In
November 2018, the Green New Deal became a rallying cry for climate
activists when members of the Sunrise Movement occupied House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi’s office and adopted the slogan as
their unifying message.
A few months later, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who had
joined the young activists in Pelosi’s office, brought this
message to Congress when she partnered with Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) to
introduce their Green
New Deal resolution.
More manifesto than binding legislation, the resolution laid out a
vision of an equitable clean energy transition for the United States.
In
drawing from the language and history of FDR’s New Deal of the
1930s, climate activists have hoped to join together two strands of
the progressive movement: environmentalism and economic justice. The
United States needs to radically reduce its carbon footprint and, at
the same time, create well-paying jobs, especially for those workers
leaving economic sectors associated with dirty energy. As with FDR’s
program, the Green New Deal relies on government direction and
funding to advance this major economic transformation.
Since
the original resolution, other Green New Deal bills have emerged on
education, housing, and cities. U.S. cities, too, have established
Green New Deal initiatives, and many civic organizations continue to
champion the GND as a radical vision for a reoriented U.S. society.
Yet
many of the actual components of a clean energy transition have
stalled in Congress even though the candidate who promised such a
transition won the presidential election in 2020. Although some very
modest climate-related provisions can be found in two successful
pieces of legislation supported by the Joe Biden administration—the
American
Rescue Plan
and the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law,
both in 2021—the bulk of the clean energy provisions have been
bundled into Build Back Better. Originally a $3.5 trillion Democratic
proposal, this bill was whittled down to $2.2 trillion and then
effectively killed by Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) in late 2021.
“Build
Back Better is seen by many as the biggest step in the direction of
the Green New Deal,” relates Brett Fleishman, the head of
global finance campaigns at 350.org. “Joe Biden had expected to
arrive at COP 26 in Glasgow in November 2021 with the bill signed in
his back pocket so he could slap it down on the table and start a
bidding war with the Chinese. But that didn’t happen.”
May
30, Fleishman continues, will be the next deadline to make a push to
win Manchin’s support for a smaller bill that includes higher
taxes on the rich and a prescription drug provision. The West
Virginia senator is also likely to insist on increased fossil fuel
production, at least in the short term. Complicating the picture,
large-scale government spending programs have recently become more
difficult because of rising prices and inflationary concerns.
The
climate provisions in Build Back Better “are not 100% dead,”
agrees Rajiv Sicora, Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Jamaal Bowman
(D-NY). “But as my boss says, they’re on life support.
The truth is, we’re not going to have federal climate
legislation at the scale that we need without making a lot more
noise, without being a lot more disruptive, and without finding ways
to counter the power of the fossil fuel industry and other
corporations that are lobbying furiously against it.”
Saul
Levin, a Senior Policy Advisor for Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), notes that
the Biden administration has not done much to meet its climate change
promises. “The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law had a lot of good
things in it,” he points out. “But every study suggests
that it will create more greenhouse gas emissions than it will
reduce. Climate change is getting worse because of that law and
without the Build Back Better plan. From my own personal perspective,
it would be an international disgrace for the Democratic Party not to
pass substantial climate legislation.”
While
policy-makers squabble about Build Back Better, climate change
continues to contribute to major wildfires, droughts, and other
disasters across the United States.
“How
many climate-related disasters will it take for us to understand that
this is a serious issue?” asks Susie Strife, who manages all of
Boulder County’s sustainability efforts, policies, and programs
with a special focus on clean energy, finance, and climate action.
“There’s clearly a disconnect between what local
governments and state governments are doing, and the push for
national federal policy and change. Doing nothing puts us in a much
more precarious position, and it’s more expensive.”
In
response to the war in Ukraine and a surge in gas prices, the Biden
administration announced at the end of March the release of a
million barrels
from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. And instead of restricting
fossil fuel production, the United States has been scrambling to
persuade
other countries
to boost output to substitute for the loss of banned Russian imports,
particularly for European partners. These developments contrast
sharply with the latest
IPCC report,
which appeared at the beginning of April. Although pessimistic about
recent trends in carbon emissions, the report stressed that halving
emissions by 2030 was still within reach.
Against
this backdrop, in mid-April, these three experts gathered
for a conversation
facilitated by Brett Fleishman about the promises, polices, and
prospects of the Green New Deal in the United States. Expressing
concern about the urgency of the moment, they offered concrete
suggestions about how to achieve at least parts of the GND vision.
