a high-profile national policy framework.

The AOC-Markey climate program marks a radical break from the Obama era of climate policy, which sometimes used the language of the Green New Deal but failed to live up to the rhetoric. The Green New Deal resolution, by contrast, offers a program of economic transformation that shouts its ambition from the rooftops. Its realism isn’t grounded in Beltway savvy but the world’s best climate science. Its vision is on the scale of an existential threat to human civilization. But it’s also short on concrete next steps.

The battle over the Green New Deal’s meaning has begun, with pundits, grassroots movements, and presidential aspirants staking out clearer and more prominent positions on climate change than ever before. Many centrist economists, wonks, and pundits have tried to ride the new wave of excitement around climate policy, using the language of the Green New Deal to describe programs with far less ambition.¹⁰ We call their alternative the “faux Green New Deal.”

In the view of these cautious moderates, decarbonizing the economy by the mid 2030s—or even just the energy sector!—is absurdly ambitious. Faux Green New Deal advocates see the plan’s social agenda as an expensive distraction. They believe that carbon taxes, with refunds for the poor, and heavy investments in research and development (R&D), should be the main policies that decarbonize the economy—gradually, but efficiently. To be fair, it’s a coherent approach. Their view is that climate progress is most likely to happen if it’s simple and narrow in scope—focused mainly on energy, minimally intrusive in everyday life, and garnering agreement among policy elites. For these skeptics, it’s precisely because inequalities are so entrenched that it would be reckless to hinge decarbonization on struggles for universal, quality social services and public control over markets. Getting to net zero carbon in the United States in ten years—or even twenty—will be hard enough. Why add the extra burdens of dismantling inequalities and disciplining capital? Why not save the world today, then make it better tomorrow?

The Practical Case for Radicalism

The real “green dream, or whatever,” to borrow a phrase from Nancy Pelosi, is that the “faux Green New Deal” will work.¹¹ One simple argument structures this book: An effective Green New Deal is also a radical Green New Deal.

When we talk about a radical Green New Deal, we don’t mean a fringe position. Our word radical comes from the Latin radix, meaning root: radical change is systemic change that tackles root causes rather than merely addressing symptoms. Is that too much to fight for in the United States? We agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s statement on 60 Minutes: “It only has ever been radicals that have changed this country.”¹² We think a radical Green New Deal would also be a popular one. We aim to build a climate politics for the 99 percent: the multiracial masses against a tiny elite, demanding justice for all on a livable planet.

More concretely, what does it mean to get at the roots of climate change?

For one thing, we’re taking the science seriously and setting our political goals accordingly. The faux Green New Deal logic of gentler targets and slower change effectively accepts global heating of 3° Celsius, risking even more if climatic feedbacks kick in fast. Our goal is a maximum of 2° Celcius of warming, aiming for as close to 1.5° Celsius as we can get. What’s more, while the faux Green New Deal uses tax incentives and price signals as its economic levers, the radical Green New Deal would use the power of public investment and coordination to prioritize decarbonization at speed, scope, and scale. And while the faux Green New Deal focuses narrowly on swapping clean energy for fossil fuels, we see energy as connected to broader physical systems and social inequalities. A radical Green New Deal leans in to the inevitable intersections of social, economic, and environmental policy, and prioritizes equality.

Finally, the faux Green New Deal sees the scope and ambition of a radical Green New Deal as a political liability. The faux Green New Deal seeks to achieve change by maximizing elite consensus and making policy under the radar. In contrast, we see the broadening of climate policy as a political asset: it’s an opportunity to build majority support for big change and mobilize political energies to break the status quo. Let us explain in more depth.

We start with our core priority: avoiding climate collapse. We don’t know exactly how sensitive the climate system is. Planning for 2.5° or 3° Celsius of warming, as the faux Green New Deal’s gradualism implicitly does, accepts devastating impacts in Global South countries and risks an apocalyptic 4.5° Celsius. So we’re shooting for 1.5° Celsius. We’d rather miss an all-out 2030 power sector decarbonization plan by a few years than miss a slower, easier 2040 target, where failure would have graver consequences. As bad as US weather is getting, in the near term African and Asian countries will bear the greatest brunt of 3° Celsius warming. We’re not willing to let that happen just to make life easier for ExxonMobil and Wall Street. And we’re more worried about the carbon budget than the fiscal deficit. Our bottom line is the scientific consensus that the 2020s will require, as a recent essay in Science put it, “Herculean” efforts to transform the economy.¹³

Herculean change isn’t the specialty of market nudges. To decarbonize fast, we have to take democratic, public control of much of the economy to put equitable climate action first. Remember: Capitalists invest in projects to make money and consolidate their power, not to make the world a better place. If the latter happens, it’s a happy side effect. Even if some corporate executives worry about the world that awaits their grandchildren, they will never sacrifice profits to cut carbon emissions. If they did, their shareholders would replace them.

