So I'm 6 days into Covid, my brain feels like cottage cheese, but I still want to try to say something about this permitting bill & the way that climate politics seems to be shaking out after the fade-away of the #GreenNewDeal.
It's supply-side climate policy and it's bad.
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It's supply-side climate policy and it's bad.
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The vision of the #GreenNewDeal was to connect climate policy to a large host of policies that would raise the majority's real income—quite aside from what people would save on clean compared to fossil energy—and thereby win a entrenched constituency for decarbonization.
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The idea, as I understood it, was that this broad constituency would arise in addition to whatever vested interests in decarbonization would be developed by establishing clean-energy industries, a climate corps, etc.
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The proponents of the IRA also imagine that new political coalitions will be built by the establishment of domestic clean-energy industries—and they may well be. But the majority of Americans still lose money, even with the IRA's generous credits and rebates, because...
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...to participate in climate action, Americans are being asked to act as individual consumers: to spend money on buying a new EV and retrofitting their own homes.
This approach still dumps the costs right in people's laps, before they start to feel the benefits.
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This approach still dumps the costs right in people's laps, before they start to feel the benefits.
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And yes, things will be much cheaper—but you're still being asked to spend money.
This approach to decarbonizing electricity and transportation is the antithesis to a public works project whose costs are socialized and that offers the public benefits directly.
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This approach to decarbonizing electricity and transportation is the antithesis to a public works project whose costs are socialized and that offers the public benefits directly.
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But the faith in markets as rational and reasonable, and consumers as perfect little cogs in the wheels of the market, seems to be unshakable. Make clean energy cheap, and people will pay to switch.
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How much more neoliberalism must we have before we accept that markets don't solve social problems?
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And I would entertain the argument that the US is taking this market-based approach to climate policy only because it's the only way to pass policy through the Senate, if...
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...if it were not for the unholy alliance of fossil fuel interests, powerful energy modelers, centrist pundits, and climate journalists who are pushing to weaken NEPA, shaming environmentalists in the process.
Supply-side climate policy IS the strategy. It's not a "compromise."
Supply-side climate policy IS the strategy. It's not a "compromise."
And here's the thing: it's not going to work to solve the climate and ecological crisis that we're currently in.
Yes, we need to build a fuck-ton of renewable energy, transmission, infrastructure, etc.
But that's not ALL we need to do.
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Yes, we need to build a fuck-ton of renewable energy, transmission, infrastructure, etc.
But that's not ALL we need to do.
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Because, I'm sorry, but the crisis we're in is not just about switching out one form of energy for another while leaving the rest of the system in place.
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I don't actually think that degrowth is a viable political program, but degrowth research has nonetheless made the incontrovertible point that everything we extract and bring into our economy and everything we emit as waste "out of" our economy is part of the climate problem.
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In addition to phasing out fossil fuel energy, we also need to integrate our economy into planetary boundaries.
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Yes, I know, I sound very crunchy. I'm sorry. I'm from New York. I grew up liking ballet, and Paris, and Madonna and Prince. I thought nature was gross. I had no interest in ecology until I was well down the climate rabbit hole. But there it is. Planetary boundaries matter.
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Anyway, my point is that the Democrats and some of the most well-positioned and influential voices in academia and media are starting to coalesce around pushing for and celebrating supply-side climate policy (increase supply of clean energy and voilà: problem solved).
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Not only does this religion of markets (sustained by the ritual of math with made-up assumptions which is economic modeling) totally ignore how the power of intrenched fossil interests actually works, and how people power must be built to overthrow it, it also...
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...it also makes decarbonization a series of consumer choices, which is bound to lead to, at best, a partial solution.
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For even if everyone bought an EV, solar panels, and an induction stove, we would still need not just a decarbonized, electrified economy, but an integrated economy in order to stop destroying the planetary systems that, let's be frank, enable us to live.
/fin
/fin
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