I have been thinking about the proposed Green New Deal. It sounds extremely radical. It probably is extremely radical, but is it as crazy as conservatives have argued it is? I don’t know, but here is what I think I do know.

First of all, the ravages of climate change are the most serious problem the world has faced in a long time–perhaps ever. If we cannot grapple with this problem the losses will be staggering. As well, until now very little has been done about it at least in Canada and the U.S. Conservatives in both countries keep pointing out how difficult it is to tackle this problem and how much it will cost to fight. When I hear this I think of what Oscar Wilde said about cynics, “They know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.”

So, they keep neglecting to come up with alternatives. I am willing to look at alternatives, but they must be rational. Liberals in both countries have spoken about how they want to control or limit climate change but are vague on how to do it. That is also unsatisfactory.

What is the alternative? Business as usual is sure to lead to doomsday. Therefore, that is unsatisfactory. So we need lofty goals. That much seems clear to me. Why not the Green New Deal? What better plan does anyone have to offer?

In the US a rookie Congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, together with others, has come up with a bold proposal, commonly called the Green New Deal. Republicans like Donald Trump have mocked that plan. They try to put fear into people who might be inclined to support the proposal by saying it will require people to give up eating beef, driving cars, and shut down all air flight. None of that is actually required by the plan, but it sounds scary or daffy or both together.

Dave White a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Community Resources and Development is a cooler head. Professor White was a co-author of the recent Fourth National Climate Assessment in the US, a comprehensive study published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a research group that studies the global environment and climate change. He knows something about the subject, unlike the former American President.

Professor White knows that because climate change is happening so rapidly and because its effects will be so severe, “we must consider transformative changes.” Professor White added, “Climate change represents a significant risk and exacerbates other risks that are dangerous.” Unfortunately, in part due to the successful campaign launched years ago by the oil and gas sector, the public was for decades confused into thinking perhaps climate change was not a real problem. It was and is a serious problem that now requires much more serious changes than would have been enough 30 years ago.

As a result, even if I consider the approach of young and inexperienced politicians like Ocasio-Cortez radical, the do-nothing approach of conservatives seems to me to dangerously worse. As White said, “We need solutions that match the scale of the problem. People underestimate the action needed, not only to reverse, but just to stop the increasing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Until the conservatives in the US or Canada come up with proposals for the transformative changes we need, I will look instead at the Green New Deal. I am willing to look at it critically and will consider criticisms, but I won’t move towards inaction that conservatives seem to insist on. The new conservative leader in Canada Pierre Polievre is taking this exact  approach.

I think Professor White has the right approach.  He realizes the Green New Deal offers innovative ideas, but that does not necessarily mean we have to give up cars, air travel, or burgers. Instead, White says, “If we focus on outcome, which is reducing emissions, we need to implement innovative projects to reach those goals. Does that mean eliminating air travel? No, it means making air travel with less pollution. It also doesn’t mean getting rid of cars, but making cars with more green technology.” I would add that it also doesn’t mean we can’t have any more big Macs. It does mean we must have less. And I love Big Macs. And I’m not keen on cynicism.

In the United States the Republicans are lining up with overflowing eagerness to tackle Democrats based on the “radical” New Green Deal proposals. The latest conservative issue is that it will cost every citizen of the US $600,000 if implemented. This I suspect is fear mongering at its most robust. I do not know what it will cost, but I do know that business as usual will cost horrendous sums. What will cost more? I wish some reputable economists would tackle this issue.

As Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany pointed out:

“We’ve already warmed the world by 1.1C, and we’re experiencing the effects: the International Federation of the Red Cross estimates there are as many as 50 million climate refugees. Once we reach 4C, most models agree it will be impossible to return to today’s abundant world.”

We know the problems that huge numbers of refugees can create. There are enough political refugees. We should add climate refugees to the mix. That can’t possibly end well.

Another climatologist, Ken Caldeira, climatologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in California  put it this way:

“For me, the issue is that we are transforming (and simplifying!) our world for many thousands of years into the future with millennia of rising sea [levels], acidified oceans and intolerable tropical temperatures, just because we weren’t willing to pay the small differential between fossil-fuelled prosperity and prosperity fuelled by non-greenhouse-gas-emitting energy systems…“People live in Houston, Miami and Atlanta because they live in air conditioning through the hot summers. If people are rich enough to air-condition their lives, they can watch whatever is the successor to Game of Thrones on TV, as the natural world decays around them,” he says. But he points out that while richer people risk a loss to their quality of life, the poorer risk their actual lives.”

The environmental reporter Gaia Vince summed it up this way:

“We are now making the climate of 2100 and however hard it seems to meet our emissions targets, it’ll be far harder for our children if we don’t. With international cooperation and regulation, we can make it liveable.”

I think the dangers of climate change are real and we should do everything to mitigate against it. The only ideas that might work, which I have heard so far, are the Green New Deal. Doing nothing serious about it, which basically is the conservative position everywhere, seems to be the worst thing we could do.

Some time ago I watched the American talk show, The View. At the time it  had 2 regular Conservative commentators or hosts as they are called. At the time, both of them, Abby Huntsman and Megan McCain, thought the most alarming thing in years is the extreme radicalism of the proposed New Green Deal.  Abby opined that one of the most radical aspects of this proposal was offered by newly elected Senator from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. She said that she was thinking about whether it was a good idea for her to have children, given that they would be inheriting a world so awfully degraded. Is that not a legitimate question?

Huntsman thought that was the most extreme thing she had ever heard. She equated this with advocating the end of the human race, which of course entirely missed the point. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was just saying that some women might choose not to have children. No one was advocating that no women have children.

