Our Lives Are Under Threat From Some of the Most Powerful and Richest Entities
Here's How We Can Fight Back and Win...
Not for forty years has there been such a stretch of bad news for environmentalists in Washington.
Last month in the House, the newly empowered GOP majority voted down a resolution stating simply that global warming was real: they've apparently decided to go with their own versions of physics and chemistry.
This week in the Senate, the biggest environmental groups were reduced to a noble, bare-knuckles fight merely to keep the body from gutting the Clean Air Act, the proudest achievement of the green movement. The outcome is still unclear; even several prominent Democrats are trying to keep the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases.
And at the White House? The president who boasted that his election marked the moment when 'the oceans begin to recede' instead introduced an energy plan heavy on precisely the carbon fuels driving global warming. He focused on 'energy independence,' a theme underscored by his decision to open 750 million tons of Wyoming coal to new mining leases. That's the equivalent of running 3,000 new power plants for a year.
Here's what we think is going on, in the broadest terms.
The modern environmental movement was born on Earth Day 1970, in an unprecedented burst of mass organizing--by some estimates 20 million Americans, a tenth of the population, took to the streets. It was a young movement, at a time when large numbers of people were serious about not just cleaning the air but stopping wars and ending official discrimination. That popular base inspired--or, more likely, cowed--Washington: the next four years saw the passage of virtually all the environmental legislation that still forms the core of green law.
It also saw the birth or rebirth of many of the organizations we think of when we think of environmentalism. Powered by that initial burst of mass support, they were able to make real headway in DC, and so they concentrated on important and professional tasks: patient lobbying of subcommittees, careful report-writing. And they kept making substantial gains: Superfund toxic cleanups, acid-rain control.
But in recent years two things have happened. One, that battery wound up on the first Earth Day has finally wound down: congressmen, it turns out, can tell the difference between an aging membership list and a vibrant political movement. As the DC political bible Politico put it last month: "green groups are being forced to play defense in a world where D.C. pols aren't scared of them."
Second, the key issue has changed. Forget acid rain and Superfund; these were important but relatively easy fights that didn't directly confront anyone's business model. You could clean up acid rain by putting a filter on your power plant. But global warming is different--you'd have to shut down that power plant, and replace it with a windmill or a solar panel.
And so the full power of the fossil fuel industry--the most profitable business in the planet's history--has been brought to bear on the fight, and they play hard and dirty. The Koch Brothers spend huge sums to underwrite the network of global warming skeptics; the US Chamber of Commerce emerged as the biggest campaign funder of them all, shuttling 94% of its donations to climate deniers. This kind of clout carried the day: the biggest dream of DC Washington groups was the so-called 'cap-and-trade' bill, behind which they mustered every insider technique they'd spent the last four decades perfecting. But in the end they didn't come close: Harry Reid refused to even schedule a floor vote, knowing that he was far short of the votes needed to pass the bill. The White House stayed on the sidelines.
To us, the lesson is pretty clear. Since we're never going to have as much money as the fossil fuel industry, we need to rebuild the kind of mass movement that marked 1970: bodies, passion, and creativity are the currencies we can compete in. It's not impossible. Working with next to no money, the fledgling campaign at 350.org managed over the last three years to coordinate 15,000 rallies in 189 countries--every nation on earth save North Korea. It's been active in every US state and Congressional district. And this week, it combined forces with another important American grass roots climate campaign, 1Sky, for extra reach.
1Sky was founded in the same spirit, and at the same time, as 350.org, and has worked to develop leaders around the country and help build a base of hundreds of allies. Together, we'll be smarter, bolder, faster, and more creative than we were before.
This new and expanded 350.org will mobilize on a large scale--circle Sept. 24 on your calendar for a worldwide day of bike-based action. But it's also going aggressively after the backroom money, with a far-reaching new campaign that tackles the US Chamber of Commerce for its climate stance.
This youth-based campaign is linking up with labor, with faith communities, with frontline communities who have the most experience trying to shut down dirty power plants in their backyards. Most of all it's actually out in the streets, organizing new blood. The idea is not to supplant the Washington green groups, but instead to give the whole movement new clout--enough clout to withstand the crushing power of oil money. And enough energy to let us get off defense and back on the attack.
We don't know if we'll win in the end: the science of climate change grows darker by the day, and the window for effective action is swiftly closing. But any chance requires people power replacing corporate power. In the year of Tunisia and Egypt and Wisconsin, it's worth a try.
