2020-02-28
To a large extent, The Greens’ 2019 Election Platform priorities added up to a Green New Deal, without actually using that title. So, let’s start calling it what it is. However, let’s also recognise that we need to think carefully about the problems and consequences of attempting to implement a Green New Deal.
By Rob Delves, GI Co-editor
What is a Green New Deal?
How would you capture the essentials of a Green New Deal (GND) in one sentence? Everyone agrees it’s about tackling the twin challenges of climate change and a stagnant, unfair economy. So using a Marxist lens, you would explain the GND as ensuring that defence of the planet and defence of the working class go together. Another way of describing a GND is that it’s about ensuring a liveable future and good jobs (or a secure income) and decent services for all. The Green part refers to urgent action to address our environmental crisis, while the New Deal part references Roosevelt’s Depression era program when the government sought to end poverty and unemployment by putting millions of people into work that urgently needed doing, for example environmental repair, housing and expansion of the electricity network.
My best effort at the one-sentence summary would be:
The Green New Deal involves the rapid transition to a zero-carbon economy, with the government taking a leading role in creating decent jobs and strong support services, so that the costs and rewards are shared fairly.
I’d give that a 7 out of 10: it’s tough expressing the complexities of the GND in one well-constructed sentence!
Do our existing policies constitute a Green New Deal?
Some people have suggested that a GND is already fully described in The Greens existing policies – it’s just a matter of combining all “the good bits” under the new heading! I think I’d tick “Strongly Agree” or at the very least “Agree” on that one. Our 2019 Federal Election Platform didn’t use the phrase Green New Deal but in my opinion that is exactly what its key points were describing. Here are some of the key “good bits” I’d put together to describe our very own, already existing, GND:
1. The One-Sentence Summary: The Greens champion big, evidence-driven solutions to the major problems we’re facing now: economic inequality, increasing cost of living, environmental destruction and climate change.
2. Urgent Climate Action: The Greens have a strong and evidence-based plan for a rapid, managed transition to a renewable energy economy. We would set Australia’s emissions target at 63-82 per cent by 2030 on a trajectory to get emissions to net zero by 2040. Our plan will replace coal with renewables and call for an immediate ban on new coal mines, fracking and conventional onshore and offshore gas and oil fields.
3. Job Creation: The RenewAustralia 2030 plan for 100% renewables and a renewables export industry would create construction, engineering and installation jobs. But this plan is more than just renewables, it will drive a transition right across the economy, creating new industries, jobs and supply chains. From energy efficiency improvements in homes and businesses, research, agriculture, land restoration, retailing and the rehabilitation of old mining sites, this plan will create over 179,780 full-time jobs a year in total – over 100,000 more than currently employed in coal, oil and gas mining combined.
4. Government Must Take a Leading Role: The Greens will also invest in the science, research and innovation that will transform our economy and make Australia a global leader in new technology. We will establish a new, publicly owned competitor to the private power companies, dedicated solely to driving down your costs instead of driving up its profits. We will prioritise and properly fund clean, safe, affordable public and active transport.
5. The just transition: With a $1 billion Clean Energy Transition Fund, Renew Australia will be tasked with supporting workers to reskill, relocate or transition to retirement, depending on what the personal circumstances require. We will work with industry to seek to ensure that no coal worker is left behind. The fund will also target support at the local communities affected by the transition, prioritising infrastructure investment in those areas and offering economic incentives for investment throughout the local area. We should all have access to high quality, free health care & education, affordable housing and a strong social safety net that looks after us when we are out of work, as we age or if we have a disability.
Questions, anyone? Yes indeed, three for starters.
1. Prepare for the Mother of all Backlashes: This can’t be a win-win transformation, because the fossil fuel industries are going to have to abandon their very profitable business model of paying almost nothing to dig up carbon and receiving vast (untaxed) sums burning it. Therefore, vested interests in fossil fuel corporations and their friends in media and finance will throw everything (dozens of kitchen sinks) into trashing this GND program. We suggest two essential components of a strategy to combat their awesome power. The first is undermining their power by divestment campaigns, passing laws against political donations and lobbying. The second is people power: unless there is a huge and powerful grassroots movement advocating for this transformation, the oligarchs will crush it, probably at minimal inconvenience to their bottom lines.
2. Order, order: The beauty of a GND is that it puts an end to the reactionary tactic of pitting workers and communities reliant on the old industries against the greenies demanding rapid action on climate change. This is because the GND puts the jobs-rich new low-carbon technologies front and centre. However, there’s still a long way to go to convince everyone that the GND is a better deal. It is understandable that workers in fossil fuel industries, especially those on fairly high pay, will oppose the transition as just another case of the technocrats exploiting them again. “Trust us, lots of well-paid clean economy jobs are coming!” Yeah sure – just like they were for the car workers.
So, some strategic thought about order is needed here, and it’s pretty simple: New industries and jobs first, then shut down the polluting dinosaurs. “Show us the new jobs first!” – and provide decent income support and free retraining after our jobs disappear.
3. Beware the GND prosperity dividend: One disastrous consequence of the original New Deal and the whole Keynesian demand stimulus was that its success in creating decent, secure, well-paid jobs for all unleashed the environmental vandalism of ever-expanding wasteful consumption and car-based urban sprawl. Secure work and widespread prosperity wasn’t meant to lead to this. For example, in 1930 Keynes argued that technological progress offered the path to a bright future: humanity could solve the economic problem of scarcity and do away with the need to work long hours in order to live. Leisure, in the sense of time free to use as we please, could be an option for all. In his famous 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow argued that once our basic physiological needs for economic security (water, food, shelter, clothing, etc…) are satisfied, we then seek not more things but instead strive for love, belonging, self-actualization.
Now, I don’t need persuading that I’ll always take a much higher percentage of every prosperity dividend as fewer working hours to devote to “the higher things” rather than as extra pay to spend on more and classier clothes, cars, curtains, cosmetics, couches…and any other consumer crap I can think of that begins with C. My definition of “the higher things” tends towards more time in the library alone and in bike riding with friends (followed by the performance-enhancing drug trifecta of Italian expresso, Danish pastry and English conversation). All very low carbon excesses. However, I increasingly worry that I’m slightly oddball, maybe elitist, probably unAustralian. Morrison’s Prosperity Gospel – you deserve that big boat, second car, jetski, “and don’t let Labor and The Greens take your boys-toys off you” ‒ seems to win over a lot of people, certainly enough to win elections.
Green technology cleans up the environment, then mindless consumerism craps all over it again. Is there such a thing as “endless green growth?” This is a huge and complex issue, but I don’t think green technologies alone can ensure zero carbon and a healthy environment: we need lifestyle changes too. We need to think hard about how to present our vision of prosperity, the good life as something different than endless consumption of things. The concept of Enough has promise: “private sufficiency and public affluence” maybe sums up where we should be heading. It’s just that I struggle to convince anyone who’s not like me.
Header photo: Newly elected Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt, who is framing policy around a Green New Deal
[Opinions expressed are those of the author and not official policy of Greens WA]