The faux Green New Deal tries to harness capitalist investment for climate benefit mainly through R&D funding, mild subsidies, and pricing carbon. They see a carbon tax as the main engine driving the private sector toward lower carbon investments, incentivizing companies and consumers alike to decarbonize. They also want to prioritize R&D for new technologies like large-scale geothermal energy, alternatives to conventional meat protein, and direct air capture of carbon. We agree on ramping up R&D. It’s just no substitute for dramatically accelerating deployment of the excellent clean technology we already have.

We also support a progressive carbon tax, with a rebate for low- and middle-income people. A modest price on carbon can help knock out coal, which is already on the ropes. If well-designed, it can help steer people away from carbon-intensive consumption, encouraging us to spend our extra cash on dance classes instead of a new iPad, and can help government agencies and firms plan long-term investments to account for climate change. But pricing carbon is a secondary tool, a complement to our principal levers of public spending, coordination, and regulation, all aimed at raising the general standard of living. Without accessible no-carbon alternatives, jacking up the price of gas will just cause a huge political backlash. Carbon pricing is also an oddly indirect strategy for rapid change. As the journalist David Roberts joked during a 2018 lecture in Philadelphia, the United States didn’t defeat the Nazis by taxing factories that didn’t produce planes and tanks for the war effort.

For the United States to get to net zero emissions in its power sector by the mid-2030s, the country needs to build out new clean energy at least ten times faster than in recent years. Along with public investments in ecosystem restoration, green infrastructure, and conservation work, these measures would require an enormous amount of labor—and thus create millions of high-quality green jobs. There’s simply no precedent for the private sector mobilizing that broadly and quickly. With state support, green capitalists have developed cheap and effective clean energy technologies. But while solar companies can gradually outcompete coal, they can’t legislate coal out of existence or transform the electricity grid and broader energy system.

Under a radical Green New Deal, the public sector would direct investment and coordinate production, much as it did during World War II. Can government bureaucracies handle such complex work? They could seventy-five years ago, working with legal pads and chalkboards. In the 1940s, improvised public agencies, the army, and government-subsidized businesses ramped up the production of killing machinery with unbelievable speed. The public-backed industry built the world’s largest factory in under a year near Ypsilanti, Michigan; it went on to produce a B-24 bomber every hour. Overnight, car seat factories switched to parachute production and Cadillac assembly lines started churning out tanks.¹⁴

We wish we had a different analogy for that scale of public action than World War II. But the point remains: we can build—and push—a public sector capable of stewarding a rapid and just transition. It’s often forgotten, moreover, that state capacity was built up in the decade prior by the New Deal. Neoliberals have spent four decades chipping away at these administrative capacities, weakening regulations and many federal agencies to empower big business. Rebuilding and reinvigorating public institutions is one of the most important tasks we face today.

Much of what we’re proposing is called industrial policy. It’s widespread in Europe, East and Southeast Asia, and beyond; it featured in ARRA’s success stories. More broadly, in the United States, state-funded military research has spawned most of the technologies at work in smartphones—like GPS, the internet, and microprocessors. The National Institute of Health and the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program regularly fund pathbreaking innovations. Most infrastructure development already combines public and private investment. Big states like California and New York are already experimenting with Green New Deal tools like aggressive regulations, green banks, and targeting green investments in marginalized communities.

Popular participation will be essential to make sure a large-scale mobilization doesn’t run roughshod over people’s lives. Federal power doesn’t have to mean top–down control. Labor unions, nonprofits, and community groups should all help steer the transition. As in Germany, we could foster energy community cooperatives for solar and onshore wind. In working class communities, which are disproportionately Black and brown, investment could empower people to make decisions over production and direct funds toward their needs. All this could help orient the state away from mass incarceration and toward community welfare.

We would also expand nonmarket institutions that are accountable to and run by communities, not governments—like public credit unions and utilities, land trusts, and worker cooperatives. And we would welcome worker co-ownership of large private companies, through arrangements like the “inclusive ownership funds” being debated in the United States and United Kingdom. Federally funded projects would be locally controlled. Picture libraries doubling as resiliency centers, community gardens employing neighborhood residents, and cooperatives of contractors weatherizing homes. The point isn’t to give Washington, DC, more power for centralization’s sake, but for federal spending to empower communities at various scales to better control their own lives.

