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INTRODUCTION

Thanks to human-induced greenhouse warming, the Earth’s average temperature today is about 1.2° C (2.2° F) higher than it was in the pre–fossil fuel era. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)[1] reported in 2018 that if warming is allowed to surpass 1.5° C, the world will risk widespread ecological destruction and human suffering. To keep temperatures below that limit, they concluded, global greenhouse emissions would have to be cut almost in half before 2030, and net-zero emissions would have to be achieved by 2050.[2]

Now, climate groups in the United States are drafting a Green New Deal, a plan that calls for cutting net U.S. greenhouse emissions to zero through a just transition to an economy that runs on non-fossil energy. The still-evolving plan has given the climate movement a big shot in the arm, providing a sweeping national policy initiative that millions now regard as something worth rallying around. In that, the Green New Deal is part of a long tradition. The women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights struggle, the movement to end the Vietnam War, the nuclear freeze of the 1980s, and the fight for reproductive choice have all focused on big demands: groundbreaking national legislation, concrete policy changes, or explicit reinforcement of Constitutional rights. The Green New Deal has revived interest in public planning, and the kind of massive investment that can secure basic needs, including energy, for all. It has eclipsed previously popular half- and quarter-measures that would have only nibbled around the edges of the climate crisis. It has inspired vigorous resistance to the Trump administration’s obsessively pro–fossil fuel, anti-ecological policies. It has explicitly linked the need for climate mitigation to the need for social and racial justice, inclusion, and workers’ power. It intends to shift the economic center of gravity away from the owning and investing classes toward those who do the nation’s work. Those visionary features have not only positioned the Green New Deal at the heart of the climate movement, but have also earned support for it from a host of other movements, institutions, networks, scientists, and scholars.

History holds other lessons. For example, passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an important and essential victory for the movement against racial oppression, but it was not the end of the struggle. To be effective, it had to be followed up by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and other major legislation—and the struggle is still not over. Passage of a Green New Deal, like that of the Civil Rights Act, is widely viewed as a vital step toward righting a wrong that threatens the nation. But one act of Congress cannot fully tackle a multifaceted threat like the emerging climate emergency. Like the Civil Rights Act, the Green New Deal Act must be accompanied by other essential legislation.

For example, the Green New Deal has not yet specified a mechanism by which the nation can safely guarantee the elimination of greenhouse emissions by a hard-and-fast deadline. The absence of a direct, airtight mechanism to achieve the necessarily rapid decline and elimination of fossil fuels is not unique to the Green New Deal. None of the climate proposals debated so far, either in Washington or at international climate talks, have included such a component. But the intensifying symptoms of our climate predicament now require an immediate switch from the current steady rise in fossil-fuel use to a much steeper decline—something like doing a U-turn at eighty miles an hour in a tanker truck. There’s no time left for legislating corporate-friendly policies and waiting to see if they work. If, in 2030 or 2040, such policies turn out to have been insufficient, it will be too late for a do-over.

The most widely discussed emissions-reduction strategies depend on three general elements: building up “green” energy capacity and infrastructure (with, in the case of the Green New Deal, lots of public investment); seeking to maintain or accelerate economic growth without increasing energy demand; and intervening in the market by setting a price on carbon in the event that greenhouse emissions are not declining fast enough.

If we are to increasingly keep fossil fuels in the ground, the development of non-fossil energy capacity as called for by the Green New Deal will be urgently needed. But the national climate discussion appears to be based on an implicit assumption that as new energy capacity comes online in the coming decade or two, it will push an equal quantity of fossil-energy capacity off-line. But history and research show that with economic growth, new energy sources tend to add to the existing energy supply rather than replace it.^[3]

The idea that investment in solar and wind technology and green infrastructure can work its way through the market to automatically eliminate fossil-fuel use and emissions is not supported by the evidence. So various interventions have been suggested to give new energy sources a leg up in the market. For example, governments could tax each of the fossil fuels based on the carbon emissions it produces; require energy companies to buy permits to burn or sell fossil fuels; or provide home- and business-owners incentives to produce or buy solar or wind energy. Governmental and grassroots approaches to making fossil fuels more scarce or expensive include eliminating subsidies to the coal and petroleum industries; pressuring institutional investors to disinvest from those industries; banning leases and drilling on public land; and pressuring the industry through direct action, as with the anti-pipeline and “Keep It in the Ground” movements.