Pushing
Joe Manchin
Although
several Democrats were unhappy with elements of Build Back Better,
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin emerged as the bill’s
principal opponent. The bill passed the House of Representatives on
November 19, 2021. One month later, Manchin released a statement
outlining his opposition to the bill, based
on its costs in light of overall government debt and surging
inflation. Despite his later declaration that the bill was “dead,”
Manchin remains open to a radically reduced version that focuses
on “climate change, prescription drug prices and deficit
reduction.” Most recently, he has sought
to build momentum
for
a bipartisan energy bill
that would boost domestic fossil fuel production and avoid the
Democratic-only budget reconciliation process.
Manchin’s
reputation as a deficit hawk is not the only reason for his
opposition to Build Back Better. Not only did he make his fortune
from a coal business, he protected that business and the coal
industry more generally through
his actions as a politician.
The Biden administration’s efforts to transition away from coal
and other dirty sources of energy—through Build Back Better and
other measures— directly challenges Manchin’s financial
and political interests.
“We’re
all inside of a house that’s burning down and there’s a
person standing there with a fire extinguisher,” Saul Levin
says. “The House did its job, and it’s come down to
Senator Manchin. The House does not have leverage over Manchin.
Speaker Pelosi doesn’t have much leverage over Manchin. The
question is: will President Biden and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) do
their jobs and hold their party together? And the answer so far has
been a resounding no.”
“The
Biden Administration and the leadership of the Democratic party in
Congress did not have a plan to deal with Manchin,” reports
Rajiv Sicora. “We could have loaded up Build Back Better with
even more good things for the people of West Virginia, and gone
directly to them to make the case for how the bill would improve
their lives—the kind of organizing approach that Bernie Sanders
would have pursued as president.” At this point, the White
House is waiting on Manchin rather than putting pressure on him.
The
fight has expanded beyond the congressional floor. “A bunch of
activists blockaded Joe Manchin’s coal plant this weekend,”
Levin reports. “If I were Joe Biden, I’d use the
Antiquities Act to take over coal fields all over West Virginia to
establish national monuments and then do a live broadcast each time
saying that ‘Joe Manchin is killing the coal industry’—over
and over again until he stops.”
Defense
Production Act
The
Biden administration has other options besides Build Back Better to
advance elements of the Green New Deal. One of those is through the
Defense Production Act where, in the name of national security, the
president can declare an emergency that provides the executive with
powers to force companies to produce key commodities. Ordinarily, the
Act is invoked during wartime. But activists have long argued that
the climate crisis should put the United States on just such an
emergency footing.
“Our
team—Congresswoman Bush and Rep. Jason Crow (D-WI) and Sen.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT)— introduced a bill a little less than a
week ago called the Energy
Security and Independence Act,”
reports Saul Levin. “It basically calls for $150 billion for
various investments in the renewable energy supply chain. Two-thirds
of that was for the Defense Production Act.”
He
continues, “Joe Biden could say right now that because of the
emergency in Ukraine as well as the climate emergency, we’re
going to redirect hundreds of billions of dollars to making strategic
investments to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels from Russia and
Saudi Arabia. The money could cover public transit and vehicle
electrification, but also heat pumps and other measures to reduce
utility costs.”
The
bill is designed to provide Biden with the congressional backing to
invoke the Defense Production Act and deploy $100 billion through
that mechanism. It has, Levin reports, attracted support across the
Democratic Party. Even if it doesn’t pass, he adds, it will
help shape the messaging around the urgency and the resources needed
to address a clean energy transition.
Green
New Deal for Public Schools
The
Energy Security and Independence Act is only one of a number of Green
New Deal-adjacent bills in the House.
In
July 2021, for instance, Jamaal Bowman introduced the
Green New Deal for Public Schools Act.
It would provide $1.43 trillion over 10 years to overhaul America’s
public schools through healthy green retrofits, hiring more
educators, expanding social services, and updating curricula. “The
bill provides enough funding for every school in the country to get
to zero carbon emissions through a combination of a comprehensive
retrofit to reduce energy use, install solar on site and electrify
the building, and get rid of all the toxic materials that are
currently threatening so many young people, particularly students of
color and low-income students in rural communities,” Rajiv
Sicora explains. “The funding would also cover climate
resilience efforts such as building out broadband infrastructure and
EV charging stations, and garden and tree planting,” according
to The
Washington Post.
It’s
not just about upgrading public schools. The bill imagines young
people taking greater control of the green transition. “My boss
is passionate about putting young people at the center of our
response to this crisis,” he continues. “Right now, we
have a youth mental health crisis in no small part because of climate
change and what they’ve been going through during the
pandemic.”
“But
imagine you’re a public-school student in a community where
your school has been ignored and experienced disinvestment,” he
adds. “Then, suddenly, your school becomes the epicenter of
this new process. And you’re able to study the retrofit to your
building. You’re participating in a community garden. You’re
seeing how the electric school bus is procured. And you’re
watching how climate-friendly food is coming into the school for
lunches.”