Ultimately, the carbon-tax-first approach of faux Green New Deal boosters posits microeconomics as the solution to the climate crisis, when what we really need is a new political economy. Averting catastrophe means transforming consumption and production, prioritizing shared public goods that improve overall quality of life over the consumption of cheap, carbon-rich crap that we don’t need. We should all eat less meat and fly for fun less often. But we have to change collectively—and for that, we need no-carbon alternatives. Public agencies would drive the big change, providing green jobs in place of environmentally destructive work; building guaranteed public housing, parks, and playgrounds; and expanding no-carbon services like free health care and education. As we explain throughout the book, investing in equality isn’t just a feel-good add-on: it’s our most effective and efficient lever for decarbonizing, by making the good life compatible with lower resource use.

It’s the rich who will bear the brunt of climate sacrifice. They’ve reaped almost all the benefits of economic growth for decades, and they’ve spent it lavishly. Globally, the wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for half the world’s carbon footprint.¹⁵ In the United States, the richest tenth of the population is responsible for a quarter of emissions.¹⁶ Cutting their consumption would have a far greater ecological impact than anything the rest of us can do individually. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson estimates that if the wealthiest 10 percent of people worldwide consumed at the level of the average European, global carbon emissions would drop by roughly a third.¹⁷ The wealthy also funnel the billions they don’t consume into investments that diminish our common world—from uninhabited luxury apartments in New York and San Francisco to venture capital thrown at rideshare companies displacing public transit.

To reuse, recycle, and—most importantly—redistribute on a massive scale, a radical Green New Deal would levy higher wealth, inheritance, and upper-level income taxes to slash luxury consumption and help fund public luxuries.

Such a monumental project will take a lot of what’s often referred to as “political will,” or what we prefer to call political power. This is where the difference between our vision and that of the faux Green New Deal comes to a head. Green policy elites often assume that change comes from above: if only some politicians were bold enough to lead on climate action, the people would follow. We think it works the other way around.

Elitist narratives about climate change often suggest that ordinary people can’t understand it and will never sacrifice for the benefit of future generations or distant others. But we think the real problem is that ordinary people have been stripped of their power. Starting in the 1970s, the US business class has crushed labor unions—one of our greatest vehicles for equality. The percentage of workers represented by unions has been halved; in that same time, workers’ real wages stagnated, even as their productivity increased. The share of income going to the top 10 percent of earners nearly doubled, and the 1 percent did even better. This wasn’t only an economic change—it was also a political one. The super-rich seized even greater control of political parties, rewriting laws at every level of government for their own benefit.

As the country’s elite dismantled both unions and public power, they also strengthened big business and the fossil fuel sector. Leading capitalist associations—the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and so on—have helped hand Big Oil tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks. The Democrats helped too.

To break the power of the reigning elite and impose public priorities on the economy, we need to build a mass coalition of ordinary people. Rebuilding public power will require tackling the inequalities and divisions that capitalism sows, both among US working families and across borders. Things are now so bad that most Americans are ready for change, as recent political turmoil makes clear. A radical Green New Deal doesn’t try to side-step all this political energy—it builds on it for the common good.

Beyond Bad Dichotomies

We see public investment and popular mobilization as non-negotiable elements of the radical Green New Deal. Yet prospects for climate action tend to rouse sharp debate around old dichotomies, especially on the Left. Polemicists charge that you’re either a cornucopian or a Malthusian, an eco-modernist or a Luddite. We think drawing strict, abstract lines on science, technology, and particular economic tools can distract us from more fundamental questions. Instead of fetishizing or demonizing technologies, we call for evaluating them the way we would any other political project: Do they reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and advance human freedom? Who controls them, and for what purposes?

Capitalism likes to tout technology as a wonder drug—let corporations charge enough for their products and they’ll solve all our problems. We know technology won’t “solve” climate change while leaving the rest of the world intact. But we also shouldn’t let the military or Silicon Valley own or define “tech”—literally or metaphorically. Science and technology can help us understand, and live with, the planet we share.

We’re skeptical that there will be viable technologies to capture and store carbon burned by natural gas plants on an industrial scale or to produce limitless quantities of clean energy with no social or ecological cost. But if someone developed cold fusion or a giant decarbonizing machine tomorrow, we’d be thrilled—as long as ExxonMobil didn’t hold the patent. We want to keep open every nuclear plant that can run safely until we reach net zero carbon and can replace nuclear energy with solar and wind.