Most of these actions have been pursued in one or more places around the world. Worthy as they are, all are indirect approaches to driving down carbon emissions. Research tells us, as I show in Chapter Three, that none of those approaches, separately or together, can make that necessary eighty-mph U-turn. None of the widely debated climate strategies has included an element that is essential for fairly and humanely stopping greenhouse emissions: a mandatory, impervious cap on the quantities of fossil fuels entering the economy, one that lowers year by year, and is accompanied by planned allocation of the nation’s energy resources and fair-shares rationing of energy. I will outline how this might be done in Chapter Four.

The Green New Deal is a stimulus package in both name and aim. If not implemented with great care, it will encourage the same pursuit of economic growth that got us into this climate predicament in the first place.^[4] Resource use must be carefully restrained during the transition; otherwise, the new non-fossil energy coming online will feed growth rather than displace oil, natural gas, and coal. Full displacement of fossil energy by non-fossil energy can only happen if a cap is imposed on fossil fuels, and that cap is lowered year by year in order to eliminate their emissions on schedule. Even an urgent buildup of green energy capacity cannot proceed quickly enough to compensate for all of the fossil-fueled capacity being withdrawn, so our society will need to operate on a smaller total energy supply. The national economy will need to reorient toward ensuring sufficiency for all rather than feeding the accumulation of wealth by the few.

Successfully enacting such a system will not be easy. Time is running out. As the struggle for the Green New Deal and other legislation proceeds, there will be much wrangling over the question of what is politically acceptable. That’s inevitable, but we must keep at the center of the public debate the most urgent question of all: What actions must be undertaken to eliminate greenhouse emissions in time?

The IPCC’s 2018 report calls for a stepped-up rate of emissions reductions and highlights the devastating impacts expected if warming is allowed to rise past 1.5°.[5] Letting the global temperature blow up to 2° or beyond would, says the report, risk irreversible loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, eventually raising sea levels by one to two meters. At 2°, one-fourth to more than one-half of all permafrost will disappear, irreversibly releasing a surge of stored carbon into the atmosphere. Storms, wildfires, and pest outbreaks will cause far more widespread forest dieback at 2°, especially in Central and South America, the Mediterranean Basin, South Africa, and South Australia. Eighteen percent of insect species would see their geographic range shrink by half or more, threatening many with extinction. The report expresses “high confidence” that warming of 2° would generally increase the risk of extinctions in general, and the “irreversible loss of many marine and coastal ecosystems” in particular. Between 70 and 90 percent of coral reefs will be lost at 1.5°; at 2°, virtually all will die off.

The IPCC cites evidence that suggests if we allow temperatures to rise from 1.5° to 2°, the percentage of the world population exposed to severe heat waves in at least one out of five years would rise from 14 percent to 37 percent, an increase of 1.7 billion people. An additional 420 million more people will be “frequently exposed to extreme heatwaves,” and about 65 million additional people will be exposed to “exceptional heatwaves,” facing prolonged high temperatures that have only occurred very rarely up to now.[6] The IPCC also projects enormous increases in crop loss and habitat degradation. From the report:

The number of people suffering increased water scarcity will increase by 184–270 million. The number of people facing increased flood risk at 1.5°C will be double the number who experienced flooding in the period from 1976 to 2005, and warming of 2°C will expose an additional 26 to 34 million people. The average monthly number of people exposed to extreme drought will rise globally from 114 million at 1.5° to 190 million at 2°.

The report projects that global warming and the food shortages that result[7] will increase the rate of childhood undernutrition, stunting, and mortality, particularly in Asia and Africa, and that the undernourished population will be much larger globally at 2° than at 1.5°. Incidence of malaria will increase, and the geographic reach of the Anopheles mosquito will be extended. Ditto for the Aedes mosquito, which carries dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, and the Zika virus. Also, according to the IPCC: “Most projections conclude that climate change could expand the geographic range and seasonality of Lyme and other tick-borne diseases in parts of North America and Europe.”

The bad news doesn’t stop there. The IPCC projects unprecedented waves of human migration: “Tropical populations may have to move distances greater than 1,000 km if global mean temperature rises by 2° . . . A disproportionately rapid evacuation from the tropics could lead to a concentration of population in tropical margins and the subtropics, where population densities could increase by 300 percent or more.” If warming exceeds 2° by 2050, “rates of human conflict could increase.” Going from 1.5° to 2° could increase the numbers of people susceptible to poverty “by up to several hundred million by 2050.” And “populations at disproportionately higher risk of adverse consequences . . . include disadvantaged and vulnerable populations, some indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods.”

A 1.5° world will be a tough one to live in, but it appears inevitable at this point, according to IPCC. A 2° world would clearly be catastrophic and must be avoided. The climate policies we adopt can’t simply rely on green technology and high hopes to carry us into the future. They must be designed to directly and reliably minimize the risk of surpassing a 1.5° increase in global temperature. It is far more important to steer clear of a nightmare future than to strive for an idealized one.

