break from the Obama era of climate policy, which sometimes used the language of the Green New Deal but failed to live up to the rhetoric. The Green New Deal resolution, by contrast, offers a program of economic transformation that shouts its ambition from the rooftops. Its realism isn’t grounded in Beltway savvy but the world’s best climate science. Its vision is on the scale of an existential threat to human civilization. But it’s also short on concrete next steps.
The battle over the Green New Deal’s meaning has begun, with pundits, grassroots movements, and presidential aspirants staking out clearer and more prominent positions on climate change than ever before. Many centrist economists, wonks, and pundits have tried to ride the new wave of excitement around climate policy, using the language of the Green New Deal to describe programs with far less ambition.10 We call their alternative the “faux Green New Deal.”
In the view of these cautious moderates, decarbonizing the economy by the mid 2030s—or even just the energy sector!—is absurdly ambitious. Faux Green New Deal advocates see the plan’s social agenda as an expensive distraction. They believe that carbon taxes, with refunds for the poor, and heavy investments in research and development (R&D), should be the main policies that decarbonize the economy—gradually, but efficiently. To be fair, it’s a coherent approach. Their view is that climate progress is most likely to happen if it’s simple and narrow in scope—focused mainly on energy, minimally intrusive in everyday life, and garnering agreement among policy elites. For these skeptics, it’s precisely because inequalities are so entrenched that it would be reckless to hinge decarbonization on struggles for universal, quality social services and public control over markets. Getting to net zero carbon in the United States in ten years—or even twenty—will be hard enough. Why add the extra burdens of dismantling inequalities and disciplining capital? Why not save the world today, then make it better tomorrow?
The Practical Case for Radicalism
The real “green dream, or whatever,” to borrow a phrase from Nancy Pelosi, is that the “faux Green New Deal” will work.11 One simple argument structures this book: An effective Green New Deal is also a radical Green New Deal.
When we talk about a radical Green New Deal, we don’t mean a fringe position. Our word radical comes from the Latin radix, meaning root: radical change is systemic change that tackles root causes rather than merely addressing symptoms. Is that too much to fight for in the United States? We agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s statement on 60 Minutes: “It only has ever been radicals that have changed this country.”12 We think a radical Green New Deal would also be a popular one. We aim to build a climate politics for the 99 percent: the multiracial masses against a tiny elite, demanding justice for all on a livable planet.
More concretely, what does it mean to get at the roots of climate change?
For one thing, we’re taking the science seriously and setting our political goals accordingly. The faux Green New Deal logic of gentler targets and slower change effectively accepts global heating of 3° Celsius, risking even more if climatic feedbacks kick in fast. Our goal is a maximum of 2° Celcius of warming, aiming for as close to 1.5° Celsius as we can get. What’s more, while the faux Green New Deal uses tax incentives and price signals as its economic levers, the radical Green New Deal would use the power of public investment and coordination to prioritize decarbonization at speed, scope, and scale. And while the faux Green New Deal focuses narrowly on swapping clean energy for fossil fuels, we see energy as connected to broader physical systems and social inequalities. A radical Green New Deal leans in to the inevitable intersections of social, economic, and environmental policy, and prioritizes equality.
Finally, the faux Green New Deal sees the scope and ambition of a radical Green New Deal as a political liability. The faux Green New Deal seeks to achieve change by maximizing elite consensus and making policy under the radar. In contrast, we see the broadening of climate policy as a political asset: it’s an opportunity to build majority support for big change and mobilize political energies to break the status quo. Let us explain in more depth.
We start with our core priority: avoiding climate collapse. We don’t know exactly how sensitive the climate system is. Planning for 2.5° or 3° Celsius of warming, as the faux Green New Deal’s gradualism implicitly does, accepts devastating impacts in Global South countries and risks an apocalyptic 4.5° Celsius. So we’re shooting for 1.5° Celsius. We’d rather miss an all-out 2030 power sector decarbonization plan by a few years than miss a slower, easier 2040 target, where failure would have graver consequences. As bad as US weather is getting, in the near term African and Asian countries will bear the greatest brunt of 3° Celsius warming. We’re not willing to let that happen just to make life easier for ExxonMobil and Wall Street. And we’re more worried about the carbon budget than the fiscal deficit. Our bottom line is the scientific consensus that the 2020s will require, as a recent essay in Science put it, “Herculean” efforts to transform the economy.13
Herculean change isn’t the specialty of market nudges. To decarbonize fast, we have to take democratic, public control of much of the economy to put equitable climate action first. Remember: Capitalists invest in projects to make money and consolidate their power, not to make the world a better place. If the latter happens, it’s a happy side effect. Even if some corporate executives worry about the world that awaits their grandchildren, they will never sacrifice profits to cut carbon emissions. If they did, their shareholders would replace them.
The faux Green New Deal tries to harness capitalist investment for climate benefit mainly through R&D funding, mild subsidies, and pricing carbon. They see a carbon tax as the main engine driving the private sector toward lower carbon investments, incentivizing companies and consumers alike to decarbonize. They also want to prioritize R&D for new technologies like large-scale geothermal energy, alternatives to conventional meat protein, and direct air capture of carbon. We agree on ramping up R&D. It’s just no substitute for dramatically accelerating deployment of the excellent clean technology we already have.
We also support a progressive carbon tax, with a rebate for low- and middle-income people. A modest price on carbon can help knock out coal, which is already on the ropes. If well-designed, it can help steer people away from carbon-intensive consumption, encouraging us to spend our extra cash on dance classes instead of a new iPad, and can help government agencies and firms plan long-term investments to account for climate change. But pricing carbon is a secondary tool, a complement to our principal levers of public spending, coordination, and regulation, all aimed at raising the general standard of living. Without accessible no-carbon alternatives, jacking up the price of gas will just cause a huge political backlash. Carbon pricing is also an oddly indirect strategy for rapid change. As the journalist David Roberts joked during a 2018 lecture in Philadelphia, the United States didn’t defeat the Nazis by taxing factories that didn’t produce planes and tanks for the war effort.
For the United States to get to net zero emissions in its power sector by the mid-2030s, the country needs to build out new clean energy at least ten times faster than in recent years. Along with public investments in ecosystem restoration, green infrastructure, and conservation work, these measures would require an enormous amount of labor—and thus create millions of high-quality green jobs. There’s simply no precedent for the private sector mobilizing that broadly and quickly. With state support, green capitalists have developed cheap and effective clean energy technologies. But while solar companies can gradually outcompete coal, they can’t legislate coal out of existence or transform the electricity grid and broader energy system.
Under a radical Green New Deal, the public sector would direct investment and coordinate production, much as it did during World War II. Can government bureaucracies