The
bill would have various knock-on effects. For instance, Sicora
continues, “investing in curriculum development would bring in
more educators and expand community partnerships with all sorts of
groups. The bill would create over a million jobs a year to carry out
all the retrofits and to fill the new educator positions.”
Green
New Deal for Cities
In
October 2021, Rep. Cori Bush introduced a bill called the
Green New Deal for Cities Act
that would earmark $1 trillion to build back better at the local
level. The money could be spent on a number
of different environmental initiatives—”replacing
lead pipes, retrofitting water infrastructure, building bike lanes,
installing electric vehicle charging stations, testing soil and water
for contaminants, and phasing out fossil fuel infrastructure, among
other options”—as well as to compensate for historic
environmental injustice.
“The
name is a bit misleading,” Levin notes. “The bill
actually would fund a Green New Deal in every city, county, state,
territory, and tribe. It’s based on the American Rescue Plan
around COVID and the way dollars were distributed around the country
for people to do masking and hand sanitizing at different phases of
the pandemic. We need the same thing on an even greater scale for
dealing with climate change and for uprooting environmental racism,
which is so pervasive all over the country.”
The
bill is based on the notion that every community in the country needs
federal support, even if they’re already run by politicians who
are pushing a clean energy transition. Such politicians “are
nitpicking around the edges of the climate problem because they don’t
really have the resources, for instance to expand public transit in
the way that’s needed,” Levin notes.
Green
Champions in Congress
There
are so many Green New Deal-related bills in Congress that progressive
legislators have created a “Green
Champions” checklist
to track congressional support for the 10 top bills.
“Most
people don’t have time to read through all these bills,”
Saul Levin points out. “And there are hundreds of bills
introduced every year called the Climate Act or the Environmental
Justice act and so on. Most of them are just not very good at all.
They’re not ambitious enough or don’t focus on justice or
on internationalism.”
After
choosing the best bills, he continues, “we spent about six
months bothering offices, saying, ‘Hey, you signed onto the
Green New Deal for Public Housing, why aren’t you signed up to
the Green New Deal for Public Schools. From there, we steadily built
up support for all of those bills. We started with just four members
of Congress supporting every bill and now we’re at 24.”
What
started out as a checklist has now become a pledge. There are now 45
organizations that support the Green Champions pledge, from Sunrise
Movement and the Climate Justice Alliance to Black Lives Matter,
March for Our Lives, and the American Federation of Teachers.
“Instead
of running for Congress as a progressive candidate supporting the
Green New Deal, the question is now: do you agree to be a climate
champion by signing onto these other nine bills?” Levin
continues. “The candidates running for office are not just
pledging to support all 10 bills, they’re also promising not to
take money from the fossil fuel industry.”
Lessons
from the Climate Frontlines
Boulder
County in Colorado is one of the most committed regions of the
country to a clean energy transition. It has also been the site of
several major climate-related disasters. At the very end of 2021, the
Marshall Fire broke out there, ultimately destroying more than a
thousand homes. It was the worst fire in Colorado history.
“We
have experienced tremendous wildfires,” reports Susie Strife,
“as well as a 500-year flood event. My own children witnessed
many of these events from our own backyard. Boulder County and
California, which have become the epicenters of these climate-related
catastrophes, ironically house a lot of the national labs and the
researchers—climate modelers, scientists, engineers—that
are doing the work to understand how we can get to a decarbonized
economy.”
In
response to the state of the emergency declared during the Marshall
Fire, the federal government provided tens
of millions of dollars
in emergency funding. An even more costly flood in 2013 elicited
hundreds of millions
of federal funding.
“What
happens when a community experiences a climate-related disaster, any
disaster really, is an all-hands-on-deck-all-the-time response,”
Strife continues. “No matter how much support you get, it
diverts attention, resources, and staff. I was astonished to see how
amazingly organized Boulder County was in its response to the
Marshall fire. But that’s a sad fact to share. We’re
getting good at disaster response.”
“These
unprecedented events—the Marshall Fire, the 2013 flood, a
firestorm in December that was put out by snow—are taking us
away from being proactive to mitigate the climate crisis,” she
continues. “We don’t have the time and resources, because
we’re continuing to respond to these disasters. It’s
bizarre: a lot of the federal funding and potential statewide funding
that comes to us doesn’t require us to build back better in a
more resilient manner.”
Even
with these climate-related emergencies, Boulder is in a better
situation than a lot of other cities. “We’re a bit of a
unicorn,” Strife notes, “because we’ve had a lot of
support in the past. In 2010, we received a $25 million grant to
jumpstart our transition to a clean energy economy, though that was
really more about jobs. We’ve been able to leverage that
funding over time to showcase our success. We were then able to pitch
to the voters the first ever sustainability tax, and that has
provided a really good stable resource for us.” Passed in 2016,
the tax raised
$387,000
for disbursal as grants to the country’s towns and cities in
2020.
