chalkboards. In the 1940s, improvised public agencies, the army, and government-subsidized businesses ramped up the production of killing machinery with unbelievable speed. The public-backed industry built the world’s largest factory in under a year near Ypsilanti, Michigan; it went on to produce a B-24 bomber every hour. Overnight, car seat factories switched to parachute production and Cadillac assembly lines started churning out tanks.14
We wish we had a different analogy for that scale of public action than World War II. But the point remains: we can build—and push—a public sector capable of stewarding a rapid and just transition. It’s often forgotten, moreover, that state capacity was built up in the decade prior by the New Deal. Neoliberals have spent four decades chipping away at these administrative capacities, weakening regulations and many federal agencies to empower big business. Rebuilding and reinvigorating public institutions is one of the most important tasks we face today.
Much of what we’re proposing is called industrial policy. It’s widespread in Europe, East and Southeast Asia, and beyond; it featured in ARRA’s success stories. More broadly, in the United States, state-funded military research has spawned most of the technologies at work in smartphones—like GPS, the internet, and microprocessors. The National Institute of Health and the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program regularly fund pathbreaking innovations. Most infrastructure development already combines public and private investment. Big states like California and New York are already experimenting with Green New Deal tools like aggressive regulations, green banks, and targeting green investments in marginalized communities.
Popular participation will be essential to make sure a large-scale mobilization doesn’t run roughshod over people’s lives. Federal power doesn’t have to mean top–down control. Labor unions, nonprofits, and community groups should all help steer the transition. As in Germany, we could foster energy community cooperatives for solar and onshore wind. In working class communities, which are disproportionately Black and brown, investment could empower people to make decisions over production and direct funds toward their needs. All this could help orient the state away from mass incarceration and toward community welfare.
We would also expand nonmarket institutions that are accountable to and run by communities, not governments—like public credit unions and utilities, land trusts, and worker cooperatives. And we would welcome worker co-ownership of large private companies, through arrangements like the “inclusive ownership funds” being debated in the United States and United Kingdom. Federally funded projects would be locally controlled. Picture libraries doubling as resiliency centers, community gardens employing neighborhood residents, and cooperatives of contractors weatherizing homes. The point isn’t to give Washington, DC, more power for centralization’s sake, but for federal spending to empower communities at various scales to better control their own lives.
Ultimately, the carbon-tax-first approach of faux Green New Deal boosters posits microeconomics as the solution to the climate crisis, when what we really need is a new political economy. Averting catastrophe means transforming consumption and production, prioritizing shared public goods that improve overall quality of life over the consumption of cheap, carbon-rich crap that we don’t need. We should all eat less meat and fly for fun less often. But we have to change collectively—and for that, we need no-carbon alternatives. Public agencies would drive the big change, providing green jobs in place of environmentally destructive work; building guaranteed public housing, parks, and playgrounds; and expanding no-carbon services like free health care and education. As we explain throughout the book, investing in equality isn’t just a feel-good add-on: it’s our most effective and efficient lever for decarbonizing, by making the good life compatible with lower resource use.
It’s the rich who will bear the brunt of climate sacrifice. They’ve reaped almost all the benefits of economic growth for decades, and they’ve spent it lavishly. Globally, the wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for half the world’s carbon footprint.15 In the United States, the richest tenth of the population is responsible for a quarter of emissions.16 Cutting their consumption would have a far greater ecological impact than anything the rest of us can do individually. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson estimates that if the wealthiest 10 percent of people worldwide consumed at the level of the average European, global carbon emissions would drop by roughly a third.17 The wealthy also funnel the billions they don’t consume into investments that diminish our common world—from uninhabited luxury apartments in New York and San Francisco to venture capital thrown at rideshare companies displacing public transit.
To reuse, recycle, and—most importantly—redistribute on a massive scale, a radical Green New Deal would levy higher wealth, inheritance, and upper-level income taxes to slash luxury consumption and help fund public luxuries.
Such a monumental project will take a lot of what’s often referred to as “political will,” or what we prefer to call political power. This is where the difference between our vision and that of the faux Green New Deal comes to a head. Green policy elites often assume that change comes from above: if only some politicians were bold enough to lead on climate action, the people would follow. We think it works the other way around.
Elitist narratives about climate change often suggest that ordinary people can’t understand it and will never sacrifice for the benefit of future generations or distant others. But we think the real problem is that ordinary people have been stripped of their power. Starting in the 1970s, the US business class has crushed labor unions—one of our greatest vehicles for equality. The percentage of workers represented by unions has been halved; in that same time, workers’ real wages stagnated, even as their productivity increased. The share of income going to the top 10 percent of earners nearly doubled, and the 1 percent did even better. This wasn’t only an economic change—it was also a political one. The super-rich seized even greater control of political parties, rewriting laws at every level of government for their own benefit.
As the country’s elite dismantled both unions and public power, they also strengthened big business and the fossil fuel sector. Leading capitalist associations—the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and so on—have helped hand Big Oil tax breaks and regulatory rollbacks. The Democrats helped too.
To break the power of the reigning elite and impose public priorities on the economy, we need to build a mass coalition of ordinary people. Rebuilding public power will require tackling the inequalities and divisions that capitalism sows, both among US working families and across borders. Things are now so bad that most Americans are ready for change, as recent political turmoil makes clear. A radical Green New Deal doesn’t try to side-step all this political energy—it builds on it for the common good.
Beyond Bad Dichotomies
We see public investment and popular mobilization as non-negotiable elements of the radical Green New Deal. Yet prospects for climate action tend to rouse sharp debate around old dichotomies, especially on the Left. Polemicists charge that you’re either a cornucopian or a Malthusian, an eco-modernist or a Luddite. We think drawing strict, abstract lines on science, technology, and particular economic tools can distract us from more fundamental questions. Instead of fetishizing or demonizing technologies, we call for evaluating them the way we would any other political project: Do they reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and advance human freedom? Who controls them, and for what purposes?
Capitalism likes to tout technology as a wonder drug—let corporations charge enough for their products and they’ll solve all our problems. We know technology won’t “solve” climate change while leaving the rest of the world intact. But we also shouldn’t let the
