The War On Climate Change Won’t Be Won Quibbling Over The Green New Deal’s Costs

The Green New Deal unveiled last week by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is a powerful and ambitious statement. It’s more than just a delineation of the enormous changes that will be required to stave off the most cataclysmic impacts of climate warming. It offers a portrait of the better world we can create by doing so.

It also has no chance of becoming law, not while Republicans control the Senate and climate change denier Donald Trump resides in the White House.

Markey and Ocasio-Cortez know this. That’s why the Green New Deal is framed as a joint resolution, not a formal law, meaning even if it passed, the measure wouldn’t bind the government to any new policies. This distinction is key to understanding what the Green New Deal is — and is not — and how to usefully talk about it now. It is a major statement of the Democratic Party’s political priorities. It is not a detailed blueprint of how to get there — or how to pay for it.

The Green New Deal’s agenda, however, is clear: Dramatic action must be taken to avert a climate disaster that will otherwise render much of the world uninhabitable. This is an emergency that deserves immediate attention. Millions of lives are quite literally at stake.

Instead of extreme weather disasters, famines and wars over natural resources, the Green New Deal envisions a future in which our nation overcomes its addiction to oil, gas and coal. The federal government would need so many workers to deploy renewable energy, retrofit buildings to be more energy efficient and construct more durable infrastructure that it could guarantee a job to every American who wants one. Those jobs would pay well and offer union protections. And because climate change touches on every facet of life, the transition away from fossil fuels would happen alongside a rapid expansion of safeguards for Americans already suffering the ill effects of dirty energy, from poisoned waterways to the coal industry’s monopolistic domination of entire regional economies.

One priority the Green New Deal does not include? Balancing the federal budget. Neither the Green New Deal legislation nor an FAQ released by Ocasio-Cortez last week included a detailed set of plans about how to pay for it.

California suffered another record wildfire year in 2018. (Photo: DAVID MCNEW via Getty Images)
California suffered another record wildfire year in 2018. (Photo: DAVID MCNEW via Getty Images)

This is as it should be. Anyone who cares deeply about balancing the budget can find a welcoming political home in the arms of billionaire Howard Schultz. Legislation should be crafted to solve social problems. The financial details affiliated with solving those problems are just that ― details ― which can be developed as political circumstances warrant. There is plenty of time between now and 2021 to sort them out.

This was the approach taken during the original New Deal. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw fighting the Depression and the Nazi war machine as emergencies that required immediate action. Roosevelt himself liked balanced budgets as much as the next fellow. He raised taxes on the rich repeatedly ― the top rate rose as high as 94 percent during the war. But he didn’t let a balanced budget get in the way of progress. If he couldn’t get enough money from taxes, Roosevelt borrowed it, fighting both the Depression and World War II with enormous federal debts.

And yet among contemporary thinkers, the Green New Deal’s very clear statement of priorities has prompted furious controversy. Noah Smith intones that Ocasio-Cortez is calling for “unlimited deficit spending” that will march America into “oblivion.” Steven Rattner accuses Green New Deal advocates of “intergenerational theft.” Marc Thiessen declares that Ocasio-Cortez has proffered “the neo-socialist lie that you can get something for nothing.” Even Paul Krugman is warning against putting forward ambitious new government programs without levying new taxes.

But Ocasio-Cortez and Markey haven’t advocated for any of these things. They simply haven’t detailed their tax and debt agendas in this particular piece of symbolic legislation.

Not that Ocasio-Cortez has a problem with tax hikes. In case you’ve forgotten, she has proposed a 70 percent marginal income tax rate for the highest-income American households. There is quite a bit of competition in the 2020 Democratic primary field among different programs to tax the rich ― robust new wealth taxes and estate taxes to go alongside higher income taxes. There seems little risk that supporters of these popular tax hikes will suddenly sour on them once they find out they are not included in the Green New Deal’s first piece of legislative text.

In some ways it’s useful to keep these tax and climate discussions separate, at least for the moment. Doing so sets up taxing the rich as an end in itself ― something that should be done for the sake of democratic fairness and accountability, rather than a mere source of funding. According to new research from University of California, Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, in today’s America “wealth concentration has returned to levels not seen since the Roaring Twenties.” Billionaires not only can purchase politicians; they can buy their way out of social accountability. Inequality is its own pressing problem.

It is also very likely that even taxing the living daylights out of the rich won’t generate enough money to fund a climate program that gets the job done. And that’s fine. The government runs deficits all the time.

