On his first day in office, he took down the White House’s climate policy web page and replaced it with his “America First Energy Plan.” On his fifth day, he signed executive orders approving the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, rolling back the modest gains of the climate and indigenous anti-pipeline movements.
There became a sense that if we could simply eject the “denier in chief” and install a Democrat who “believes science,” we could start to take the necessary action to solve the climate and ecological crisis.
Bush administration, President Barack Obama announced in a victory speech: “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Yet, if anything, the age of American energy dominance was not a Trump creation but a product of the Obama era.
Today, as in 2008, a new set of deadlines are being discussed that are far enough away to stall dramatic action and close enough to appear scientifically credible.
These ongoing effects are merely the product of roughly 1.2 degrees of warming above preindustrial levels; experts think we will likely reach 1.5 degrees by 2030 and 2 degrees between 2034 and 2052.7 Frankly, the climate system does not care if the president believes climate science.
The program aimed to solve inequality and climate change with a straightforward working-class program based on public investment, a job guarantee, and economic rights to health care, housing, and a living wage.
We also need to recognize the ongoing danger of Biden and the Democratic Party — still staunchly a party of capital — assimilating the more radical GND coalition into the dead-end conciliatory politics of compromise and half measures.
The last four years have built momentum toward real transformation, but the last year shows some concerning trends of movement conciliation before the fight really begins.
This momentum built steadily up until the fall of 2008 with two world-historic events: the largest financial crash since the 1930s and the election of an insurgent candidate as US president named Barack Obama.
By January 2009, with the economy in free fall and the Democrats in charge of the executive and legislative branches, one couldn’t imagine more favorable conditions for transformative change.
As Theda Skocpol shows in excruciating detail, Obama made no effort to mobilize the public but rather created a behind-closed-doors process of what she calls “corporatist bargaining”: elite negotiation between state leaders and powerful interest groups.
In spring of that year, Obama announced a major offshore drilling plan as a fig leaf to industry to garner support for the doomed “cap-and-trade” legislation.
The 2015 Paris Agreement — while historic — was simply a fulfillment of Obama’s Copenhagen vision of a purely voluntary agreement with no enforcement teeth.
After another crushing defeat in the midterm elections of 2014, Obama attempted to salvage his climate legacy by doing what he should have done on day one: using the Clean Air Act to directly regulate greenhouse gases.
On the environmental front, transformative action was blocked by a “threat, constantly reiterated by energy companies, that aggressive regulations would trigger retaliatory actions by the polluters that would disrupt the flow of investments into the energy sector on which the economy depended.” Given that we are currently experiencing another massive economic crisis — and that Biden actually received notable contributions from fossil fuel companies — the idea we can push Biden to the left through political lobbying and rhetorical persuasion is not likely.
As Aronoff put it in her formative essay “No Third Way for the Planet”: “Framing the carbon tax as a silver bullet for the planet’s ills runs a deadly serious risk of obscuring how big the changes physics demands really are.” Additionally, carbon pricing could easily be framed by the Right as “costs” to everyday working people.
She understood that the scale of the crisis contained all the elements of resurrecting a left working-class agenda: confrontation with corporate power, redistribution from the rich, and massive public investment based on a job guarantee.
After the sit-in, Ocasio-Cortez’s office, along with left think tanks like New Consensus, started working out the details of what a Green New Deal could look like.
Congressman Rob Bishop from Utah held an event where he accused the GND of wanting to “control will be outlawed.” He took a bite while his allies pleaded, “Pass it around!” This event was specifically reacting to a comment by Ocasio-Cortez suggesting people could eat fewer burgers.
Much of the pundit class focused on the plan’s price tag of $16 trillion, but its most radical and distinctive aspect was Sanders’s proposal to expand publicly owned electricity.
As Third Way energy expert Joshua Freed put it, “What the Sanders proposal would do is create an 800-pound federally owned power gorilla that would make it very hard for the existing generators to compete.” Given that it is those very same generators who continue to burn fossil fuels to make profit for investors, isn’t that exactly the point? No other Democratic Party contenders, however, were willing to say this out loud.
