> The Green New Deal moves us in the right direction. You can raise questions about the specific form in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey introduced it. But the general idea is quite right.
I really wish the "Green New Deal" wasn't mentioned in these pushes for the future. I don't think there was ever agreement on what the "general idea" of it was, and I don't think it deserves any credit for the few good ideas that it did contain. Sure, it's recognizable, but not necessarily in a good way.
"New Deal" is synonymous with a program of large and widespread government reform and investment to combat a specific problem. So while "Green New Deal" is the name of a specific piece of legislation, support for a general green New Deal is support for reform and investment to help the environment and more specifically fight climate change. I don't think anyone ever really expected the specific Green New Deal legislation to be passed, but it was meant to kick start that discussion and serve as a rallying point for future efforts. This type of thing is pretty common when a specific piece of legislation is inserted to represent an entire issue.
> Yes, and what do you personally prefer to see instead?
That's nowhere near as useful as
"What do you think we can reasonably expect at least 180 million (geographically distributed) Americans to accept?"
It is time that tech people looked themselves in the mirror and said, "Nobody gives a damn what I want, and I should stop acting like they do." There is no point system. We get nothing for 'being right' but not getting any traction. There is no gold star waiting for you at the end (and we aren't 6).
You can't solve policy problems thinking the same way you do about convincing more than half of a room of people to upgrade that library you use. That's four people, possibly including yourself. While success may make my life a lot easier, that barely ranks as an accomplishment. Large groups of people are so much harder to manage than small groups that it's not even funny.
That has nothing to do with the parent wishing for the Green New Deal not to be pushed by Noam Chomsky. Also as far as I'm aware, Noam Chomsky is not a tech person so I don't see where your "we aren't 6 and get nothing for 'being right'" argument is relevant there. If anything it's snarky and probably goes against the guidelines of this website. On the other hand, I guess this entire article and thread do as well.
> Yes, and what do you personally prefer to see instead?
Since you seem to agree, I'll give this privilege to you.
> Why would something not deserve credit for any good ideas it contained?
It was a packaging of some ideas, not the source.
> I'm really not trying to nitpick, but it seems like you're overgeneralizing. To whom would it be recognizable but not necessarily in a good way?
It had no regards for feasibility, and most people noticed. I don't think using the name of something infeasible is good when you're proposing something that you want to be considered feasible. It also contained very significant social programs that are usually unrelated.
The new deal created the middle class in America, rescued it (very lately) from the Great Depression, and set it up for the post war prosperity that made America what it is today. I think the idea of a green new deal is to do that again, as well as save us from the climate grave we are digging ourselves into. In my mind it is poetry.
Yeah I don’t disagree with that but it’s a separate problem IMO. Americans don’t give a shit because if we lose our job we’re fucked, the government doesn’t give a shit about us, we’re stressed and worried all the time about things Europeans take for granted. The quality of life in the US is horrible. And if it were better people would be more capable of organizing and speaking the truth. But the truth has just been squashed in the interest of the ultra wealthy.
This is just factually wrong and has no credibly outside of a few extremely left wing economists and those believe it despite the economic research or because they have not studied it. The New Deal has achieved mythical status in the left wing version of history, but that is simply not an accurate depiction of history.
If you look at the numbers in detail, you would see that when the US left the Gold Standard, growth immediately came back, industrialist production skes back up. This is pretty clear pattern with all the nations who were under deflationary pressure. Leaving the gold standard (or adjusting the exchange rate) was the fundamental thing that restarted the economy.
It is pretty clear that the NIRA actually stopped the ongoing recovery and indsutrial production only outpaced the pre-NIRA level again when NIRA was declared unconstitutional. Why anybody would declare the total madness of this program a success is just unbelievable to me. Massive destruction of food, mass slaughter of life-stock to increase prices. Blue Eagle program to 'keep prices high' were exactly the wrong things after a deflation.
Contrary to popular history, New Deal was not some brilliantly executed Keynesian program. In fact it does not fit any economics logic at all.
The US had one of the globally worst recovery path from 1931 to 1939 of all industrialized nations. Specially consider how well the came into the situation compared to everybody else. Why this period is hailed as a great success, is because it was an incredible political success as FDR managed to totally rebuild the democratic coalition. That coalition remains to this day. Of course the left and specially democrats hail it as the biggest success in centuries, because it was politically successful.
And the claimed that it 'prepared' to US is mostly wrong. Roosevelt to his credit was smart enough to kick most of the New Deal idiots out of his administration going into WW2 and worked with actually sensible people and during WW2 and after the US actually removed the majority of these terrible polices and that allowed the US to recover far better then most other countries.
