From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The Democrats’ New Climate Plan: Improved But Weirdly Isolationist
Date July 5, 2020 12:00 AM
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[Shaped by mass demand, Congressional Democrats’ June 30th
report on the climate crisis is a welcome improvement. But, in
addition to its weak response to fossil fuel expansion, the report
adopts an America First strategy to solve a global problem.]
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THE DEMOCRATS’ NEW CLIMATE PLAN: IMPROVED BUT WEIRDLY ISOLATIONIST
 
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Kate Aronoff
July 1, 2020
The New Republic
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_ Shaped by mass demand, Congressional Democrats’ June 30th report
on the climate crisis is a welcome improvement. But, in addition to
its weak response to fossil fuel expansion, the report adopts an
America First strategy to solve a global problem. _

Sunrise Movement activists demand a Green New Deal. Climate crisis
activists, in the streets and in the Congress, led House Democrats to
submit a climate crisis plan, that despite its flaws would not have
been submitted even a couple of years ago., Image via YouTube

 

There’s a lot to like in the House Select Committee on the Climate
Crisis’s 538-page climate plan
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Put together by nine Democratic majority members of the committee
through hearings and consultations, the document released Tuesday
is more ambitious than anything that could have come out of Capitol
Hill even a few years ago—thanks largely to pressure coming from
inside and outside the halls of power. 

The plan, though, also imagines the United States fighting climate
change alone, an isolated government with an economy broadly
resembling the one it had half a century ago. It’s an odd missed
opportunity for Democrats to internalize what climate campaigners,
particularly those in the global south, have been observing for
decades: Carbon doesn’t stop at borders just because policy does.

The wider world out there—a world to which the U.S. still
enthusiastically exports
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fuels—goes mostly unmentioned in the report, as does the fact that
policymakers here hold enormous sway over international institutions
with the power to shape global trade flows toward low-carbon ends. The
plan touches on the Paris Agreement and the Green Climate Fund set
up under its auspices. But its discussion of the international
aspects of climate change largely ignores pressing global governance
questions and conjures up images of an America under attack, fending
off hordes of climate refugees with a military that’s procuring
green tanks. 

“The climate crisis amplifies geopolitical threats as resource
scarcity and catastrophic events fuel conflict, mass migration, and
social and political strife,” the report states. Few experts would
dispute this statement
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Yet the report’s prescription for meeting such challenges relies on
combative rather than cooperative approaches: “Federal leadership
requires coordination across the science, security, and defense
enterprises to confront threats to military infrastructure and
operations and global security.” While the plan
encourages wildlife migration across borders and to more suitable
climates, it treats human migration mainly as a menace, directing the
Department of Homeland Security to join other agencies in preparing
for “climate-driven internal and cross-border migration.”
Laudably, the report’s authors do recommend admitting and offering
formal protections for 50,000 “climate displaced persons per
year.” But given that 16.1 million people were displaced just last
year by weather-related disasters, it’s certainly possible that
modest quota could be quickly overwhelmed.

Framing the international dimension of the climate challenge as a
national security threat is pretty common, even among some
progressives. Besides dabbling in  xenophobia, this narrow lens also
comes at the cost of more comprehensive solutions. In particular, this
framing tends to downplay the need for a more compassionate
immigration policy overall as people seek refuge from the climate
crises the U.S. has played a major role in creating.

The committee’s plan takes a blinkered view of what a holistic U.S.
response to the crisis could look like. “In poor and fragile
nations, these climate-driven shocks can also drive political
instability and refugee movements. U.S. foreign policy and aid can
help to address the global humanitarian threats of climate change
before they become national security threats,” the committee states
forebodingly. Without listing any specific figures, it further
recommends that Congress “contribute the funds necessary to meet our
financial commitment to the Green Climate Fund,” the grant-making
body set up as a part of the United Nations Framework Conventions on
Climate Change to furnish resources for mitigation and adaptation, and
integrate climate into the work of the U.S. Agency for International
Development. 

