This Changes Everything (20 page)

Most of these surveys, notably, don’t ask respondents how they feel about raising taxes on the rich and removing fossil fuel subsidies, yet these are some of the most reliably popular policies around. And it’s worth noting that a U.S. poll conducted in 2010—with the country still reeling from economic crisis—asked voters whether they would support
a plan that “would make oil and coal companies pay for the pollution they cause. It would encourage the creation of new jobs and new technologies in cleaner energy like wind, solar, and nuclear power. The proposal also aims to protect working families, so it refunds almost all of the money it collects directly to the American people, like a tax refund, and most families end up better off.” The poll
found that three quarters of voters, including the vast majority of Republicans, supported the ideas as outlined, and only 11 percent strongly opposed it. The plan was similar to a proposal, known as “cap and dividend,” being floated by a pair of senators at the time, but it was never seriously considered by the U.S. Senate.
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And when, in June 2014, Obama finally introduced plans to use the
Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, the coal lobby howled with indignation but public opinion was solidly supportive. According to one poll, 64 percent of Americans, including a great many Republicans, backed such a policy even though it would likely mean paying more for energy every month.
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The lesson from all this is not that people
won’t sacrifice in the face of the climate crisis. It’s that they have had it with our culture of
lopsided
sacrifice, in which individuals are asked to pay higher prices for supposedly green choices while large corporations dodge regulation and not only refuse to change their behavior, but charge ahead with ever more polluting activities. Witnessing this, it is perfectly sensible for people to
shed much of the keener enthusiasm that marked the early days of the climate movement,
and to make it clear that no more sacrifice will be made until the policy solutions on the table are perceived as just. This does not mean the middle class is off the hook. To fund the kind of social programs that will make a just transition possible, taxes will have to rise for everyone but the poor. But if
the funds raised go toward social programs and services that reduce inequality and make lives far less insecure and precarious, then public attitudes toward taxation would very likely shift as well.

To state the obvious: it would be incredibly difficult to persuade governments in almost every country in the world to implement the kinds of redistributive climate mechanisms I have outlined. But
we should be clear about the nature of the challenge: it is not that “we” are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is (unless it’s for a campaign contribution), and the corporate class is dead set against paying its fair share.

Seen in this light, it’s hardly surprising that our leaders have so far failed to act to avert climate
chaos. Indeed even if aggressive “polluter pays” measures were introduced, it isn’t at all clear that the current political class would know what to do with the money. After all, changing the building blocks of our societies—the energy that powers our economies, how we move around, the designs of our major cities—is not about writing a few checks. It requires bold long-term planning at every level
of government, and a willingness to stand up to polluters whose actions put us all in danger. And that won’t happen until the corporate liberation project that has shaped our political culture for three and a half decades is buried for good.

Just as the climate change deniers I met at the Heartland Institute fear, there is a direct relationship between breaking fossilized free market rules and
making swift progress on climate change. Which is why, if we are to collectively meet the enormous challenges of this crisis, a robust social movement will need to demand (and create) political leadership that is not only committed to making polluters pay for a climate-ready public sphere, but willing to revive two lost arts: long-term public planning, and saying no to powerful corporations.

I
. This was the situation not only in the Rockaways but seemingly wherever public housing was in the path of the storm. In Red Hook, Brooklyn, many residents were left without power for three weeks, during which time the Housing Authority never went systematically door-to-door. As sixty-year-old Wally Bazemore put it at an angry residents meeting: “We were literally in the dark and we were completely
in the dark.”

II
. This is why the persistent positing of population control as a solution to climate change is a distraction and moral dead end. As this research makes clear, the most significant cause of rising emissions is not the reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich.

“Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media adds to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.”

—John Berger,
Keeping a Rendezvous
, 1991
¹

“A reliably green company is one that is required to be green by law.”

—Gus Speth, former dean of
the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, 2008
²

To understand how free market ideology continues to suffocate the potential for climate action, it’s useful to look back on the most recent moment when transformative change of the scope required actually seemed like a real possibility, even in the United States. That time was 2009, the peak of the world financial crisis and the first
year of the Obama presidency.

Hindsight is easy, granted, but bear with me: imagining what might have been can help clarify what the future might still create.

This was a moment when history was unfolding in fast-forward, when almost anything seemed possible, for better and worse. A large part of what made better scenarios seem possible was the decisive democratic mandate that Obama had just
earned. He had been elected on a platform promising to rebuild the “Main Street” economy and to treat climate change as, in his words, “an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs. . . . It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth
over the last couple of decades.”
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Both the fossil
fuel companies and the environmental movement took it as a given that the new president would introduce a bold piece of climate legislation early in his presidency.

The financial crisis, meanwhile, had just shattered public faith in laissez-faire economics around the world—so much so that there was tremendous support even in the U.S. for breaking long-standing ideological taboos against intervening
directly in the market to create good jobs. That gave Obama the leverage to design a stimulus program worth about $800 billion (and he probably could have asked for more) to get the economy moving again.