Sorry to break it to you but your analysis is totally wrong. You don’t really put forth any reasons as to why the new deal was a failure, you just say it is. Living people experienced the success of the new deal, which is why it is such a powerful phrase. If you’re going to reject reality you’re at least going to need a source or an argument.
If you want to base your claims about what we should do in the future on totally arbitrary analysis of the mood of people in the past based on a competently unrepresentative analysis then that I can't stop you.
Again, the Gold standard is what mattered the most and the New Deal got credit for a lot of that. This is pretty much the opinion of the waste majority of economics study on the this subject and fits in with global story of the Depression. Rather then a incredibly narrow US focused explanation political history wants to tell you. FDR got credit because he took over the administration right on the global back-swing and he used the opportunity to politically redefine the country. That is why it is remembered so well, much more then actual experience reports from back then.
Why mass destruction of food, stopping the recovery and being declared unconstitutional does not count as a failure is beyond me.
The evidence for the New Deal accomplishing any of those things is virtually non existent. For example, the 1937-38 downturn was nearly as bad as the 1930 one, and the economy wasn’t restored until WW2 started.
I’m not jumping through hoops for those to lazy to find easily google-able and commonly known economic history. Any freshman economics books has the statistics too.
The 1937 recession almost cost FDR the election. The unemployment rate didn’t reach normal levels again until the US entered the war.
And here I thought it fairly obvious (for those not covering their ears). The general idea of it was to mobilize some kind of cooperative fight to defeat the very real threat of climate change, and to overcome our addiction to fossil fuel and the consequential CO2 emissions and pollution. Many very talented people have created a lot of good ideas and solutions to the oncoming disaster.
I don't think that people realize how much this pandemic is a walk in the park compared to whats coming down the road. I don't think people want to think. I think they want to stick their head in the sand and ignore the fact that there have been many calamities in human history. Perhaps they never heard of the 10s of millions of people who starved to death in Asia less than a century ago. That was a walk in the park by comparison.
Finally, I think that people don't realize how many of the technologies that they so happily embrace (without understanding how they work or where they came from) are the result of the same scientific process that has led 11,000 scientists to tell us that our time to act is growing very short.
That's the general idea of it. And I feel sorry as hell for today's wonderful kids who will have to pay with a miserable life (those who survive) for the willful ignorance of their parents and grandparents.
During times of extraordinary economic stress, the government should be acting as the employer of last resort [1] (which it's currently performing indirectly with programs such as the PPP, paying people to not work). This is likely to not be enough to bring many of the jobs back that will be lost from the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking that into account, if you're going to employ people regardless so that you don't have millions of hungry homeless citizens (which is not good, obviously), the most pressing work for them to perform would be that related to decarbonizing the economy (referring to both fossil consumption and CO2 emissions). This isn't only an environmental and climate change issue, but also a national security imperative (unless we intend to allow OPEC to dictate our economic wellbeing for another 40 years).
It's too early to tell if we can "fix" climate change (we might only mitigate the worst of it depending on the atmospheric CO2 PPM high water mark we land at) but if we're going to implement extraordinary socioeconomic policy, we should head in the right direction and adjust as needed along the way. Many can be trained to install solar panels and wind turbines, to upgrade electrical infrastructure, to install EV charging stations, or rooftop solar. These are all jobs that you cannot outsource to a developing country, jobs that have traditionally paid a reasonable wage.
We're going to spend the money we're printing [2] anyway, we might as well give success an honest shot. There are much worse ways we've spent trillions of dollars our economy has produced, or that we've borrowed from a future that couldn't consent to said borrowing [3]. We're already on the right path [4], it’s time we deliberately choose to succeed.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." -- JFK
Why does the government have to be an employer of last resort? The government isn't particularly good at deploying labor in an efficient way or directing them to the most productive ends (see: the economic calculation problem).
Instead, it's probably better for the government to be the salary provider of last resort, via some basic income (universal or otherwise) or a negative income tax, and then imposing steep taxes on externalities.
This is a fine end state to target between now and some point in the future a UBI is palatable to the electorate. But we're talking about what is feasible today.
Are you suggesting that reconfiguring our economic system is more feasible than introducing a new redistributive welfare transfer on top of the existing economic system?
Keep in mind that we already have a negative income tax in the US: the Earned Income Tax Credit. We're really just talking about expanding that.
