from The
Guardian
By Yanis Varoufakis and David
Adler:
In times of crisis and
catastrophe, children are often forced to grow up quickly. We are now
witnessing this premature call to action on a planetary scale. As the adults in
government accelerate their consumption of fossil fuels, children are leading
the campaign against our species’ looming extinction. Our survival now depends
on the prospects for a global movement to follow their lead and demand an
International Green New Deal.
Several countries have
proposed their own versions of a Green New Deal. Here in Europe, DiEM25 and our
European Spring coalition are campaigning under the banner of a detailed Green
New Deal agenda. In the UK, a new campaign is pushing similar legislation with
MPs such as Caroline Lucas and Clive Lewis. And in the US, dogged activists in
the Sunrise Movement are working with representatives such as Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez to push their proposal to the front of the political
agenda.
But these campaigns have
largely remained siloed. Their advisers may exchange notes and ideas, but no
strategy has emerged to coordinate these campaigns in a broader, global
framework.
Unfortunately, climate change
knows no borders. The US may be the second-largest polluter in the world, but
it makes up less than 15% of global greenhouse emissions. Leading by example is
simply not enough.
Instead, we need an
International Green New Deal: a pragmatic plan to raise $8tn – 5% of global GDP
– each year, coordinate its investment in the transition to renewable energy
and commit to providing climate protections on the basis of countries’ needs,
rather than their means.
Call it the Organization for
Emergency Environmental Cooperation – the namesake of the original OEEC 75
years ago. While many US activists find inspiration in a “second world
war-style mobilization”, the International Green New Deal is better modeled by
the Marshall plan that followed it. With financial assistance from the US
government, 16 countries formed the Organization for European Economic
Cooperation (OEEC), dedicated to rebuilding the infrastructure of a devastated
continent and coordinating its supply of energy.
But if the original OEEC
entrenched an extractive capitalism at Europe’s core –protecting the steel and
coal cartel – the new organization for an International Green New Deal can
empower communities around the world in a single transformational project.
The transnational scope of
this mobilization is crucial for three main reasons.
The first is production. Recent
studies show that, as long as countries cooperate, all continents have
the wind, solar and hydropower resources they need in a zero-emissions world.
Northern countries and mountainous regions have better access to wind power,
while southern lands are better suited to exploiting the sun. An International
Green New Deal could exploit these differences and ensure that renewable energy
is available to all of them year-round.
The second is innovation.
Confronting the climate crisis will require more than keeping fossil fuels in
the ground. We will also need major scientific breakthroughs to develop
renewable sources of energy, adapt existing infrastructure, detoxify our oceans
and decarbonize the atmosphere. No country alone can fund the research and
development necessary to meet these challenges. The OEEC would pool the
brainpower of the global scientific community: a Green Manhattan Project.
The third is reparation. For
centuries, countries such as the US and the UK have plundered natural resources
from around the world and polluted them back out. Less developed nations have
been doubly dispossessed: first, of their resource wealth, and second, of their
right to a sustainable life – and in the case of many small island developing
states, of their very right to exist. An International Green New Deal would
redistribute resources to rehabilitate overexploited regions, protect against
rising sea levels, and guarantee a decent standard of living to all climate
refugees.
The UN climate change
conferences will not save us from extinction – the demise of the Paris
agreement should be evidence enough. These frameworks lock us into prisoners’
dilemmas, in which every country has an incentive to defect on their climate
commitments, even if cooperation between them would yield a greater collective
good. As long as climate cooperation is framed around sacrifice, it is
vulnerable to strongmen like Donald Trump who vow to buck international rules
in the name of national interests.
The International Green New
Deal changes the frame. Rather than pleading for restraint, it sets out a
positive-sum vision of international investment, in which the gains from
joining in outweigh those to going it alone.
This is the strategy that won
Franklin D Roosevelt the original New Deal. His plan addressed people who had
given up hope and inspired in them the idea that there is an
alternative. That there are ways of pressing idle resources into
public service. It made sense to the disheartened and offered opportunity to
the entrepreneurial.
The same is true of the
International Green New Deal, which mobilizes public finance to crowd in
private investments that, together, fund the $8tn transition. Just like in the
original New Deal, public financing will involve a mix of taxes and bond
instruments. On the former, we can introduce a global minimum
corporate tax rate that is then redistributed on the basis of their
sales. On the latter, public investment banks – including the European
Investment Bank, the World Bank and the KfW, Germany’s state-owned development
bank – can coordinate the issue of green bonds that the major central banks
agree collectively to support in the secondary markets.
Suddenly, countries with large
trade surpluses will realize they are better able to invest their excess
capital if green investments in deficit countries are coordinated under the
auspices of an international plan. The positive-sum dynamic will prevail.
In this sense, the stakes of
the International Green New Deal are not merely environmental. By uniting
countries in the project of bottom-up economic transformation – and coercing
multinationals to fund their fair share of it – it will also stem the tide of
bigotry and xenophobia engulfing the world.
“Advanced” capitalist
countries today are literally falling apart. In the US, net public investment
has fallen below half of one per cent of GDP. Across the eurozone, net public
investment has remained below zero for nearly a decade. It is little wonder
that political monsters are rising again: just as in the 1930s, the grapes of
wrath are ripening and “growing heavy for the vintage”.
To revive the liberal
democratic project, some pundits have suggested making China into a bogeyman.
But the real bogeyman is of our creation: a climate crisis wrought by decades
of inaction and underinvestment. To address the true existential threat that we
face today, we must reverse the economic policies that brought us to this
brink. Austerity means extinction.
The promise of an
International Green New Deal to is to avoid the pitfalls of cold war politics
and unite humanity in the only project capable of preserving a habitable
planet. To do this, however, we need a powerful progressive international
movement to demand that our leaders begin to act beyond their own borders.
Let’s start building it. The children are watching.
No comments:
Post a Comment