What’s in the Green New Deal?

MIT Technology Review:

Here are four key takeaways.

1. Clean, not renewable

For some, the concern had been that the proposal would limit energy generation to renewable sources alone, mainly wind and solar, as some environmental groups had advocated.

Instead, the package adopts a relatively technology-agnostic approach to how we clean up the power sector, stating that the nation must meet “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

That seems to allow for the use of carbon-free sources like nuclear power and fossil-fuel plants with carbon-capture systems. Most energy researchers argue that such steady carbon-free sources will make it faster, easier, and less expensive to overhaul the energy system. That’s because wind and solar generation fluctuates wildly, which requires expensive forms of energy storage or transmission, in the absence of other consistent sources.

2. No new nukes?

That said, at least one of the authors obviously wants to rapidly get rid of nuclear power and fossil-fuels plants.

An early version of an accompanying FAQ, released this morning from Ocasio-Cortez’s office, stated that the plan wouldn’t include any new nuclear plants, adding: “It’s unclear if we will be able to decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and fossil fuels as soon as possible.”

The nuclear language didn’t appear in a later draft, though.

“Although a fact sheet from one of the resolution’s sponsors has created confusion, the text of the actual resolution makes it abundantly clear — we must embrace every zero-carbon resource available to eliminate climate pollution and dramatically increase our investment in clean energy innovation,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president at Third Way, a clean-energy think tank, in a statement.

3. “Natural” carbon removal

Both the UN’s climate panel and the US National Academies have concluded that we’ll need to remove massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order to prevent dangerous levels of warming.

So another area of concern before the proposal was published was whether or not it would embrace methods of removing carbon dioxide directly from the air — and if so, in what form.

The released framework does specify that the law would allow or require “removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and reducing pollution,” but it gives clear priority to “proven low-tech solutions that increase soil carbon storage, such a preservation and afforestation.”

These kinds of approaches — planting trees and improved soil management — probably won’t be enough, according to the US National Academies report. That’s because they would place competing demands on agricultural lands needed to feed the world. That report called for significant federal funding for research and development in other approaches, like direct air capture machines that can suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. No mention of them appeared in the Green New Deal proposal.

4. Possibly impossible

All told, the proposal betrays a clear preference for natural solutions and renewable power, with perhaps a grudging acceptance that other technologies may be required.

The broader question, of course, is how much this proposal will matter. It certainly won’t become law in anything like this form under the current Congress and president.

And whether it’s economically feasible to overhaul nearly the entire energy sector in a decade is highly questionable. Energy researcher Christopher Clack, chief executive of Vibrant Energy, found that such a rapid transition would cost around $48 trillion, or around $5 trillion a year, which is roughly a quarter of the nation’s annual GDP, he said on Twitter.

Even if Democrats do retake the Senate and White House in 2020, the Green New Deal may still be doomed to fail. In addition to cleaning up the energy system, the proposal guarantees all Americans good-paying jobs, high-quality health care, clean water, and affordable food. Such a wide-ranging bill may not stand much of a chance whoever is in charge.

But some hope the sheer ambition of the Green New Deal becomes a rallying point in US politics that inspires legislators, activists, and voters, widening the window of what’s politically possible.

Excerpting an extremely long Vox piece here. 

Vox:

The first use of the term “GND” in the US may trace to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who called for one in a 2007 column (and in his book Hot, Flat, and Crowded) as a kind of green globalism. (Funny thing, politics.) As Kaufman notes in a story on this history, none other than Barack Obama was taken by Friedman’s idea and included a GND in his 2008 platform. (It can also be argued that Obama’s stimulus bill was a proto-GND in itself.)

Around the same time, in 2007, British economist Richard Murphy began discussing a GND and founded the Green New Deal Group, which funneled some ideas to the Labour Party. The UN also took up the idea, calling for a global GND in 2009.

But then Tories won in the UK in 2009, the Republicans swept the 2010 midterms, and the idea mostly went quiescent, at least among politicians.