I think that modifying the Earned Income Tax Credit (which was introduced by Nixon, then expanded by Reagan) by further expanding it, and then removing the employment requirement is a way easier sell to Americans than fundamentally shifting towards central planning.
We're already central planning (Federal Reserve unlimited support), I'm just arguing for changing the conditions of operation. Tax policy is insufficient for the effort required IMHO.
Effort required for what? We are simply talking about the merits of the government being the employer of last resort in the event of economic stress. That’s far more effort than just giving people money.
If we’re talking about climate, it’s probably far easier and far more effective to institute steep carbon taxes. It should be very easy to do that especially now, oil is the cheapest that it’s ever been.
Who knows what's going to happen with the climate? No one, because the climate is a chaotic, non-linear, dynamic, multivariate system. Right now, as we speak deep sea thermal vents are leaking geothermal heat into the oceans. Underwater and aboveground volcanoes are erupting. One good solid eruption and you can have a whole year without a summer (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer). A string of Mount Tamboras or one good super volcanic eruption could plunge the earth back into a deep glacial period for the next 100,000 years. You pair the above with the geomagnetic reversal that's going on (https://www.space.com/earth-magnetic-north-passes-prime-meri...) along with the really deep solar minimum period that's likely to dominate for the next few solar cycles (https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2019/04/10/experts-predict-t...)...and who knows? One thing I know is CO2 may push the temp ceiling slightly higher but it doesn't provide any kind of floor for base temperature (see Mars).
No it's not. It is the nature of chaotic systems. In chaotic systems, the uncertainty in a forecast increases exponentially with elapsed time. Hence, mathematically, doubling the forecast time more than squares the proportional uncertainty in the forecast. This is why, despite our best efforts and 50 years or so of Moore's law increases in computation, we still cannot predict the weather beyond 10 days with any sort of accuracy. Likewise, I have no idea what the Lyapunov time is for the climate, but it's certainly smaller than 80 years.
If human beings had any sense at all, we'd accept that we cannot control the climate and we'd do well to prepare for either a warmer or cooler climate. In other words, we should be adaptable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
I think we can assume that climate scientists are aware of chaos theory, considering their field was one of the first to recognize the value in modeling things as dynamic non-linear systems.
While there are large error margins due to that non-linearity, literally all of our evidence (including causative models, e.g. grade school greenhouse science experiments) indicates bad things. Those may not come to pass, or they may not be human related -- nothing is certain -- but there's precious little evidence in the other direction.
Outcomes may vary, you are right. Yet nearly all available evidence suggests we should accept AGW as the most likely situation, while accepting there may be other, more accurate predictions. We should change our behavior only once new evidence comes in indicating a different conclusion.
So why is it that climate scientists - the most educated people on this topic - overwhelmingly believe that evidence supports a theory of anthropogenic climate change? Is it more likely that they are all wrong, that they are all in on an elaborate conspiracy, or that you are wrong?
Number one they're not all in agreement. Number two, outright, science does not work on consensus. The only reason climate relies on consensus is because they cannot validate their models. They are stuck on the hypothesis step of the scientific method. It doesn't matter how many people you get to agree with your hypothesis. Without empirical experimentation, it proves nothing. You cannot beat chaos theory. The current crop of climate scientists are not being honest about the extremely exponentially high levels of uncertainty in their forecasts. You would do well to read from first principles on chaos theory and ask yourself whether I'm the crazy one for claiming that the future of our climate is unknowable.
We understand weather far better than we understand climate. And we cannot predict it more than 10 days into the future.
At any rate of you want to hear it from true experts here are a few:
Predicting the weather is fundamentally different from predicting climate.
Let's play a coin game. We'll throw a fair coin 100,000 times. Beforehand, I predict the number of heads +-0.5%. If I'm right, 1,000$ for me, if I'm wrong, 1000$ for you.
The probability that my prediction is correct is more than 99.8%. Nevertheless, I can predict a single coin flip only with a 50% chance.
A single coin flip represents a weather forecast. Climate, however, is the long term average, represented by the total number of heads. Even if I cannot predict the individual events (like tomorrows weather), I can say something about the averages with high probability.
Funny how evidence of modern hominid species arriving coincides with extinction of most large animals in any given area. Or oceans suddenly became more acidic with widespread burning of coal. It's almost as if humans can destroy the habitat life relies upon as quickly as natural phenomenon.
Humans can control human behavior. Just because other, uncontrollable risks exist does not mean we should just give up.
