(This doesn’t all square with ecosocialist ideas, but is a worthwhile read. A very good articulation of the need for a “Marshall Plan like mobilization”. Criticizes lack of practical specifics from the anti-capitlist forces, looks to positive roll of the state, but clearly doesn’t theorize ‘capitalist’ state with interests beholden to BAU. We can endlessly recommend emergency measures and policies guided by rationality, but still problematic if we don’t have a theory of revolution….)
Below is a provisional platform of policies, acts of Congress, Constitutional amendments or Presidential actions that would represent a serious and appropriate confrontation by US society and government with the upcoming climate catastrophe. This document is meant to start a public discussion on government actions grounded in economic, human and geophysical reality and is therefore provisional. It is divided into the following parts:
1) Rationale
2) List of the Platform Planks (Slogan Form)
3) List of Short Descriptions of the Planks/Required Government Actions
4) Question and Answer
1) Rationale
Geophysical Context
A. We, the people of the United States, and every other people, are currently in a global climate emergency. Two hundred years of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use have destabilized and warmed our atmosphere. These human-caused emissions have increasingly disrupted the biosphere of which we are a part and upon which our lives depend. Most of these emissions and warming have occurred in the last several decades with no appreciable halting of them since the beginning, starting in the late 1990’s, of efforts at climate policy. Human life and civilization are dependent on a myriad of biological systems which it is highly unlikely will be heat-resistant and climate-change-resistant enough to withstand the current and upcoming high temperatures, acidification of the oceans, and radically altered climate. Positive feedback loops, where human-caused warming now is leading non-human systems (like melting permafrost) to add to that warming, paint a dire picture for humanity without a vigorous, concerted response.
B. The climate crisis is the most severe and pressing of a series of crises of sustainability and crises of the integrity of earth systems that are now encroaching on human civilization, the consequences of what might be called a “throw-away society”, a decades-old idea taken up by Pope Francis in his recent encyclical. Other biophysical crises include
a. rapid loss of biogenetic diversity and mass extinctions,
b. nitrogen pollution,
c. phosphorus pollution,
d. ocean acidification,
e. freshwater contamination and waste,
f. chemical and particulate pollution from wastes and gaseous emissions,
g. accumulation of toxic solid wastes,
h. rapid deforestation and
i. soil degradation.
As the climate crisis is eased via decisive action, these sustainability crises must be addressed in rapid succession or we will move from one critical global emergency to another. Additionally, the means used to address the most pressing crises should ideally have some benefits in diminishing the severity of other critical resource shortages and destruction of our and co-evolved species’ habitats.
Crises of Social Institutions
C. As if these geophysical crises were not enough, we are also facing multiple social crises that might also be linked to the concept of a throwaway society.
a. Economic inequality has accelerated in the United States and many other industrialized or industrializing countries.
b. Labor force participation rates continue to decline and there is an income squeeze on working, poor and middle class people.
c. Poverty levels with attendant social, economic and health problems are at their highest levels since the early 1960’s.
d. Diminished income to those who will spend it, means weakening demand for the produce of society, especially if the crutch of booms in private credit creation is taken away.
e. The use of bank and other private credit creation as an economic “crutch” has a tendency to lead to collapse of economic systems, new forms of debt peonage, and the upward spiral of asset prices, including real estate.
f. Speculation on asset prices and their inflation has led to a shortage of affordable housing in those places where there are jobs and economic dynamism.
g. There is an ongoing threat to all types of labor, manual and intellectual, from automation, increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence and robots, and a border-less labor market constructed to suit employers and not employees.
h. The political process in the US is dominated by wealthy individuals and corporate lobbies with legalized corruption the norm; politicians spend more time courting the favors of large donors than in governing.
i. The US system of governance, particularly fragmented by geographical subdivisions and dependent on rich patrons, is unable to respond to overwhelmingly popular demands for reform and risks full delegitimation.
j. The increasingly desperate lot of many African Americans and their harassment and brutalization by law enforcement departments have eliminated idle speculation that the US is, after the election of its first African American President, a post-racial society.
k. There is a resurgence of a radical right that uses the racial identity of the current, rather conservative and cautious President as an excuse to engage in anti-government activity and threats. Obama is held by the radical, mostly white, right-wing, to be either a Communist or a Nazi, accusations that seem more to do with virulent racism than the President’s center-right tendencies.
The Priority of Mobilizing Against Climate Catastrophe
D. As engaging and compelling as conflicts between political and cultural groups are we cannot forget that we must unite, in some form, around the critical climate emergency in order to survive in any organized form as a civilization. Human-caused warming and acidifying emissions must cease rapidly. The effects of previously emitted warming gases in the atmosphere on global temperatures must be dampened to buy time. The already expectable effects of warming, such as droughts, more severe storms, and sea level rise must be guarded against to preserve a basis for civilization. All of this suggests that the only rational response is a massive, unprecedented emergency mobilization from the United States government and population as well as other nations and international organizations such as the United Nations. The required massive effort will apply both moral and financial means to mobilize people and resources to preserve a habitable world.
