What kind of Green Deal?

Sharon Astyk critiques Al Gore’s climate change wish list for the next administration on the grounds that, among other things, it would require a huge up front investment in technology and infrastructure that may put us over a climate change tipping point because of the fossil fuels that would be required for such an undertaking.

Astyk, however, thinks that we need to re-think our commitment to economic growth and unlimited consumption. Gore, she says, wants to put the nation on a kind of war footing, with a massive industrial build-out. What she favors, though, is more along the lines of an ecological New Deal, a program that focuses on what human labor can accomplish, along with more modest technological improvements:

What do we need? Well, there are strategies for dealing with climate change that don’t require a massive investment of fossil energies. They are, of course, unsexy in a legislative sense, mostly because they are enacted by ordinary people, and focus heavily on conservation. On the other hand, as we have seen with the shifts people are making for economic reasons, they provide immediate, dramatic paybacks, with fewer dangers. It is obviously not possible to reduce our energy usage to 0 – we will still need investment in renewable infrastructure, in insulation, and we will still need companies, perhaps car companies, to build rail cars and windmills. But the difference between a gradual build out, that takes into account the ecological and economic costs of this shift, and takes the New Deal, rather than the war as a real model – ie, it emphasizes what ordinary people can do with human energies and small-to-moderate investments and a massive build-out that attempt to keep business as usual.

A New Deal model of ecological adaptation would consider what we could do with the least possible increase in long-term indebtedness. It would ask our population to make short term, radical sacrifices in order to ensure a better world for their children and grandchildren, to make real the words “for ourselves and our posterity” enshrined in the Constitution. Instead of building out all at once, we’d prioritize our cutbacks, dropping our energy consumption both radically and rapidly – 50% in 5 years is probably feasible. Meanwhile, our investments in renewable energy *and* in people would enable not just short term jobs in boomtowns, but a long term renewable economy – shifting our focus to food, health care, education. Instead of tax incentives that apply mostly to those rich enough to pay substantial taxes, we’d focus on low input, often human powered improvements to our lives – putting people to work building basic storm windows and helping people retrofit their homes.

I’m not going to try and summarize her long post; it’s well worth reading.