Some of this faux controversy over the Green New Deal comes down to a feud within the economics profession over the rising prominence of a school of thought known as modern monetary theory. MMT began getting a hearing in Washington when Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hired economist and MMT proponent Stephanie Kelton as an adviser ahead of his 2016 presidential run. Ocasio-Cortez has created more buzz for the doctrine by talking it up in interviews with journalists.

MMT is essentially a revival of a tradition of Keynesian economics going back to, well, John Maynard Keynes ― the name is a reference to “modern money” in Keynes’ 1930 book, A Treatise on Money. According to MMT economists, taxes are not really a method of raising revenue for the federal government. The government, they note, raises revenue for itself by printing money. Taxes, instead, are a regulatory tool ― a way to manage inflation, economic inequality and production incentives. MMT doesn’t say the government can or should implement multitrillion-dollar proposals without raising any taxes. It just offers a different rationale for taxes, their uses and their limits.

The window for avoiding climate catastrophe is closing fast. In October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that a world just half a degree hotter on average than today’s will lead to at least $54 trillion in damages. That level of warming is all but guaranteed unless world governments not only halt but cut in half surging global emissions and begin removing carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere over the next decade.

A month after the UN report came out, the U.S. government’s own climate forecast predicted up to 10 times as much warming by the end of the century. Intergenerational theft, indeed.

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Alaska

The impacts of climate warming in Alaska are already occurring, experts have warned.   Over the past 50 years, temperatures across Alaska increased by an average of 3.4°F.   Winter warming was even greater, rising by an average of 6.3°F jeopardising its famous glaciers and frozen tundra.
The impacts of climate warming in Alaska are already occurring, experts have warned. Over the past 50 years, temperatures across Alaska increased by an average of 3.4°F. Winter warming was even greater, rising by an average of 6.3°F jeopardising its famous glaciers and frozen tundra.

Venice

The most fragile of Italian cities has been sinking for centuries. Long famous for being the city that is partially under water, sea level rise associated with global warming would have an enormous impact on Venice and the surrounding region.   The Italian government has begun constructing steel gates at the entrances to the Venetian lagoon, designed to block tidal surges from flooding the city. However, these barriers may not be enough to cope with global warming.

Antarctica

The West Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming areas on Earth, with only some areas of the Arctic Circle experiencing faster rising temperatures.   Over the past 50 years, temperatures in parts of the continent have jumped between 5 and 6 degrees F— a rate five times faster than the global average.  A 2008 report commissioned by WWF warned that if global temperatures rise 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial averages, sea ice in the Southern Ocean could shrink by 10 to 15 percent.

The Great Barrier Reef

The rapid decline of the world's coral reefs appears to be accelerating, threatening to destroy huge swathes of marine life unless dramatic action is swiftly taken, leading ocean scientists have warned.   About half of the world's coral reefs have already been destroyed over the past 30 years, as climate change warms the sea and rising carbon emissions make it more acidic.

The Himalayas

The world's highest mountain range contains the planet's largest non-polar ice mass, with over 46,000 glaciers.   The mammoth glaciers cross eight countries and are the source of drinking water, irrigation and hydroelectric power for roughly 1.5 billion people. And just like in Antarctica, the ice is melting.
The world's highest mountain range contains the planet's largest non-polar ice mass, with over 46,000 glaciers. The mammoth glaciers cross eight countries and are the source of drinking water, irrigation and hydroelectric power for roughly 1.5 billion people. And just like in Antarctica, the ice is melting.

The Maldives

An expected 2°C rise in the world’s average temperatures in the next decades will impact island economies such as the Maldives with extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels.
An expected 2°C rise in the world’s average temperatures in the next decades will impact island economies such as the Maldives with extreme weather patterns and rising sea levels.

The Alps

Over the last century, global warming has caused all Alpine glaciers to recede. Scientists predict that most of the glaciers in the Alps could be gone by 2050.   Global warming will also bring about changes in rain and snowfall patterns and an increase in the frequency of extreme meteorological events, such as floods and avalanches, experts have warned.

The Arctic

The Arctic is ground zero for climate change, warming at a rate of almost twice the global average.    The sea ice that is a critical component of Arctic marine ecosystems is projected to disappear in the summer within a generation.
The Arctic is ground zero for climate change, warming at a rate of almost twice the global average. The sea ice that is a critical component of Arctic marine ecosystems is projected to disappear in the summer within a generation.

Micronesia and Polynesia

Called the "epicenter of the current global extinction," by Conservation International, this smattering of more than 4,000 South Pacific islands is at risk from both local human activity and global climate change.
Called the "epicenter of the current global extinction," by Conservation International, this smattering of more than 4,000 South Pacific islands is at risk from both local human activity and global climate change.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.