In reality, there’s much more the U.S. can do to help finance the
path to a low-carbon future, as well as many places where its
obstructionism is actively hampering the world’s efforts to get
there. As global south countries face massive capital flight, mounting
death tolls from Covid-19, and deep depressions, U.S. Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin has continually blocked the International
Monetary Fund extension of Special Drawing Rights
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a currency pegged to five different global currencies that—if
issued—could lend much-needed relief to struggling low- and
middle-income countries. Agreeing to make those funds available
wouldn’t be purely altruistic, either: Resource-rich, monetarily
poor countries under duress will be more likely to dig up and burn
fossil fuels as a means of quick cash—bad news for everyone on this
planet. These countries lack the funds to prepare adequately for
climate damages, much less leapfrog over the fossil-fueled development
that helped build Northern countries’ wealth and transition to
renewables. The United Nations Commission on Trade and Development has
done detailed work
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out what democratic multilateralism, rising to the challenges of a
hotter and wetter twenty-first century, could look like. Democrats
interested in a thoroughly global energy transition—indeed, the only
kind capable of staving off catastrophe—might do well to consider
it. 

Among the best things the U.S. can do for the climate is to
decarbonize itself as quickly as possible. The committee’s plan
falls short on that front, too. No firm date is given for the U.S. to
stop expanding its fossil fuel system. Instead, it offers periodic
paeans to experimental carbon-capturing technologies that have yet to
prove
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can suck meaningful amounts of carbon out of fossil fuel production
and could artificially extend the life of coal, oil, and gas. Despite
plenty of evidence indicating the U.S. could decarbonize faster
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already existing technology, the plan sets a leisurely goal of making
all cars zero-emission by 2035, the power sector net-zero-emission by
2040, and most everything else slower than that. 

This is a far cry from the benevolent global climate leadership the
committee claims to be championing. The enormous wealth the U.S. has
built enables it to transition rapidly off fossil fuels if so
desired. As global south countries have long pointed out, far-off
goals like the committee’s  net-zero-by-2050 target leave poorer
countries to shoulder a decarbonization burden
that wealthier countries are much better positioned to carry. 

The plan also lets polluters off easy. Instead of placing any limits
on fossil fuel exports, it instructs the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission to consider the climate costs of greenlighting new
infrastructure. Rather than collaborating with countries like
China—which has spent years developing specialized industrial
processes for clean technologies—the plan refashions Trump’s idea
of energy dominance for a greener but still harshly unequal world:
The U.S., hoarding intellectual property according to this vision,
will dominate clean energy export markets for everything from
renewables to so-called clean coal. 

Notably, this vision also fails to reckon in any way with current
economic realities. The kinds of midcentury-style industrial
production imagined in the plan are folksy anachronisms at this point.
The world’s most cutting-edge clean tech factories, for instance,
employ relatively few people on their shop floors, which are dominated
by automated processes. Decarbonizing without throwing millions into
unstable living conditions will require transitioning workers now in
emissions-heavy sectors to greener work, not holding out false hope
for a manufacturing economy
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long gone. There are plenty of well-paid and unionized jobs to be had
in an energy transition—in insulation, maintenance, and building a
smart grid, for instance—but also lots of sorely needed work
that’s already low-carbon
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much of it today done by mostly underpaid women in professions like
teaching and nursing. These green jobs—in effect, expanding sectors
that already exist—may not satisfy outdated wartime fantasies of
what a full-scale economic mobilization will look like. But maximizing
decarbonization, minimizing disruption, and building a more broadly
sustainable society will require such adjustments. It will also
mean collaborating with international partners rather than jockeying
to outcompete them.

For example, even the modest industrial policy the committee’s plan
advocates (i.e., “Buy Clean” government procurement
policies) would benefit from multilateral cooperation to reimagine
what international institutions are for. Without that, such a
plan could easily run afoul of an international trade regime
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to keep capital as mobile as possible, whatever the costs to the
planet. As with the IMF or World Bank, the U.S. could feasibly
leverage its enormous power in bodies like the World Trade
Organization to rewrite these old rules so as to align with the
planet’s needs. But the committee offers scant discussion of how
to change the rules of a game now rigged against
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As green groups have noted in the last few days, the House
committee’s hefty climate plan is a step in the right direction. For
now, though, Democrats are still holding fast to George H.W. Bush’s
bipartisan wisdom, dispensed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992: “The
American way of life is not up for negotiation.”

[_Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic. She is the
co-author of A Planet To Win: Why We Need A Green New Deal (Verso)
and the co-editor of We Own The Future: Democratic Socialism,
American Style (The New Press).__She can be reached @KateAronoff.
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