In short, we see no reason to arbitrarily decide in advance which technologies will ultimately be sustainable or morally preferable. We want the longest possible list of options for quickly slashing carbon. We want to build power for better technology, inspired by calls for a new digital commons that would put the power of machine learning and algorithms under transparent, democratic control. And we want to radically loosen patents to speed global cooperation on clean tech, making the best tools available to all countries. The possibility of technological miracles in the future can’t be an excuse to do less now. As we’ve argued, we want to increase public research and development and accelerate deployment of no-carbon technologies we already have.

This book also doesn’t parse debates around how to pay for a radical Green New Deal. You may or may not accept the tenets of modern monetary theory, which holds that the government can produce almost unlimited money for useful investment. Either way, there’s broad economic agreement among a range of progressive schools of economic thought that the conditions are favorable for at least a few years of massive, public green investment. We’ve had decades of low interest rates; there’s fiscal room for maneuver; the Fed has a panoply of tools to prevent runaway inflation; green bonds are an exploding market that we could tap. There are also countless reasons to increase taxes on the wealthy, which can help fund social benefits, clean energy deployment, and research and development. There are hundreds of billions to be redirected from the military and fossil fuel subsidies. Meanwhile, the future costs of unabated climate change are incalculable. In the last three years, the average cost of climate-related disasters in the United States alone was $150 billion per year. We know that we have enough money and economic consensus to start funding a radical Green New Deal now—and that we can’t afford not to.

Even if a magic decarbonator miraculously appeared overnight, we’d still have an ecological crisis. This raises the most contentious dichotomy of all: growth or degrowth. GDP growth has never been a great metric for the things we care about. The past forty years show that it can continue without benefiting most people’s well-being or trickling down. Contrary to the ideology of capitalism, materially intensive growth can’t continue forever. We can’t pretend ecological limits don’t exist. And contrary to the arguments of clean technophiles, there’s zero evidence that growth can be meaningfully “decoupled” from resource use, or occur without environmental impact. Our view is that we need a “Last Stimulus” of green economic development in the short term to build landscapes of public affluence, develop new political-economic models, jump off the growth treadmill, break with capital, and settle into a slower groove.

Reconnecting the Dots

The old ecological adage is right: everything is connected. The planet and its atmosphere are the material base on which all other human activity rests. Today, capitalism drives most of that activity. At every turn, carbon emissions are entangled with the drive for profit and filtered through the lived realities of race, class, gender, and place.

Yet policy discussions tend to divide climate change into silos, offering analyses sector by sector—buildings, transportation, power plants, agriculture—and targeted solutions for addressing them one at a time. But each issue intersects with others in countless ways. Climate change, the economy, social inequalities—they’re all tied up together. So we break the problem down in a way that emphasizes the connections between politics, economics, and carbon, using a holistic, political economy approach that could be applied to any number of issues.

A Planet to Win devotes a chapter each to four strategic battlegrounds: fossil fuels and private utilities; labor; the built environment; and the global supply chains of a renewable transition. In each, we explore our vision of what a Green New Deal could do and how to dig into the struggles ahead.

For a stable climate and a more equal world, we have to simultaneously unmake our fossil-fueled lifestyles and build infrastructures that equitably distribute renewable energy. We have to dismantle the most powerful industry on earth incredibly fast, or the things we build to replace it won’t matter. That means tackling fossil capital head on.

To do that, we’ll need the power that comes with a renewed labor movement—which means overcoming longstanding tensions between labor and environmental politics. There’s a lot of work to do to build a world that runs on sunshine. But all the work we’ll need to retrofit homes and erect wind turbines, solar arrays, and transmission lines doesn’t exhaust the category of “green jobs.” Far from it. In our vision, care work—construed broadly to encompass reproducing our communities and restoring the planet’s ecosystems—is just as essential to a green economy.

Even the energy transition itself isn’t just about swapping out one energy source for another. Energy systems are embedded in everyday life: they shape everything from transit to housing to the landscapes traversed by power lines. We dig into the guts of all these systems to show how at every turn, remaking our built environment is wrapped up with politics—and opportunities for liberation.

Finally, we have to track the implications of an energy transition beyond US borders. A transition in the United States can’t come at the cost of more devastation elsewhere. Basic solidarity means respecting the democratic will of communities who supply the lithium, cobalt, copper, and other resources needed to produce renewable energy and who bear the brunt of extraction’s effects. Building solidarity across borders is the best way to strengthen global climate cooperation rooted in justice.

