The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

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      GROWTH AND LIMITS: 1933–2016

      “Every day of continued exponential growth brings the world system closer to the ultimate limits to that growth. A decision to do nothing is a decision to increase the risk of collapse.”

      —Donella Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, 1972¹³

      No nation in history has done what the climate emergency now requires the United States and other nations to do. We must decide collectively that we will refrain, forever, from tapping known, rich reserves of easily available energy. It remains to be seen if we can manage that. We and other nations have faced resource limits many times before, but they were not self-imposed. Now they must be. Can we, collectively, of our own free will, put permanent boundaries around extraction of potent mineral energy from the Earth? That clearly will be the most difficult step in taking on the climate challenge. Should we take that step, we can prepare to deal with the consequences by learning from past episodes in which Americans found themselves hemmed in by forces beyond their control and were forced to deal with limits.

      Proponents of ambitious climate initiatives have long been fond of historical allusions. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, the Interstate Highway System, the New Deal, and World War II all have been cited as precedents. For our purposes, we can safely set aside purely technical feats such as the bomb, the moon shot, and the interstates. But the New Deal, the wartime mobilization of the 1940s, and other crucial junctures in the decades that followed, offer insights that can be useful to us in responsibly addressing the climate crisis.

      Various Green New Deal visions have been explicit in emulating the 1930s New Deal example of using public policy to put society to work and solve big problems. Those and other strategies for a green makeover of the nation’s energy systems and infrastructure often hark back to the lightning-speed buildup of productive forces in the 1940s. But that wartime industrial surge was only half the story. The other half was that for a brief four years, the U.S. civilian economy went into emergency mode, becoming almost the opposite of itself, with carefully planned production and strictly limited but equitable civilian consumption. The postwar economic boom of the 1950s and ’60s, surfing on a wave of cheap oil and military spending, created the false impression that limits of all kinds had been suspended. But when the energy crisis landed hard in the 1970s, Americans were shocked back into reality, and the decade came to be defined by limits. Restoring and increasing the flows of both fossil energy and wealth became a central mission of the federal government in the 1980s. Finally, through the climate-aware 1990s and 2000s, the need to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels was dismissed time after time on the grounds that economic growth always takes priority.

      The 1930s and ’40s saw a desperate need to burst through limits imposed by the economic system. Now, we need desperately to pull the economy back within limits set by the Earth’s ecosystems. Whether or not our society—or human civilization—can survive the current emergency intact will depend in large measure on whether we take ecological limits seriously.

      “COOPERATIVE CAPITALISM”

      Crisis was far too mild a word; emergency came closer to capturing most Americans’ predicament in the early 1930s. The U.S. unemployment rate had vaulted from 3 percent at the time of the 1929 financial crash to 24 percent during the 1932 presidential campaign. Given those numbers, prospects appeared excellent for Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party nominee, as he set out to unseat incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover, whose weak free-market tonics had only worsened the downward spiral.

      In a campaign speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Roosevelt called for a sharp break from long-standing economic orthodoxy. He had come to the conclusion that in America, growth had not just faltered; it had come to an end. The free-market policies of the nineteenth century, he said, were inadequate to address the human catastrophe they had created. Sounding more like a twenty-first-century steady-state economist than a wealthy politician of the 1930s, he declared, “Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand, . . . of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organization to the service of the people.”¹⁴

      In reality, Roosevelt had no intention of knocking out the pillars of capitalism in such a fashion, and once he took office, his actions were not as radical as he had implied in the San Francisco address. But those actions did include a flood of economic legislation that served as inspiration for today’s vision of a Green New Deal. In the Roosevelt administration’s first hundred days, Congress passed a breathtaking stack of stimulus initiatives that, among other things, provided $3.3 billion for public works—more than the entire federal budget of three years earlier. This came four years before the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s epic The General Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Money, the book that showed the world why ending a depression or severe recession requires deep-pocketed government intervention in the economy. In a 1999 article, Patrick Renshaw, then of Sheffield University, discussed how the New Deal was built not on a theoretical foundation like the one laid out by Keynes but rather on the “chaos of improvisation.” He wrote, “As it struggled to end mass unemployment, the federal government stumbled on this policy, whereby it was forced to act as compensating agent during an economic downturn, spending public money to fill troughs in the trade cycle in order to stimulate revival.”¹⁵

      One of the headline initiatives of those first hundred days was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933. Declaring a national emergency, the NIRA created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and gave it the mission of steering private industry toward prosperity. The Recovery Administration was not a mere dispenser of stimulus funds. Rather, its goal was no less than the planning of the entire industrial economy. It aimed its biggest guns at the cutthroat competition that New Dealers saw as driving down wages and prices and deepening the Depression. The Recovery Administration relaxed antitrust enforcement and worked with private industry, through hundreds of business and trade associations, to develop voluntary “codes of fair practices” that would limit production and set wages and prices. The Recovery Administration also guaranteed the right of workers to unionize, even giving union members a voice in the development of the fair-practice codes. Summing up the Recovery Administration’s goals, Ira Katznelson, the author of Fear Itself: The New Deal and the СКАЧАТЬ