Even
with this funding, however, Boulder county hasn’t met its
climate goals. “In a dream scenario, the Feds would back the
regulations and the policies for a decarbonized economy, and also
help us staff up to full capacity,” she continues. “But
every
community is not where Boulder is, and we still need the local
capacity-building. To reach carbon neutrality by 2030, local
governments are ready and primed, but we would need quite a lot of
investment and help in staffing and capacity.”
Mobilizing
Local Power
To
move their agenda at a federal level, climate activists have had to
marshal support from various sectors. One of those has been the labor
movement, which has been attracted to the job-creating potential of
the Green New Deal. Recent organizing victories at Starbucks
and Amazon
suggest that unions are making a comeback.
“To
the extent that we can, the climate movement should be looking for
opportunities to partner in creative ways with the resurgent labor
movement,” Rajiv Sicora notes. “We need to be fighting
the same fight. It can’t just be lowest common denominator
stuff. Retrofitting every public school in the country is one
example. I was just talking to someone from Seattle where teachers
are leading this fight in coalition with the climate movement, and
brought the building trades on board to demand that the latest bond
renewal include $19 million to put solar on school rooftops. This is
a huge area of potential cooperation, with teachers and climate
activists and parents and young people coming together.”
Saul
Levin agrees. “We’ve talked to Chris Smalls and Derek
Palmer, who organized the Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, about
what they think about climate change,” he reports. “They
told us that people get hurt and are dying at Amazon all the time
because they’re being forced to work during tornadoes,
hurricanes, and other climate events. A lot of these new unions are
being formed by young people who are savvy and are seeing the climate
crisis hit them in their own lifetime.”
Localities
are also trying to amplify their voices at the state and national
level. “We often act in coalitions to lobby at the state and
federal level for climate protective policies,” reports Susie
Strife. Early on, she was involved in compiling greenhouse gas
inventories to get a better understanding of what was needed at a
local level. At this point, though, it’s no longer necessary to
do more such inventories. Instead, she has worked with other local
partners to create Colorado
Communities for Climate Action,
an umbrella lobbying organization that mobilizes the collective power
of 40 local governments.
“That
collective lobbying power is very well respected at the state
legislature,” she reports. “While our mission does
include federal lobbying we’ve been pretty deflated in the last
several years, especially during the Trump administration. Local
governments have long played the role of showcasing what’s
possible when it comes to deep cuts in emissions and establishing
standards, policies, and regulations regarding reductions.”
Next
Steps
The
panelists were all acutely aware of the challenges of pushing a large
federal program for clean energy transition at a time of war and
inflation.
“Obviously,
we do have to care about the impact of gas prices on working class
people,” points out Rajiv Sicora. “This is something that
the mainstream environmental movement hasn’t always been good
at, to say the least. But that’s changing. We are putting the
well-being of working-class Americans at the forefront of our
thinking. We have answers, and we have alternatives, which the Biden
administration should be exploring instead of scrambling to get more
fossil fuels online that are not going to magically bring down the
price of oil. For instance, they need to subsidize public transport.
In Boston, Mayor Michelle Wu has a fantastic Green New Deal platform,
with free
public transit
as a centerpiece.”
The
funding for such initiatives can come from the federal budget. But
revenue can be raised in other ways.
“The
fossil fuel industry is making very healthy profits,” Sicora
points out. “Right now, the solution is not to appeal to their
patriotic duty, which is what the Democrats are doing, to drill more.
Instead, we need to crack down on the windfall profits of the fossil
fuel industry and invest those profits to bring relief directly to
people and accelerate the green energy transition. Rep. Ro Khanna
(D-CA) and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) have
a bill
that does that specifically for the oil industry, and provides
rebates to people. And my boss has
a bill
with Bernie Sanders that takes an economy wide approach, because it’s
not just the oil industry. If you’re making windfall profits,
we’re going to tax that at 95 percent as a temporary emergency
measure.”
“I’m
particularly excited about the Green New Deal for schools and also
building a workforce for decarbonization,” replies Susie
Strife. “Finding folks who are ready and able to electrify
homes has been challenging. There needs to be some deep preparation
for communities who will potentially get any of the stimulus funding
to start thinking through what’s possible. I’m also
excited about building a climate youth corps, like the one in the
original Build Back Better legislation. We need to get people back
out helping to regenerate our land. It’s a win-win if you can
do carbon sequestration and involve youth as part of solution.”