The Green New Deal’s inclusion of urgently needed economic and social policies for job creation, workers’ and union rights and benefits, inclusive economic justice, guarantees of living wages and health care coverage, indigenous rights, and vision for an end to racial oppression are all much-needed breakthroughs and are crucial for creating a genuinely more just society. It also sets necessarily ambitious goals for the elimination of greenhouse emissions. The original joint resolution did not include explicit target dates, but in other contexts, GND advocates have cited timelines that would be more aggressive than IPCC’s. Its energy and justice proposals complement movements to keep fossil fuels in the ground, rather than competing with them. And the Green New Deal is forthright in recognizing that market forces would be sorely deficient in addressing the climate emergency.

The promise of a Green New Deal resonates with an enormous and growing number of people. When in 2019, The Intercept and Naomi Klein presented a seven-minute film called A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,[8] it garnered two million views within eight hours of being posted. Written by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who was sponsor of the Green New Deal bill in the House of Representatives, and the filmmaker Avi Lewis, with animated art by Molly Crabapple, and narration by Ocasio-Cortez, it tells the story of the Green New Deal in retrospect, looking back from 2030. After the Democrats won back the White House and Congress in 2020, the film tells us, “We knew that we needed to save the planet, and that we had all the technology to do it.”

There is value in the Klein/Crabapple/Ocasio-Cortez film and other works that envision a world that we would like to see become reality, along with policies that will be needed to take us there. Such visions can inspire us to act and not be paralyzed by dread and inertia. It is necessary as well to envision the ways in which our best-laid plans could fail to keep future generations from falling not only into the 2° world that IPCC projects, but even farther, into the hell of a 3° or 6° world.

The Earth we knew in the twentieth century is gone, and it’s not coming back. The necessity to prevent much more catastrophic heating requires us to impose solid limits that minimize the risk of catastrophe. As we accomplish that, we will have to find a way to live within those limits. New energy technology can be useful in helping us adapt to the limits we impose on ourselves, but it is inadequate to the task of restraining society within the energetic, economic, and ecological boundaries that we are compelled to respect.

There is no time for experimentation. Given the emergency we face, climate policy’s highest-priority target must be to drive emissions down to zero in time, without fail. It doesn’t matter whether a realistic target is considered to be 1.5°, 2°, or even 2.5°. If the policies we decide to pursue turn out to be inadequate, it will be too late to try something else. By the time failure is apparent, there will be no action, no matter how strong, that can keep warming within acceptable limits. A direct, foolproof plan is needed, and no such plan yet exists. The Green New Deal is a step in the right direction, but it’s only a step. To prevent catastrophe, the Green New Deal must be paired with legal mechanisms that directly drive fossil-fuel use down to zero, and on schedule. Taking that route will at least improve the Earth’s chances of avoiding the IPCC’s beyond-two-degree future and even more calamitous scenarios.

ENDNOTES

[1] The IPCC was created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program. It draws on the work of thousands of scientists worldwide to supply governments with up-to-date scientific evaluations and projections regarding the global climate. Its website is ipcc.ch.

[2] IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5° C, October, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15

[3] Richard York and Shannon Elizabeth Bell, “Energy Transitions or Additions? Why a Transition from Fossil Fuels Requires More Than the Growth of Renewable Energy,” Energy Research and Social Science 51 (2019): 40-43.

[4] Giorgos Kallis, “A Green New Deal Must Not Be Tied to Economic Growth.” Truthout, March 10, 2019

[5] As in previous reports, IPCC relied only on published studies and analyses regarded as scientifically solid and was cautious in its conclusions. While potentially on the conservative side, the report’s still-jarring projections make the broadest and most authoritative case for policies and direct mechanisms that will clamp down on emissions as hard and as rapidly as possible.

[6] IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5° C. Even with 1.5° of warming, twice as many megacities will experience severe heat stress, exposing more than 350 million more people to deadly heat by 2050. At 2°, Pakistan and India could see an annual reoccurrence of the unprecedented heatwaves that killed more than four thousand people in 2015.

[7] IPCC finds that each degree Celsius increase in global mean temperature is projected to reduce production of
wheat by 6 percent, rice by 3 percent, maize by 7.4 percent, and soybean by 3 percent, on average. In the greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia, rice yield losses per degree of warming could exceed 10 percent. The report predicts that total human impact of drought will grow by 64 percent. Southeast Asia’s crop production could drop by one-third. A large increase in loss of fisheries can be expected.

[8] Naomi Klein , “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” The Intercept, April 17, 2019.