RED, WHITE, AND BLUE NEW DEAL
You’ve likely noticed Progressives in America all atwitter with talk of what is being called the Green New Deal. And, as the nation that most likes to catch America’s colds, flus, moral panics, and policy agendas, here in Canada our telephone poles and social media accounts have too begun announcing Canada’s Green New Deal. However, before we swallow this US policy pill promising salvation by way of cohesion between environment and economics, we may wish to ask where this is coming from and what it’s all about.
The first thing to notice is that the very people most loudly jeering Trump’s “Make America Great Again” have themselves gone and forged policy and are now trumpeting a set of associated talking points explicitly aimed at what they see as transforming American society for the better with, no less, the glorified past as a template. As if to one-up the current administration’s vague notions of a better time that once was, the opposition is pitching its own plan based on a very specific time and set of policies – and even naming it accordingly to drive home their deeply nostalgic point. Apparently some Democrats see Roosevelt’s New Deal and the prosperity that followed as America’s golden age and wish to restore the nation to some kind of former glory by the same method. (Hilarious! One couldn’t write such comedy and expect it to be taken seriously.)
Then when we stop laughing we’re forced to contend with the specifics of this, so-called, Green New Deal. We hear the heroes of Progressivism such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders pushing for an FDR-like stimulus package of social and economic reforms, but with the 21st century twist of taking aim at climate change. To get the ball rolling, a letter signed by more than 600 organizations who support the idea of a Green New Deal was sent to Congress in January. The letter spelled out a clear set of aims including the desire for "an expansion of the Clean Air Act; a ban on crude oil exports; an end to fossil fuel subsidies and fossil fuel leasing; and a phase-out of all gasoline-powered vehicles by 2040.” A fine plan. But, along with this, signatories also noted their intention to "vigorously oppose ... market-based mechanisms and technology options such as carbon and emissions trading and offsets, carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, waste-to-energy and biomass energy.” All of this may sound perfectly reasonable to some. Others are quick to note that there’s no vision of reality in which decarbonization is achieved by mid-century, as needed, without all available tools in play, particularly carbon capture. And organizations no less than the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defence Fund, the Natural Resources Defence Council, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the UN agree. Historians should also chime in here, reminding Democrats that FDR’s plan was very likely successful not because he had a narrow set of rigid demands based on a clear blueprint, but because his government was open to experimenting with a wide range of improvised schemes, many of which failed miserably. Why not give that a try? Why not admit no one knows what will work and that it’s very likely a variety of strategies are needed? Why are folks so quickly closing doors, especially those that many leaders in the field say are essential? Curious.
Then there are features of the Green New Deal such as the promise of massive green skills worker training programs. As pointed out by Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang, the numbers don’t imply this will be even a moderately successful strategy. To date, Yang tells us, based on the government’s own numbers, retraining programs have a success rate of around 10-15%. So the experiment has already been run. It doesn’t work. Historically we’ve not seen folks bumped out of resource extraction and factory work by automation, companies finding cheaper labour overseas, or by a shifting economy, say, entering retraining programs, moving to a new city or state and rejoining the workforce in new and thriving industries; instead, it’s far more common for people to go on disability or slip into unemployment, fall into depression or substance abuse, and eventually die from an overdose or commit suicide by one form or another. In fact, we’ve all watched as cases of opioid addiction, drug overdoses, and suicide have exploded. Things are so bad that the Centres for Disease Control is now sounding the alarm – noting that, even while great progress is made combating heart disease, stroke, and cancer, the US population has seen its life expectancy drop year after year and is currently on a decline unlike anything seen since the coincident catastrophes of World War I and the Spanish flu. So, as the US economy is fundamentally reconstituted by technology and environmental emergencies, it seems the Green New Deal, in its current formulation at least, is likely to leave Americans worse off than at present – where they already have a life expectancy less like Canada, Japan, or France and more like Armenia, Lebanon, or Vietnam. Worse still, most indicators, reports, and surveys point to the disappearance of virtually all work paying less than $20 per hour between now and 2030. (Which, in case you’re wondering, is the majority of all US jobs: about 80 million or so according the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.) But, of course, it’s not at all about retraining and getting a better job, as under threat too are many of those higher earning jobs: jobs like insurance agents, accountants, radiologist, and surgeons. So even if you’re logger, truck driver, or work in retail and are willing and able to go back to school for ten years the future is likely to remain unpredictable. And there’s no serious plan to deal with this reality in this massive, once-in-a-lifetime stimulus package.
And so it’s still just more comedy on offer here, pretending that these policy amendments aimed at greening the economy will be sufficient for society or the environment when the nature of work and the fundamental structure of society is already shifting beneath our feet, all as a climate system we’ve made capricious disrupts all that we reliably knew about the status quo. America’s new New Deal seems more in line with the old New Deal, and more like a bit of political nostalgia akin to “Make America Great Again”, than anything like an ambitious and multifaceted agenda aimed at tackling the realities we presently face – never mind those we can see coming on the horizon.
Given these points, Canada should not align itself with what I see as the Brown New Deal. While there are abundant commonalities and shared interests between ourselves and the United States – like entwined economies running on fossil fuels and rapidly eliminating human labour – we should be charting our own course. Actually, much of the work is already done: way back in 2015, a broad spectrum of the progressive movement in this country, representing Indigenous, environmental, labour, and justice groups, began to formulate what would become the Leap Manifesto. It lays out a viable way to expand the low carbon sectors of the economy, grow local capacity and energy independence, and transform transportation and agriculture, all while meaningfully addressing our obligations to one another under Truth and Reconciliation. So why look to America?
Is there any doubt that Canada’s most progressive leaps have all come about not by looking to the US or Britain but by finding an alternative? Don’t we see this written into our national fabric, from bilingualism to the cultural mosaic to health care? Was the whole Canadian project not in fact a rejection of foreign influences and, in a place that is so different, a commitment to trying something new? Confederation was nothing like an obvious and seamless coalescence, nor was it a more conventional bloody conquest; instead, we imagined a third path: an unlikely and messy dialogue of co-independence between Indigenous, French, and English parties who felt it better to form an extremely difficult, even unholy, alliance between disparate neighbours than to submit to America’s stated destiny and our certain collective erasure. That panned out. And we should continue to do this messy work, making our own mistakes in the process, while leaving America to do the same.
At the very least, why not start with what all the experts say will work, while trialing proven policies and technologies, like those implemented in the democracies of Northern Europe, and running some location specific, made-in-Canada experiments on the side? And part of this imagining a carbon-free future will also require the government to come to terms with a 60%+ unemployment rate. If we have one and not the other, or just go halfway on either, we may wind up worse off than doing nothing at all.