Although Sunrise boasts an army of young activists and employs militant language, it was itself born from the environmental NGO complex — its origins include a $50,000 grant and office space from the Sierra Club Foundation in 2017.
These not only fall into the trap of what Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams call “folk politics” — an emphasis on the small-scale, local, and grassroots against any large-scale vision of social change — but are obviously out of step with the scale of the climate crisis, which will not be solved one Brooklyn co-op at a time.
Prior to defeat, Panitch and coauthors excitedly described the Corbyn and Sanders movements: “Nothing like this has happened in at least three generations.” They speculated about what a “socialist-led government” would face and suggested that much of the Left was still marked by a “failure to prepare adequately for the challenge of transforming state apparatuses.” Similarly, Mike McCarthy, writing in Jacobin, warned that “our first 100 days could be a nightmare.” Now, the nightmare is simply the harsh electoral realities.
Quite the opposite — the threat of Sanders led to a turnout surge among suburban liberals and people Matt Karp termed “Halliburton Democrats.” Too much of the existing working class is still beset by apathetic cynicism, or what the late Mark Fisher called “reflexive impotence”: “ know things are bad, but .
We will need to build capable working-class organizations first , before we can expect to vie for state power.
In April, a coalition of neoliberal Democrats, large environmental organizations, Sunrise, and other GND leaders was announced called “Climate Power 2020.” In May, Julian Brave NoiseCat, a staffer at Data for Progress, declared that the movement was ready to align with the Democrats: “We’re moving from a phase of contention and division within the party .
The plan seemed to signal Biden’s endorsement of the Green New Deal, but two months later, both Biden and his vice presidential pick, Kamala Harris, refused to admit this on the debate stages.
The appointment of New Mexico representative Deb Haaland as interior secretary — an indigenous woman and a supporter of the Green New Deal and Medicare for All — was probably the most significant win on this front.
It is quite impressive to see that Biden’s plan doesn’t even mention carbon pricing and focuses much more on public investment and “good union jobs.” Yet simply granting radical GND activists “a seat at the table” will in no way guarantee them the power to implement their agenda.
Even Janet Yellen, the former chair of the Federal Reserve and the new Treasury secretary — a pick that progressives have largely welcomed — is a founding member of the Climate Leadership Council: a collaboration with major oil and gas firms that remains committed to carbon pricing as the sensible approach to solving the climate crisis.
Take one of the key demands of the Biden plan emerging out of the Climate Unity Task Force: 40 percent of Biden’s $2 trillion in spending was to be allocated to so-called frontline communities.
Who qualifies as “frontline”? Who speaks for particular communities? Biden’s plan calls for a “Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to help identify these disadvantaged communities.” I’m sure the communities deemed not “disadvantaged” enough by this tool will find it a fair process.
Given that 57 percent of Americans believe climate change will not affect them personally, I doubt many consider themselves part of a “frontline community.” This kind of policy would potentially ignite the same kind of class resentment that is aimed toward targeted state benefits, while the majority are left to languish.
Moreover, socialists have had most success winning state and local office; how this cadre attempts to deliver a working-class agenda in the face of devastating budget austerity will likely be the decisive battle of the year ahead.
For the climate movement, a litmus test for our campaigns must be: Does the policy decarbonize by delivering material gains in the name of public goods? Only by actually delivering results can we start to resurrect the kind of mass politics needed to transform society.
Instead, they organized popular support, shut down schools, and won their demands in about two weeks.
It is encouraging to see the youth movement reclaim the language of the strike, but the 2019 Global Climate Strike was purely voluntary.
As Jane McAlevey argues, “There’s just no better way to create a crisis than a 100 percent withdrawal of labor.” The Massachusetts Teachers Association called for a national teachers’ strike for a Green New Deal in the summer of 2019.
Yet few GND activists have pointed out that the electric utility sector is already one of the most unionized in the entire economy — in fact, the electric power generation, transmission, and distribution sector has 26.3 percent union membership.
The tenor of the moment is to say “we’ve only got five or ten years left” because of the depth of the climate emergency.
By 1936, after socialist organizers and militant union activists in the CIO “created a crisis” through a nationwide strike wave, FDR was welcoming the hatred of capital and passing the most transformative working-class agenda in US history.