In 2016, a GND became the centerpiece of the Green Party presidential campaign of Jill Stein; indeed, a GND has been part of the US Green Party’s platform for over a decade. (It is also central to the platform of the European Greens — see this study from the Wuppertal Institute.)

Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign included a GND. And then, in the 2018 midterms, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a representative-elect, took it up.

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I asked the same question of everyone I talked to: What are your bottom lines? What must be in a policy platform for it to earn the name GND? Answers varied considerably in their details and emphasis, but they clustered around three basic principles.

1) The plan must decarbonize the economy.

The young people who will have to live with the effects of climate change want a plan that begins with what is necessary rather than what is deemed politically possible. “We want the policy to match the findings in the IPCC report — to match the scale of the problem,” says Waleed Shahid of Justice Democrats. Or as Gunn-Wright puts it, “We need to go all the way.”

That means decarbonizing the US economy: getting the electricity sector to zero carbon as soon as possible and other sectors shortly thereafter. That is a gargantuan undertaking that will touch every American life.

Ocasio-Cortez’s platform calls for 100 percent renewable electricity within 10 years, but very few policy experts believe that is possible. Carlock, along with most other wonks in the field, thinks it’s preferable to shoot for 100 percent “clean and renewable energy,” to make room for non-renewable carbon-free options like existing nuclear plants or any new developments in nuclear, biomass, or carbon capture and sequestration. And they also think it’s best to push the target out a bit. (Carlock has it at 2035.)
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2) The plan must include a federal jobs guarantee and large-scale public investments.

Again, the GND is not just climate policy. It’s about transforming the economy, lifting the up the poor and middle class, and creating a more muscular, active public sector.

The GND “opens an opportunity to renegotiate power relationships between the public sector, the private sector, and the people,” says Gunn-Wright. “We are interested in solutions that create more democratic structures in our economy.”

Weber says that the key is to “connect [the GND] inextricably to the economic pain that so many Americans still feel, and show people that there’s a way to build a better economy and improve their lives through action on climate change.”

To that end, the GND would involve large-scale investments, on the order of trillions of dollars over 10 years, alongside a federal jobs guarantee. A job paying at least $15 an hour, with good benefits, would be available to anyone who wanted one.

Politically, this is the key to the GND. It’s a program that can involve everyone and help everyone — and, theoretically, gain support from everyone, even those in red states who do not care about climate change. The investments and the job guarantee take the GND out of the realm of environmental policy and move it into the realm of transformational economic policy.

3) The plan must include a just transition.

Several people I talked to stressed that they want to avoid the mistakes of the original New Deal, many elements of which entrenched or exacerbated racial inequalities. Everyone wants to make sure that the plan includes protections for those hardest hit by historical discrimination and those set to suffer most from the effects of climate change — in Ocasio-Cortez’s document, “low-income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities, [and] the front-line communities most affected by climate change, pollution, and other environmental harm.”

Part of that is workforce training and the job guarantee, part of it is ensuring that all those jobs come with strong labor, environmental, and nondiscrimination standards, part of it is investments in those communities to fund programs like lead remediation, and part of it is making sure that all the investments — that all parts of the GND — follow strong environmental-justice standards.

Beyond these three core principles, the GND is still capacious enough to include a wide variety of preferences and perspectives. Journalist Aronoff best expresses the maximum, self-avowedly socialist version, painting an idyllic picture of a family provisioned with publicly funded work, child care benefits, and elder care. The Sierra Club has a somewhat more modest version.

As the GND brand spreads, traditional advocacy and policy groups are likely to break off more manageable chunks under the same rubric. After all, the GND is so sweeping that virtually any climate policy can claim to be part of it.

The delicate dance is to keep the GND fuzzy enough to allow a broad coalition of people and interests to see themselves in it — which is, somewhat miraculously, what seems to have happened so far — while specifying it enough to avoid having it watered down into a feel-good buzzword.

And that has to be done while navigating all the prodigious challenges ahead.