The other extraordinary factor in this moment was the weak state of the banks: in 2009, they were still on their knees, dependent on trillions in bailout funds and loan guarantees. And there
was a live debate unfolding about how those banks should be restructured in exchange for all that taxpayer generosity (there was even serious discussion of nationalization). The other factor worth remembering is that starting in 2008, two of the Big Three automakers—companies at the very heart of the fossil fuel economy—had so badly mismanaged their affairs that they too had landed in the hands of
the government, which had been tasked with securing their viability.

All told, three huge economic engines—the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus bill—were in a state of play, placing more economic power in the hands of Obama and his party than any U.S. government since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been willing to invoke
its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy promised on the campaign trail—to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future. Imagine if there had been a powerful social movement—a robust coalition of trade unions, immigrants, students, environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were getting crushed
by the crashing economic model—demanding that Obama do no less.

The stimulus package could have been used to build the best public transit systems and smart grids in the world. The auto industry could have been dramatically reengineered so that its factories built the machinery to
power that transition—not just a few token electric cars (though those too) but also vast streetcar and high-speed
rail systems across an underserved nation. Just as a shuttered auto parts factory in Ontario had reopened as the Silfab solar plant, similar transitions could have been made in closed and closing factories across the continent. This transformation was proposed at the time by one of the most important intellectuals of the North American labor movement, Sam Gindin, who served for many years as research
director for the Canadian Auto Workers Union:

If we are serious about incorporating environmental needs into the economy, this means changing everything about how we produce and consume and how we travel and live. The potential work to be done in this regard—in the tool and die shops that are closing, the component plants that have the capacity to make more than a specific component, and by a
workforce anxious to do useful work—is limitless.

The equipment and skills can be used to not only build different cars, and different car components, but to expand public transit and develop new transportation systems. They can participate in altering, in line with environmental demands, the machinery in every workplace and the motors that run the machinery. They can be applied to new systems
of production that recycle used materials and final products (such as cars). Homes will have to be retrofitted and appliances modified. The use of solar panels and wind turbines will spread, new electricity grids will have to be developed, and urban infrastructure will have to be reinvented to accommodate the changes in transportation and energy use.

What better time to launch such a project
than now, in the face of having to overcome both the immediate economic crisis and the looming environmental crisis? And what greater opportunity to insist that we cannot lose valuable facilities and equipment, nor squander the creativity, knowledge and abilities of engineers, skilled trades and production workers?
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Retrofitting factories on that scale is expensive, to be sure, and that’s where
the bailed-out banks could have come in. A government unafraid to use its newfound power could have used the leverage it had over the
banks (having just pulled them from the precipice) to enlist them—kicking and screaming if necessary—in this great transformation. As every banker knows, when you loan someone money, you acquire a fair bit of power over them. Does a factory need some capital to
make the transition from dirty to clean? If it has a credible business plan, especially one that supports the stimulus vision, then the bailed-out banks could have been mandated by the state as part of the bailout to give that factory a loan. If one refused, it could have been nationalized, as several major banks were around the world in the period.

Many of the previous factory owners would not
have been interested in sticking around for this kind of transition, since the profit margins, at least at first, would have been small. But that is no reason to allow useful machines to be sold off as scrap. The workers at these plants, as Gindin suggested, could have been given the chance to run their old factories as cooperatives, as happened in several hundred abandoned factories in Argentina
after that country’s economic crisis in 2001. I lived in Buenos Aires for two years while making a documentary film about those factories, called
The Take
. One of the stories we told was about a group of workers who took over their shuttered auto-parts plant and turned it into a thriving co-op. It was a highly emotional journey, as workers took big risks and discovered new skills they had not
known they possessed. And over a decade later, we still receive reports about how well things are going at the factory. Most of Argentina’s “recovered factories”—as the hundreds of worker-run co-ops are called—are still in production, churning out everything from kitchen tiles to men’s suits.
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This decentralized ownership model has the added benefit of pushing against the trend toward utterly
unsustainable wealth inequality; rather than simply propping up the current global system in which eighty-five people control as much wealth as half the world’s population, the ability to create wealth is gradually dispersed to the workers themselves, and the communities sustained by the presence of well-paying jobs.
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If that kind of coherent and sweeping vision had emerged in the United States
in that moment of flux as the Obama presidency began, right-wing attempts to paint climate action as an economy killer would have fallen flat. It would have been clear to all that climate action is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce commodity indeed. But all of this would have required a government that was unafraid
of bold long-term economic planning, as well as social movements that were able to move masses of people to demand the realization of that kind of vision. (The mainstream climate organizations in the U.S., in this crucial period, were instead narrowly focused on a failed attempt to get a piece of carbon-trading energy legislation through Congress, not on helping to build a broad movement.)

In
the absence of those factors, that rarest of historical moments—so pregnant with potential—slipped away. Obama let the failed banks do what they liked, despite the fact that their gross mismanagement had put the entire economy at risk. The fundamentals of the car industry were also left intact, with little more than a fresh wave of downsizing to show for the crisis. The industry lost nearly 115,000
manufacturing jobs between 2008 and 2014.
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