An Open Letter to Green New Dealers

I write this as a friend who wants your movement to succeed. Your cause is just and, due to decades worth of political inaction (some of which, I’m sorry to say, I have to personally account for), the hour is late. As the U.N.’s sixth Global Environmental Outlook declared this month, “urgent action at an unprecedented scale” is necessary to address climate change and the degradation of critically important ecosystems. The 2019 Global Risks Report, published by the World Economic Forum (an international, nonprofit institute serving as a forum for top business, political, and academic elites from around the world), concludes that climate-related risks now account for three of the top five global risks by likelihood, and four of the top five by impact. While there is a wide distribution of possible outcomes from climate change, we are already incurring serious risks from existing greenhouse gas concentrations, and the most likely outcomes by 2100 (imperfectly and conservatively accounted for by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, otherwise known as the IPCC) are frightening. The worst-case scenarios — many of which are as likely to occur as the best-case scenarios — suggest that catastrophic tipping points might be crossed before we realize it, with the real possibility of severe and irreversible ecological, economic, and human damage if we fail to act. (...)

I worry, however, that despite all of the new energy you’ve unleashed on the political scene, you are setting your cause back, not moving it forward. Nothing about the seriousness of the threat we are facing changes the fact that politics is “the art of the possible,” not exhortation for the impossible. Given that serious action on climate will have to come out of the institutions we have — not those we might wish for — the strategies and tactics you are pursuing through the Green New Deal amount to political malpractice. Moreover, the policy initiatives you’re promoting are rightly difficult for political actors to swallow. As veteran Democratic operative Stuart Eizenstat warned this month, “Speaking from experience, by demanding the moon, their proposals will crash on the launching pad and lead to nowhere good.”

Wishing for Ponies

What makes your Green New Deal innovative is that it ties climate action to a host of extremely ambitious progressive initiatives that have little or nothing to do with climate change. The Green New Deal resolution (introduced in the House by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York’s 14th district and in the Senate by Ed Markey of Massachusetts) is literally 10-parts “New Deal” to 1-part “climate.” Beyond the climate-related goals it asks Congress to adopt, the resolution also calls for:

• “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States,
• “strengthening and protecting the right of all workers to organize, unionize, and collectively bargain free of coercion, intimidation, and harassment,
• “strengthening and enforcing labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards across all employers, industries, and sectors,
• “ensuring a commercial environment where every businessperson is free from unfair competition and domination by domestic or international monopolies,
• “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care,
• “providing all people of the United States with affordable, safe, and adequate housing,”
• “providing all people of the United States with economic security,
• “promot(ing) justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth (referred to in this resolution as ‘frontline and vulnerable communities’),
• “providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States, with a focus on frontline and vulnerable communities,” all while
• “supporting family farming.”

Beyond that, the resolution tackles just about every non-climate-related concern on the environmental agenda, calling for new federal programs to:

• increase soil health,
• provide for a “sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food,
• “restoring and protecting threatened, endangered, and fragile ecosystems through locally appropriate and science-based projects that enhance biodiversity,
• “cleaning up existing hazardous waste and abandoned sites, ensuring economic development and sustainability on those sites,” and
• “providing all people of the United States with clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”

Republican demagoguery aside, it’s unclear what any of that would actually mean in terms of public policy. And that’s by design. Maybe “providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care” means a Bernie Sanders Medicare-for-All plan. But it could also mean fixes to the Affordable Care Act. Maybe “providing all people of the United States with economic security” means a $15 federal minimum wage and Universal Basic Income. Or perhaps it simply entails increases in existing welfare programs. The idea, I gather, is to establish where the Green New Deal is going and to politically commit Congress to the trip. The length of the journey (policy ambition) and detailed itinerary (policy design) is TBD based on the political give and take that is to come. This is a resolution after all, not a bill, and that’s typically what resolutions are designed to do.

These commitments, however, are so unqualified and open-ended that members don’t know what to make of them. That has provided Republicans with an opening to characterize the Green New Deal in the most lurid terms, which has naturally made Democrats deeply uncomfortable. When asked about the Green New Deal on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, for instance, Sen. Dick Durbin (IL) said “I’ve read it and I’ve reread it and I asked Ed Markey, what in the heck is this?” Speaker Nancy Pelosi has referred to it dismissively as “‘The Green Dream,’ or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?” (...)

Rule number one in politics is not to let your opponents define you or your ideas. The vague but suggestive Green New Deal resolution, however, was an open invitation for Republicans to do exactly that. The FAQ and background material coming out of the progressive community gave everyone to your right plenty of ammunition to define you as radicals bent on a sweeping, revolutionary enterprise. “I think the idea is you never let your message get too far out ahead of the substance, and we have definitely created a vacuum and left space for people to fill with what they think the Green New Deal is based on their assumptions and past experiences,” conceded Rhiana Gunn-Wright of New Consensus. “It’s certainly a danger, but it’s a danger worth taking by ensuring we get frontline voices in.”

That last line is really the key to understanding the politics animating, and the policies constituting, the Green New Deal. Allow me to try my hand at making the very best case for your strategy as I understand it.

by Jerry Taylor, Niskanen Center |  Read more:

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