Coda: The Next Crisis

At the time of writing, in summer 2019, the Trumpian nightmare feels ghoulishly routine. But change comes in volcanic bursts, and the magma beneath us is boiling. Over the last two centuries, organized movements have repeatedly built enough strength to make vast social change, transforming worldviews and material conditions: the abolitionists of the nineteenth century, the movement for women’s suffrage, the radical labor movement, the civil rights movement, queer liberation. Broad majorities for radical change always start as militant minorities. Today, militant organizing is everywhere, from the explosive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America to the teachers’ strike wave to the migrants’ rights movement, and increased mobilization around racial justice, housing justice, reproductive justice, and Indigenous rights. Even scientists are marching on Washington.

There’s also the matter of crisis. President Obama wasted his, but more are on the horizon. A global economic slump looms; climate disasters are unfolding faster than ever. Ecological and economic crises are sure to coincide and mutually reinforce. At the time of writing, Americans are struggling to make their car loan payments, and student debt is obliterating the bank accounts of millions of millennials. There are billions of dollars in real estate value in housing markets that are literally about to go underwater—forever—in places like Miami Beach. Oil majors, some of the world’s biggest companies, are valued based on their reserves—which contain roughly five times as much carbon as we can burn without destroying civilization. The Bank of England is warning all who will listen about these “stranded assets.” In 2008, we saw what a few million bad mortgages could do to a hyperfinancialized, overleveraged, and interconnected global economy. Worse is coming.

We don’t celebrate or romanticize brutal breakdowns of social, economic, and political stability. But as Naomi Klein showed to such devastating effect in her book The Shock Doctrine, the Right plans for crises meticulously. We should, too. If we can organize in advance, we can use the openings created by the next crises to directly attack their root causes. No more crises wasted.

Whenever they strike, those coming crises will be chances to charge forward with our organizing. And when market crashes coincide with progressives and leftists holding state power, militant organizing proliferating, and millions marching in the streets, our leverage will be huge. Each win that cuts carbon and betters everyday life lays the groundwork for more. The premise of a radical Green New Deal is that we’re entering a new era for politics—a whole new terrain, material and imaginative, for deciding how to channel our collective energies. The future is coming at us fast—but we still have the chance to shape it. We have nothing to lose, and a planet to win.

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1 Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018, wir2018.wid.world; Lisa Dettling et al., “A Wealthless Recovery? Asset Ownership and the Uneven Recovery from the Great Recession,” FEDS Notes, federalreserve.gov.

2 Christopher Alessi, “US Expected to Produce Half of Global Oil and Gas Growth by 2025,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2018.

3 Reed Hundt, A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decision (Rosetta Books 2019).

4 Theda Skocpol, “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming,” Harvard University, prepared for the symposium on the politics of America’s fight against global warming, 2013, scholars.org.

5 Ryan Lizza, “As the World Burns,” New Yorker, October 3, 2010.

6 Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Viking 2018), p. 280.

7 Philip Bump, “4.4 million 2012 Obama voters stayed home in 2016 — more than a third of them black,” Washington Post, March 12, 2018.

8 Zach Beauchamp, “A Clinton-era Centrist Democrat Explains Why It’s Time to Give Democratic Socialists a Chance,” Vox, March 4, 2019.

9 Danielle Kurtzeblen, “Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Releases Green New Deal Outline,” NPR, February 7, 2019.

10 For example, see Editorial Board, “Want a Green New Deal? Here’s a Better One,” Washington Post, February 4, 2019.

11 “Pelosi calls the Green New Deal ‘the green dream or whatever,’” The Week, February 7, 2019.

12 60 Minutes, CBS News, June 23, 2019.

13 Johan Rockström et al., “A Roadmap for Rapid Decarbonization,” Science, vol. 355, no. 6331, March 24, 2017.

14 Bill McKibben, “A World at War,” New Republic, August 15, 2016. Also see Mark R. Wilson, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016).

15 Oxfam International, “Extreme Carbon Inequality,” December 2, 2015, oxfam.org.

16 Kevin Ummel, “Who Pollutes? A Household-Level Database of America’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint,” Center for Global Development, Working Paper 381, October 10, 2014, cgdev.org.

17 Kevin Anderson, “Response to the IPCC 1.5°C Special Report,” Manchester Policy Blogs, October 8, 2018, blog.policy.manchester.ac.uk.