Others, like Sean Hannity have said we wont’ be able to eat burgers anymore. Some have said we all will be required to become vegans. What could be worse than that?  Some have said our entire lives will be unrecognizable.

These are all example of fear mongering on the right.

Rather than fear mongering, I wish the right would propose reasonable alternatives and the public could then weigh in on what makes the most sense.

When the Canadian federal liberals introduced a carbon tax many conservatives rubbed their hands with glee. After all, former Conservative Prime Stephen Harper ran a highly successful campaign against his liberal opponent Stephane Dion in 2008 in opposition to his plan to shift some taxes from income to carbon expenditure. Dion called his climate program a tax shift, but it was really a carbon tax. Harper successfully excoriated Dion as a tax grabber.

But a lot changed in 11 years and the Conservatives, cocooned from reality in western Canada, did not realize it. That is the problem of listening only to people who think like you. You begin to think wrongly that everybody agrees with you. People had moved on. People know that serious problems demand serious solutions. This becomes clearer every year.

The Conservatives lost the 2019 federal election running against a carbon tax proposed by all 3 of their political opponents.  They deserved to lose.

I have been surprised to learn how many people favour a carbon tax as the most viable solution to the emergency of climate change. Even that strongly conservative magazine The Economist, favours it. Even some pretty vigorous capitalists realize something serious, like a carbon tax is necessary. Therefore, they have said they favour it.

ExxonMobil, no shrinking violet of a capitalist firm, has said that a carbon tax is the best policy to tackle climate change in the United States and elsewhere. All of the 4 western major oil companies—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Total—have said that they support the Paris agreement to limit climate change so that average temperature changes are held to an increase of no more than 2ºC and hopefully 1.5ºC. There is some hope for reason beyond self-interest from multi-national corporations.

Of course, we should not go too far in praising them. Being better than the Conservative Party of Canada is still pretty faint praise. The fact is oil companies are not doing enough, even if they are talking more nicely. The Economist, again, not a wild left-wing source, put it well:

“Yet amid the clamour is a single, jarring truth. Demand for oil is rising and the energy industry, in America, and globally, is planning multi-trillion dollar investments to satisfy it. No firm embodies this strategy better than ExxonMobil, the giant that rivals admire and green activists love to hate. As our briefing explains, it plans to pump 25% more oil and gas in 2025 than in 2017. If the rest of the industry pursues even modest growth, the consequences for the climate could be disastrous.

ExxonMobil shows that the market cannot solve climate change by itself. Muscular government action is needed. Contrary to the fears of many Republicans (and the hopes of some Democrats), that need not involve a bloated role for the state.”

 

Yes, you read that right. The Economist said, “Muscular government action is needed.”    No doubt many of their readers consider that heresy. But I suggest the numbers who would say that are declining. The Economist also said, unsurprisingly, “It would be wrong to conclude that energy firms must therefore be evil.” To which I would respond, it would be wrong to conclude that energy firms must therefore be angels. They are large corporations responding to demand. That is how the system works. Until the demand is quelled that is exactly what they will do and no one should be surprised or dismayed. Rather, we should be determined to demand “muscular government action”.     And soon.

 The Economist has gone a lot farther than the Conservative Party of Canada which weakly criticized the Canadian carbon tax as “a tax grab,” without offering a significant alternative to it that had a hope of success. Recently Canada was criticized for being at the bottom end of the G20 in tackling climate change. To offer alternatives that were even weaker than the liberals did not seem like an attractive option to most Canadians.

The Green New Deal proposed by young radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be too extreme for many to accept, but offering Caspar Milquetoast in response was also too lame to accept.     Most Canadians know stronger medicine than that is needed. This is no time for lame.

And so far the only proposal that is not lame is the Green New Deal. If conservatives don’t want the Green New Deal they had better come up with something better than they have done so far.

The Economist is not exactly a left-wing rag.  It is a very conservative and thoughtful journal. I love to read it for a different point of view. Sometimes, the point of view is not that different from my own.

I read an article in the Economist about the Green New Deal. It was not a ringing endorsement, but it was not a rabid diatribe against it either as I am accustomed to seeing in conservative journals.  The article talked about how climate change was really about market failure. In other words, it is a serious problem that the market has not figured out how to solve. This is how they described it,

“In economics, climate change is a big but straightforward example of a market failure, with a correspondingly straightforward solution. People take environmentally harmful decisions because the private benefits of doing so (using a car to get to work, say) outweigh the private costs (the price of the petrol to run the car). But emission-producing activities also impose social costs—deaths from pollution and collisions, the contribution of carbon emissions to climate change—that do not influence an individual’s decision to drive rather than walk or take public transport. To solve the climate problem, then, governments need only include the social cost of carbon in the prices people pay. The simplest approach is a levy on emissions corresponding to that social cost. Carbon-intensive activities become more expensive, and people efficiently reduce their emissions by responding to prices. It is an elegant approach favoured by this newspaper. In January a distinguished and bipartisan list of economists signed a letter that ran in the Wall Street Journal arguing in favour of a version that would refund carbon-tax revenue in the form of a flat, universal dividend.”

That is the problem we must address.  Once again, people like me who own and drive a car, tend to ignore the costs of driving that car which are born by the public. I count the fuel I must pay for as well as the costs of the vehicle, but the costs to the public at large, I largely ignore.   I shouldn’t. Neither should you.

A carbon tax fairly forces us to do the right thing whether we want to o not. We can still drive a gas guzzling car if we choose. But we have to pay the whole cost–the public as well as the private.