It is easier to image the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Richard Taylor quoting someone else.
The radical thing about the Green New Deal is not the Green part it is the New Deal part. That the climate is changing is now a given for anybody who has been paying attention and is willing to believe the experts. Most crucially, that change, those changes, are going to get more extreme next year, and the year after, and the years after that, for the next fifty years. No matter what we do at this stage, the Global Climate Crisis is not going away soon; the fires in California are not going away next year, or the hurricanes slamming Louisana, or the hundred mph windstorms in Kansas. Even Trump and the Republican Congress must know that (although much of Trump’s pitch is that Global Climate Change is a hoax, just like Covid-19, and Biden winning the election). The escalating change, in itself, will make doing something about the Climate increasingly urgent, the Green part is no longer controversial.
But what do we do and how do we do it? The temptation is to do something, under the guise of moving quickly, that will involve getting the known players, with lots of money, to build expensive solar and windmill farms in the Great Western Outback. Huge solar farms and giant windmills are already being built by already huge companies. Their lobbyists, while not as powerful as the fossil fuel lobby, are already in place and ready to lobby for more. However, that is not the smart move. One of the big surprises of the Covid-19 epidemic, for me at least, is that our whole world, the modern world, cannot handle change very well. Everything in our society has evolved towards efficiency, over robustness and dependability, in an effort to become more cost-effective. The Holy Grail, it turns out, is lower costs and that has driven out redundancy and anything else that drives costs up, like being ready for a disaster. Everything is designed around a belief that nothing serious will ever go wrong.
When I first heard of Toyota’s “just in time supply chain”, it seemed like such a good idea. The Japanese were beating us with cheaper and better cars because they were more efficient. At the time, General Motors kept something like two weeks’ worth of inventory of the parts going into their cars, and Toyota with their just-in-time philosophy had way less money tied up in inventory. Now we have caught up. General Motors can build a car just as cheap as the Japanese. Everybody has learned the lesson. We have tried to eliminate redundancy and safety nets everywhere because they raise operating costs, every supply line, every process has been distorted by the quest for lower costs. Hospitals no longer carried enough masks and ventilators for a pandemic, a pandemic is an unusual event, and planning for something that won’t happen costs money that eats into profits and dividends.
The radical part of the Green New Deal is to decentralize and democratize the solutions to Global Climate Change rather than defaulting to huge companies. The Green New Deal proposes, among other things, putting solar panels on every house in America rather than huge solar farms. This is a way more expensive proposition than the humongous facilities now being built in the desert but it is also less susceptible to natural disasters making it safer and more reliable. If nothing else, Covid-19 has shown us that eliminating the safety net will make a terrible situation even worse.
The Green New Deal is based on the thesis that a giant array in the desert is only cheaper in the short run, but that it is not healthy for the economy – long run – or as safe as solar panels spread out everywhere, like on house roofs, public parking structures, and bus stops. The New Deal part of the Green New Deal is a make-work program similar to Civilian Conservation Corps, or the Civil Works Administration, or the National Industrial Recovery Act. It is designed around good-paying jobs for Union workers. That is going to be a harder sell, even with a Democratic Congress, but President-elect Biden seems to be surrounding himself with economic and financial experts who are going to try.
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