The Mobilization of Resources Hinges on Morality and Money
E. There is and will be no fixed amount of government-supplied financial resources in the effort to rescue the human species from its likely self-destruction. The US federal government can create and destroy dollars as dictated by its fiscal policy the product of a political struggle between a number of competing ethical goals, fiscal philosophies, and interest groups. The US economy is now approximately a 17 trillion dollar economy of which 3.5 trillion dollars are federal government investment in people, goods and services. To build a net-zero carbon emitting and climate resilient basis for civilization rapidly, a more-than doubling of that government investment to 8 trillion dollars per year over a period of one to two decades is warranted and necessitated by the dire geophysical situation we have created for ourselves. Thus in this 20 year emergency period, not unlike a wartime economy, government payments will make up perhaps one third to one half of economic demand. For the US federal government, effective climate action will take its place alongside the immediate survival of the US citizenry and prevention of bodily harm from physical attack as one of the top spending priorities. As in wartime, the fiscal functions of the federal government shall be fully utilized for this vital national priority. There can be no more appropriate use of money, a convention invented by people that we use to measure value, than the preservation of humanity and the ability for humanity to prosper into the future
Managing Inflationary Tendencies of a Wartime Economy
F. With the increase in the injection of funds into the economy by government, stimulating demand for real goods and services that will reduce emissions and increase climate stability, the management of the value of the currency is a concern, as has been in past wartime mobilizations. Even with the very highest ethical and economic goals and intentions as these are, too much demand, too much money plus human wishes, can increase the price of certain key goods and services, if they are in scarcer supply than demanded. The acceleration of government investment will take into account the productive capacity of the economy to produce the necessary goods and services. A variety of additional tools will be used to keep the value of the dollar stable because our lives and those of our children depend on it. These tools would include voluntary conservation efforts, targeted taxation and delayed consumption via climate bond savings programs, which would reduce effective demand for non-essential, non-critical goods and services. However, despite the attention to these safeguards, the contemporary tendency in supposedly savvy financial circles to place inflationary fears above all concerns cannot be the starting point for a program of self-rescue of the human species from its fossil fuel addiction. More likely, real, i.e. non-financial, resources, whether human or from non-human nature, may constrain our efforts to save our species, but the invented resource of money that originates as a shared, public resource will not be the critical brake on our efforts.
Measurable Geophysical Targets
G. The US national economy will be completely decarbonized (net zero carbon emissions) by 2035 with additional targets to reduce existing carbon dioxide concentrations from the atmosphere (currently 402 ppm) and oceans thereafter to target a range from 280 to 350 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to target a return of the oceans to the pH levels measured in the mid-20th Century.
Outline of the Mechanisms of Climate Action
H. Effective and timely climate action, in a combination of public investment and rule-making, will involve bringing into the public sector certain key, currently fossil-fuel dependent, portions of the economy as well as producing within the public domain critical pieces of infrastructure and financial tools required to decarbonize the private economy rapidly. Both financial and moral incentives will mobilize people and material resources while rule-making and enforcement will direct building activities and constrain destructive or climate-damaging activities.
I. The use of the tools of government are not reflective of any claim about the categorical superiority or inferiority of the public versus the private sector, a long-running political debate that is at least 100 years old. Much of this debate consists of positions that mask various political and economic interests or represent commitments to simplified images of how society functions but do not shed much light on the functions of either government, private capital or markets. The tools of government will lead effective climate action because these tools are capable of different functions than those of private companies and households. One of these functions is to represent the long-term interests of the public, a forgotten function in an era of mistaken economic ideas and political cynicism. Despite the current neoliberal fashion in political discourse, the laws and institutional actions of the state are still the one of the prime repositories of the effective morality of our society as well as vital to the functioning of the economy in “normal” times. Undertaking effective climate action will require a somewhat higher standard of morality to become the norm among humanity, especially as regards instant gratification of material wishes. We will need to embed our care for ourselves and future generations, biased towards the latter, in the laws and economic policy of government.
J. Too often mainstream climate policy has been based on a fetishized market as the sole picture of an effective social and economic organization. Climate policy and therefore politics, shrouded in idealized and unrealistic ideas about both how society functions and the specific domain of climate action, has lost sight of the technological tools, the real social matrix of action, and the geophysical goals that would make climate action effective. Climate action is not a hobby-horse for a particular social science theory or love of a particular technological tool: effective emissions reductions and technological change must be brought about by the right and effectively implemented economic, political and social tools.
…more…
