Noah Smith’s 1%-friendly “green” “new” deal
This is a late reply to Bloomberg’s Noah Smith’s hit job on the Green New Deal resolution recently introduced by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Smith’s piece is here: “How to Design a Green New Deal That Isn’t Over the Top,” 12/2/2019.
“The planet is in grave danger from climate change” — says Noah Smith. But what do we mean by “the planet,” Ke-mo sah-bee? I don’t know about Pelagibacter ubique or HTVC01P (google them!), but the humans who live in the planet are in grave danger from climate change. So, “the planet” is shorthand for us, the homo sapiens on it — humans with different levels of earning (i.e. wealth) and political power to deal with this already present danger. The distribution of wealth and political power among people in the planet tells us directly the extent to which different groups of people are exposed to the consequences of climate change.
Smith blasts the “entitlements” included in the GND: guaranteed jobs, benefits, health care, housing, education, income, etc. He view them as extraneous to the problem of climate change. But these “entitlements” (a coded term aimed to demean basic economic rights of people already enshrined legally in most rich nations of the world) are precisely the type of wealth-and-political-power redistribution measures that the most vulnerable humans in our midst badly need to face the impending effects of climate change with a fighting chance of making it. In fact, it seems to me, these programs are modest compared to the kind of massive redistribution that would be required for an equitable response to climate change. Modest in size, but they are at least a serious attempt to contribute to a solution.
Smith is worried about how the “large deficits required to pay for all of these things” may end up “harming the economy.” But the point of having an economy, any economy, is precisely human welfare, the dignified development of human beings. It is not the job of humans to serve some metaphysical Moloch called “the economy” — which, dressed down, it just means the social status of the 1%.
The government — and, therefore, its deficit, its finances in general — cannot be an end in itself. The government should be an instrument; and in a democracy, it should be an instrument of the 99%. Its “deficit” or its “debt” only matters instrumentally, in the context of how the 99% is actually faring. If Smith is really worried about the problem of public debt, here’s a solution as viable as his alternative “green” “new” deal: Have the 1%ers donate the bulk of outstanding public bonds they hold in their portfolios back to treasuries and finance ministries. Problem solved! But that is not the point. What truly matters is whether people can lead decent lives or even just survive while retaining a bit of their human dignity. If that requires “entitlements” and/or the confiscation of the financial holdings of the 1%, so be it.
The GND’s focus on what the United States needs to do to curtail carbon emissions is not a flaw, as Smith thinks, but the correct focus. This is how this nation can start to contribute to solving a planetary problem that it has greatly contribute to engender. To find a solution to this civilizational crisis, we need to have a sense of history. Western industrialized Europe and its privileged off-shots across the seas (the U.S., most prominently), have for centuries piled up most of the garbage, C02, metane, and other pollutants that are clogging the planet’s lungs and arteries, warming up the biosphere, and making human life on earth increasingly difficult for most people.
It is hard to disentangle the environmental disaster from the social one, because it is actually one and the same disaster. The rich nations have been the minority beneficiaries of several centuries of conquest, colonial plunder, enslavement, and semi-enslavement of millions of humans, generations of them. The standards of living that — above all — the 1% in them enjoy, which contribute mightily to anthropogenic climate change, are what they are as a result of this bloody history. These asymmetries have not disappeared in recent times. Perhaps they seem less gross in their appearance, but in substance they are as gaping and insulting as — if not more than — in the past.
It is incumbent on the people of these rich nations to lead now by example and use respectful diplomacy, cooperation, and persuasion to influence the rest of the world. Smith alludes to international assistance, but as a token gesture. What is required is taking foreign policy — i.e. the international deployment of public resources so far at the service of our nastiest, dirtiest, and most vicious corporate overlords— and turning it upside down. The thrust of Smith’s argument, with its invidious remarks on China, insinuates that the rich countries should continue to leverage their substantive economic (and military!) advantage to dictate conditions on the rest of the world. That is not the way to build an environmentally sustainable and peaceful global society.
The parts of Smith’s proposal (which I won’t detail since readers can find them in the article, linked above) that are not already contained in a similar or larger scale in the Green New Deal are truly wacko. In sum, Smith wants to solve the environmental crisis by preserving and expanding the inequities in wealth and power that led us to the climate crisis in the first place. He wants public resources devoted to handing out incentives ($$$), to dangle “market-friendly” carrots in front of our salivating corporate overlords to make them mend their behavior, develop miraculous technological remedies to what is first and foremost a massive social-civilization problem, and help them along the way to become even more powerful and rich.
Who’s being delusional here? Noah Smith, of course!
