The Green New Deal, Part 2  

Alex Steffen has a post at WorldChanging declaring a bright green economic boom the first priority after the US elections - Job One, Day One: Bright Green Economic Recovery.

"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late."
--Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

With the U.S. presidential race in its final few weeks, and momentum towards a possible Obama/ Democratic landslide building, it's worth beginning to ask, "What next? What happens here in America after the election?"

The world needs a strong and future-focused United States, but what we have is a U.S. nearing complete collapse. Our financial institutions have nearly failed, our dollar is weak, our government is in deficit spending, our people are neck-deep in debt. Our infrastructure is literally falling apart. Our military is in a shambles. Our health care system is the joke of the developed world, our education system fails half of our children, and we imprison more people than China. Meanwhile, we are the world's worst polluter, having built a car-dependent suburban way of life that pumps money out of our economy and planet-threatening emissions into the sky.

Many Americans, especially young Americans, see this nation's future disintegrating in front of their eyes, and realize that we no longer have options or time to debate. We have only one choice: launch ourselves immediately into a bright green economic transformation, or sink into a potentially irrecoverable decline.

We know that transformation is within our grasp. We know that we can move quickly to transition to smart growth and urban revitalization, green building, efficient electric cars, power generation from renewables, sustainable farming, ecological restoration of our wild lands and rivers, green taxes (with a carbon cap) and a strong commitment to education, public science and diplomacy. Solutions exist to the problems we face.

We know that making this transition quickly and strongly will produce millions of green jobs, and propel America back into the lead of the global economy while benefiting people everywhere. We know too that making this transition will leave Americans healthier, more prosperous and safer, while restoring fiscal stability to our government. A bright green transformation would not be a drag on the economy, but the means of its rescue. Finally, we know that only an all-out effort to make our prosperity sustainable offers us any hope of staving off a planetary ecological disaster. ...

The next U.S. president and congressional leaders will find themselves under immediate fire from neo-conservatives, reactionary businesses and industries that are irredeemably unsustainable (like the Oil and Coal Lobbies) and will find themselves very quickly pressured to scale back their plans, to speak in the most triangulated language possible, to confine change to the smallest, most halting steps. Those in the U.S. who oppose change are strong, wealthy, unprincipled and ruthless. They're already gearing up to demand that given the tough times, change must be weak, small and slow.

But we don't have another decade to embrace change. We may not have another election, even. Indeed, we need a president and congressional leaders who stand up on their very first days on the job, and commit this nation to big, bold, rapid and visionary change. We need to set the terms of the fight at a level with the order of magnitude of change we need. The stakes are a nation transformed within the next couple years. Without that, even a landslide will prove to have been meaningless.

So that's it, then, choruses the commentariat. Collapsing confidence, crashing stock markets and credit-starved banks spell doom not just for the economy, but for environmental concerns. Saving the planet may be all very well in the good times, but is an unaffordable luxury when things turn bad.

The argument is pervasive, persuasive and gaining ground. Even some environmentalists half-accept it, believing they should mute their message. But it is plain wrong. Never have green concerns and measures been more important.

How so? The second best reason is that this financial crisis is mild compared with the environmentally driven ones ahead. The climate crunch, the Stern report concluded, will cost a staggering 20 per cent of global growth if not averted. Peak oil – when the cheap and abundant fuel that has powered our growth becomes scarce and expensive – is likely to be even worse in its impact, reducing supplies of humanity's main source of energy, for the first time in history, before another can take its place.

And neither can wait. There's a growing consensus that emissions of carbon dioxide must head sharply downwards within a decade if global warming is not to run out of control. And peak oil, a growing number of experts believe, may well arrive even sooner.

But the most important reason is wholly positive. Developing a new green economy is our most promising path out of the present crisis. It is the best available new engine of growth, with the best chance of creating the tens of millions of jobs that will soon be desperately needed.

This Wednesday, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) will be making precisely this point, when it launches a new campaign in London. Its multi-million-dollar Green Economy Initiative – already being funded by the German and Norwegian governments and the European Commission – aims to convince the world, that, far from restricting growth, tackling the growing planetary environmental crisis would accelerate it.

UNEP plans to "make and communicate a strong and convincing economic case". As The Independent on Sunday exclusively reported last week, it envisages a Green New Deal to create jobs, revive the international economy, slash poverty and head off environmental disaster.

The launch comes not a moment too soon, for the tide is already flowing strongly in the other direction. Last Thursday it threatened to sweep away the prospects for agreeing a strong successor to the Kyoto Protocol – the best, and last, chance to bring climate change under control.

Eight European leaders – led by Donald Tusk the Prime Minister of Poland, and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's controversial premier – revolted against ambitious targets for increasing renewable energy adopted at a similar summit just 18 months ago, saying they could no longer afford to meet them. The revolt is serious because it threatens to undermine the authority of the EU, which is leading the drive towards a new climate treaty, and to give other countries the excuse not to act.

It is also shortsighted, for renewables are one of the most important, and fastest growing, parts of the already booming green economy. Worldwide, investment in them grew four-fold, from $33.4bn (£19.3bn) to $148.4bn between 2004 and 2007, Michael Liebreich, CEO of analysts New Energy Finance, will report in the next issue of the UN's environmental magazine, Our Planet.

Renewables' share of Germany's electricity supply has almost tripled to more than 14 per cent over the past 10 years, creating 250,000 jobs. In China 600,000 people are employed in making and installing solar water heaters: they are now used in one in 10 of the nation's homes – a proportion forecast to rise to one in two by 2030. Chinese wind-energy capacity has doubled in each of the past two years, while its production of solar cells soared from virtually nothing in 2005 to the biggest in the world last year. Worldwide, renewables now employ 2.3 million people, a figure expected almost to quadruple by 2030. ...

"The 20th century economy, now in such crisis, was driven by financial capital," says Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director. "The 21st-century one is going to have to be based on developing the world's natural capital to provide the lasting jobs and wealth that are needed, particularly for the poorest people on the planet." He cites Mexico, which is already employing 1.5 million poor people to plant and manage the forests that conserve the country's soil and water supplies.

It makes economic, as well as environmental sense. If the world's two billion desperately poor people can be economically enfranchised, they will become a huge new market, helping to create a new world prosperity.