The Case for the Green New Deal. Ann Pettifor

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ same interview. ‘Then we will focus on how to pay for it. To be clear: It’s a question of how we will pay for it – not if we can afford to pay for it. America can afford what we decide to do.’

      The UK Green New Deal (2008)

      The British Green New Deal had a quite different orientation from the American version.¹¹ While the American GND is heavily focused on the domestic economy, the British version, written at the height of a globally contagious financial crisis, adopted a more internationalist perspective. We began by locating the breakdown of earth’s life support systems in the current model of financial globalisation, and argued that ‘a positive course of action can pull the world back from economic and environmental meltdown.’

      We were ambitious, too. We wanted to combine stabilisation in the short term with longer-term restructuring of financial, taxation and energy systems of the global economy. We urged the UK to take action at the international level to help build the orderly, well-regulated and supportive policy and financial environment required to restore economic stability and nurture environmental sustainability.

      ‘Financial deregulation’ had in our view ‘facilitated the creation of almost limitless credit. With this credit boom have come irresponsible and often fraudulent patterns of lending, creating inflated bubbles in assets such as property, and powering environmentally unsustainable consumption.’ We were also clear that high, real rates of interest had driven the need for excessive rates of return on investment necessary to repay costly debt. Hence the compulsion to strip the forests, empty the seas and exploit labour in order to generate the returns needed to repay debts.

      Our report therefore began with proposals for systemic change to the global economic model as an essential precondition for decelerating climate change. We understood that global transformation was necessary if we were to re-regulate the domestic financial system to ensure the creation of money at low rates of interest consistent with democratic aims, financial stability, social justice and environmental sustainability.

      Fundamental to the British GND is the understanding that over the centuries advanced societies have developed monetary systems. The concept of money and a system of money evolved to enable us ‘to do what we can do’ (Keynes). Money is and always was a form of social technology, one that enables individuals, firms and governments to do business, to trade and exchange. To accomplish transactions smoothly and efficiently, both at home and across borders. A society’s monetary system, like its sanitation system, we argued, is a great public good.

      However, we also recognised that the history of monetary systems is one of struggle for control over the system, between those that would exercise private authority over it and those that prefer public, accountable authority. In the 1960s and 70s, Western governments ceded effective control over the system to a private authority – ‘the market’. Or, to be more specific, private actors in financial markets. The latter are dominated by the capital bourses of Wall Street, the City of London and Frankfurt.

      While a developed monetary system is a great public good, we Green New Dealers recognised that there are of course ecological, economic and political limitations to what society can ‘do’ within the framework of the monetary system. Nevertheless, provided they are managed by the visible hand of public authority, monetary systems could help finance the radical and costly transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to one based on renewable energy. Just as the monetary system helped finance transitions to war, or to recovery from financial crises.

      Therefore the UK GND makes clear that one of the first tasks will be for society to regain public authority over the national and international monetary system. And next, to raise the finance to tackle climate change, not just in Britain but internationally. We called on the British government to support a transformation of the financial system that would:

      • allow all nations far greater autonomy over domestic monetary policy (interest rates and money supply) and fiscal policy (government spending and taxation);

      • set a formal international target for atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations that keeps future temperature rises as far below 2°C as possible;

      • deliver a fair and equitable international climate agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012;

      • give poorer countries the opportunity to escape poverty without fuelling global warming by helping to finance massive investment in climate-change adaptation and renewable energy.

      We drew our inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘courageous programme’ launched in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929. We called for a sustained programme to invest in and deploy energy conservation and renewable energies, coupled with effective demand management.

      A Carbon Army to Make Every Building a Power Station

      Like the US GND, we placed considerable emphasis on the creation and training of what we termed a ‘carbon army’ of workers to provide the human resources for a vast environmental reconstruction programme. The production and distribution of clean energy will demand the skills, professionalism and experience of many that currently work in an industry that must contract until it finally shuts down – the fossil fuel industry. We called for hundreds of thousands of these new high- and lower-skilled jobs to be created in the UK, regarding this as part of a wider shift from an economy narrowly focused on financial services and shopping to one that might become an engine of environmental transformation. We supported the Trade Union Congress’s demand for strong policies to support workers through a just transition – one that will make sure that workers do not pay the price for the economy’s transformation away from dependence on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

      Focusing first on the specific needs of the UK, we called on the British government to introduce a decentralised, low-carbon energy system that included making ‘every building a power station’. Energy efficiency was to be maximised, as was the use of renewables to generate electricity. At the time we envisaged a £50 billion-plus per year crash programme to be implemented as widely and rapidly as possible. ‘A programme of investment and a call to action as urgent and far-reaching as the US New Deal in the 1930s and the mobilisation for war in 1939’.

      We argued for realistic fossil fuel prices that included the cost to the environment, high enough to create the economic incentive to drive efficiency and bring alternative fuels to market. We advocated rapidly rising carbon taxes and revenue from carbon trading. We called for the establishment of an Oil Legacy Fund, paid for by a windfall tax on the profits of oil and gas companies. We wanted the focus to be on smart investments that would not only finance the development of new, efficient energy infrastructure but also help reduce the demand for and the cost of energy, particularly among low-income groups, by improving home insulation.

      GNDs: How Do They Differ?

      Both the US and UK GNDs are based on the understanding that because climate breakdown is a security threat to the nation as a whole, the state has a major role to play in the transformation – just as if the nation were facing the threat of war. The American Green New Deal is ‘a Federal Government-led mobilization’ working alongside, and integrating, the private sector within GND programmes. In drafting the GND the Justice Democrats drew heavily on the work of Professor Mariana Mazzucato, whose research has shown that contrary to myth, public organizations have played a critical role as ‘investor of first resort’ in the history of technological change and advance. From the iPhone to Google Search, the world’s most popular products were funded, she concludes, not by private companies but by the taxpayer.¹²

      The British GND also has a major role for the state, not just in the transformation of the energy sector, but also the finance sector – and at international as well as domestic levels.

      While СКАЧАТЬ