You can’t honestly be comparing us to those things…Mars is cold because it has essentially no atmosphere, and if there was a supervolcano eruption, it’d really easy to tell. Geothermal vents don’t make the whole planet consistently warmer for decades on end.
I just don't understand the rhetoric here. The climate disaster scenario is
> everything is expected to change: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the landscapes we see, the oceans, the seasons, the daily routine, the quality of life. Our children will have to adapt or become extinct. They will have to dress differently, behave differently, live differently.
Sounds bad! I'm open to ideas on how to prevent such radical disruptions. But the author suggests that we need to end fossil fuel consumption, reconfigure our economic system, reconsider what it means to have a decent life, and eliminate our desire to consume lots of goods and services. Shouldn't we expect a comparable amount of disruption from these huge changes?
Would you like to be driving the car when it veers off the road, or in the passenger seat. Passively waiting for the disruption of climate change to ravage normalcy, is probably going to be worst then trying to dealing with it aggressively. The equity of disruption will be extreme in the passive case.
I don't agree with the intuition. Even in the worst projections, climate change will be somewhat gradual; we won't wake up one day to find all the corn in Iowa is dead. The day we expropriate the factories, as the author insists we must, will be pretty extreme.
If only there were a current event that illustrates the danger of this line of thinking when it comes to things that can spiral out of control exponentially...
What? The two aren't related. You can't just take one event that demonstrably exhibits exponential-growth characteristics (via the R0) and another event that demonstrably doesn't, and then declare them to have the same growth characteristics just because they're vaguely similar in level-of-catastrophe.
I would like to see a demonstration that ecological collapse cannot happen exponentially in response to a linear change in the environment. I am no ecologist, but I don't believe it.
Even the worst case projections don't propose that the average temperature will change by more than current day-to-day variability. That doesn't mean it's okay, it'll cause a lot of problems if every day is 4 degrees hotter, but a spiral out of control won't happen.
Ending fossil fuel consumption is at least somewhat relevant to the stated problem...but reconfiguring economic systems? The Greeks couldn't construct a better horse than that.
The original New Deal was quite clearly designed for that as well. It was not about improving the economy, it was about chaining society and achieve political dominance.
Right, it is totally orthogonal to the climate, and is already the subject of a forever-long debate over how we ought to organize society.
You're going to have a hard time fixing the climate if you also attach with it a completely unrelated laundry list of desired left-wing policy (not even trying to knock left-wing policy).
It's functionally equivalent to adding a corporate-gender-diversity quota to the Coronavirus stimulus.
Bernie Sanders would have been so good for the American capitalist economy. He is the only one who would have after the monopolies, which would help level the playing field that is currently just consolidating into big companies. The social safety net would also spur a lot of new business creation.
I am not very confident about America's ability to handle global warming disasters in ten years.
>If you eliminate the massive subsidies that are given to fossil fuels, renewable energy is probably already more cost-effective.
Because there is a lot of subtlety in the way we contrast subsidies with normal tax deferrals, it may be clarifying to consult this fact sheet from EESI, which is a successor of the Environmental Study Conference caucus originally in the US Congress:
>Well, what’s the difference between the Green New Deal of today and the New Deal from the 1930s? Several things. One thing that’s different is large-scale labor action.
It wouldn't be a Chomsky essay without a paean to the labor movement.
I think that the "Green New Deal" is the wrong name. The "New Deal" was a principally economic initiative. Climate change affects the economy, but climate change is really about physics. The appropriate analogy would be to the Manhattan Project, not the New Deal. (Nuclear technology has also had a massive effect on the economy!)
One unfortunate consequence of the naming trend "Green New Deal" has been an excessive focus on economic remedies which overshadows the most important scientific advances. Recently the most important advances have been in the production and price of lithium batteries.
There are approximately 500 trillion pounds of lithium in the ocean, as well as many cheaper sources on land. The lithium iron-phosphate chemistry is not dense enough for use in cars or portable electronics, but on a cost basis it is quickly eclipsing all other forms of energy storage. At present, the development of this technology is limited mostly by low demand, which is utterly ridiculous when you consider that the widespread adoption of grid-scale energy storage is absolutely essential to there ever being a near-zero-carbon electricity market.
