Why You Should Be a Socialist by Nathan J. Robinson

Author:Nathan J. Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

To me, this sounds like an excellent place to begin. Now, granted, it’s a statement of goals. But net-zero greenhouse gas emissions is an extremely clear target, and setting the aim is a precondition of developing a plan. You’ve got to understand what you’re trying to do before you begin figuring out how to do it. As Steve Cohen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute wrote, FDR’s original New Deal “was a series of improvisations in response to specific problems that were stalling economic development … [T]here was no master plan, many ideas failed, and some were ended after a period of experimentation,” while others, “like social security and the Security and Exchange Commission’s regulation of the stock market, became permanent American institutions.”18 It’s okay if the plan starts off vague, because the path to zero emissions is unpredictable, and we’ll only know what works once we experiment.

The IPCC has given us some guidance here. We’ll need to switch all of our power generation to be low or zero emission, change our food systems, electrify transport, plant a hell of a lot of new trees, and use sensible urban planning to make everyday life as energy efficient as possible. Sensible how? Well, in Los Angeles many people spend hours each day sitting in traffic, engines running. It’s a colossal waste of both people’s time and of the planet’s capacity to absorb new carbon emissions. In a well-designed city, that wouldn’t happen.

The Green New Deal is only at the beginning of its development, a fact that is important to understand.19 There has to be a strong public debate about what the most technologically feasible and cost-effective ways of getting to zero emissions are. Some proposals are no-brainers: taxing carbon emissions is an excellent way to account for their real cost to the planet, and the United States is the only large industrialized country without a carbon tax. (This is both colossally irresponsible and yet another reason for the rest of the world to think we are a bunch of selfish assholes.20) But most importantly, this debate should take place within the context of a political consensus. In other words, we all know we’ve got to undertake this project, now let’s figure out how to do it.

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