The other key technology that needs to be developed further is the heat pump. Heating buildings with gas accounts for a large fraction of our carbon emissions and can't be easily replaced by Joule heating because the electricity requirements are so large. Therefore the near-zero-carbon replacement for gas heating must be some variety of heat pump, be it vapor-compression, magnetocaloric or otherwise. The current commercially available air-source heat pumps are limited to a minimum outdoor air temperature of about -20 C, which means that they are not viable for year-round heating in many large global cities, including e.g. Chicago, Moscow, Harbin, et cetera. Ground-source heat pumps by contrast have high installation costs which increase with the desired power output. Improvements in one or the other are needed to reach the necessary endpoint where nearly all of the human population can stop relying on gas heating.
Isn't a better analogy that we have invented some new type of window glass that is the future for all homes, but there isn't overwhelming demand in the free market for it yet (due to price incentives); therefore, we should break some legacy old-glass windows every month (and subsidize their replacement with new-glass) to support and accelerate (inevitable) adoption?
This gives me the setup for my quarantine dystopian future novel. Roving gangs of “handymen” throwing rocks through windows then offering repairs for a fee.
We already subsidize tons of essentially valueless jobs, from propping up the coal and oil industries when they can’t compete in the free market, to paying farmers to plant corn for ethanol that no one needs. Those subsidized industries actively harm the planet. Why not subsidize equivalent jobs that work to reduce harm to the environment instead?
One of the points Chomsky makes frequently is that anarchism (at least in his view) is not opposed to any and all power structures. Legitimate ones can exist but they need to justify their existence.
It's not dehumanizing to point out the fact that life long, globally recognized leading figure of a particular ideal is recommending a massive intervention which stands in total contrast to his own convictions, especially if he himself doesn't bother to elucidate on that fact.
He's making his own, obvious contradictory conclusions, can't blame the messenger.
I find it incredibly unlikely that we are going to be able to avoid the brunt of climate change. Mass flooding is going to happen and countries like Bangladesh will be swallowed up by the sea. Refugee crises are going to happen at unprecedented scales and there will likely be wars. Even the paltry GND, which is almost certainly not going to be instituted, would not prevent this.
This was inevitable under capitalism. As a system that requires constant growth, it is incredibly brittle and does not lend itself well to long-term, sustainable planning. The only question for me now is: how do we best prepare ourselves for the upcoming crisis, such that we might be able to construct an equitable, sustainable society out of it? Crisis doesn’t guarantee revolutionary change — but it can if we're organized properly.
The New Deal has such a ridiculous glorified position in the view of the left. Of course it was a total failure and thankfully rules unconstitutional. The US had the deepest Great Depression, deeper then countries that didn't do a 'New Deal'.
You can pin-point the start of the recovery to the leaving of the gold standard (literally in the month by month producing you see it jumping). It was actually the New Deal that stopped the bounce back.
The politicians behind the new deal saw the Great Depression as an opportunity for social revolution, not as an economic recovery program. It is no secret that many of the primary architects behind the New Deal were strongly inspired by early socialism and fascism.
Further I would say Noam Chomsky has absolutely zero credibly in any topic related to economics. He is a weirdo socialist and we could go down 3 levels deep of what type of socialist exactly he is, but needless to economics and political science would agree that his ideas are not practical. So why take a advice from him on this.
You don't need a 'New Deal' you need to apply your budget and countries strategy with the long run goals you have and make good investments. The New Deal was the exact opposite, it was the embodiment of 'lets throw shit on the wall and hope for the best' often doing massive damage in the process. Mass slaughtering of pigs and destruction of other foods being the most absurd examples of such idiocy. The Blue Eagle program might be the worst regulation ever passed in American history. The list goes on.
Depending on what exactly you want to achieve, their are far, far better solutions then having the government bureaucrats blow billions of 100s of billions on politicians pet projects. Its totally contrary to how good government contract is done.
Just as with the original New Deal this Green New Deal is not about achieving results. Its is about achieving social and governmental revolution along the principles that the authors believe in.
Give me billions of dollars to hire people to dig holes in the desert and I’ll create a lot of jobs, and you’ll get, a lot of holes in the desert.
The “job creation” benefit myth needs to die. Some jobs are bad jobs, some have little or no economic value. Green New Deal advocates need to focus on the economic benefits of these plans, such as a healthier population due to less pollution, saving economical important properties from flooding, maintaining healthy fish stocks, etc, etc.
Funny how this argument is rarely leveled against the defense industry, the vast proportion of which is at best boondoggle busywork and at worst outright grift.
I really wish the "Green New Deal" wasn't mentioned in these pushes for the future. I don't think there was ever agreement on what the "general idea" of it was, and I don't think it deserves any credit for the few good ideas that it did contain. Sure, it's recognizable, but not necessarily in a good way.