Posted on AlterNet
ZNet Articles
ZCommentaries
ZVideos
Books
Combine Climate Change & Employment to Win
By Roth, Robert at Apr 17, 2011 02:16 AM
Want to Fight Climate Change? Hire Somebody
By William Drayton - April 8, 2010 - http://www.pdamerica.org/articles/news/2010-04-08-11-43-50-news.php - Published by The Huffington Post.
With official U. S. unemployment at 10.2% and with Congressional debate on a climate bill sputtering, last week the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on how climate legislation might help fix the economy and create jobs. At the same time, President Obama announced he would hold a White House forum next month to gather new ideas for achieving the robust job creation that has so far eluded stimulus efforts, and opponents and supporters of cap-and-trade legislation both echoed the jobs theme, saying that in the end, any US climate bill must be a jobs bill.
These are promising developments that may point the way to an effective climate policy. Because with them, the crucial enabling connection between creating jobs and fighting climate change has finally entered explicitly into our politics.
I say "finally" because throughout most of 2009, even as the economy hemorrhaged some 3.8 million jobs, while they were framing proposals for climate change legislation, most members of Congress and their staffs were curiously reluctant to broach the obvious jobs connection. They expressed lots of concern over the impact of regulating carbon on energy producers, coal states and carbon emitters, but very little about its impact on jobs and workers in general. (President Obama's 2010 budget proposal was a notable exception; it plowed carbon permit revenues back into a payroll tax credit to help working families, but unfortunately that provision didn't pass Congress) .
But it's not that surprising the jobs dimension of the climate debate has been relatively muted until recently, considering the federal government doesn't like to be explicit about the true extent of unemployment, either. Unemployment is much worse than official statistics suggest. That official 10.2% rate represents only a fraction of the adult population that is not working; the total figure is closer to 40%. BLS statistics show that of the total non-institutionalized adult population of 235 million, only about 140 million, or about 60%, are working. Officially, there are 15 million unemployed; unofficially, the true number of unemployed is roughly five times higher.
But double-digit unemployment crosses an undeniable perceptual threshold in the public's mind. When we hit it, the political rhetoric around the climate bill shifted, and the jobs connection was finally made explicit. Acknowledged or not, it's been clear for a long time that in order for climate legislation to pass, it must not exacerbate job loss, and that for it to make sense, it should take advantage of this once-a-century opportunity for retooling the economy to optimize job gain.
In October the CBO released a study projecting a net job loss from the climate legislation bill that passed the House. It contradicted the findings of a report released by the Center for American Progress which projected a net job gain. The projections are contentious politically, hence the Senate Finance Committee hearing last week. Part of the debate is about whether a US cap and trade system could in effect create more "green" jobs than "non-green" it destroys, whether it will ultimately grow the economy or shrink it.
But there is a more fundamental principle involved than whether the particular cap-and-trade mechanism in the House bill or in Senate proposals can create a certain number of jobs. At the heart of the matter is one of the most basic decisions societies make: how to manage the fundamental tradeoff between the two primary factors of production--labor utilization vs. resource consumption. The two aren't quite a zero sum, but in general, they are substitutes for one another. The more natural resources such as energy and materials a business uses, the more labor it "saves," and vice versa.
Ideally, in a market economy the two should find an optimal balance. But for decades, through taxation and other interventions, we have pushed our thumb down hard on the scale, and tilted it steeply in favor of employing things over people. Even when U. S. joblessness is obviously deeply damaging our economy, not to mention our communities and families, we continue to define "productivity" in terms of how little labor we can use, and Wall Street can still rally on bad jobs reports.
As a result our economy consumes natural resources very aggressively. At the same time, US policy actively discourages labor demand. More or less by accident, we have sent a giant "use things, not people" price signal as payroll taxes have increased from 1% to almost 40% of federal revenues over the last several generations. This raises hiring costs, lowers employment, and hands an effective subsidy to resource consumption, skewing the relative prices of labor vs. resources over 30%.
The human impact of this is enormous. The potential contributions of tens of millions of people are wasted (hundreds of millions worldwide), studies show the health of sidelined workers and unemployed retirees suffers, and a whole host of social ills arises, from crime to students who see no future, with debilitating costs to individuals, business, and government. The climate impact is equally enormous. The effective subsidies favoring resource consumption and discouraging hiring mean we are burning a lot more fuel, tearing up more land and emitting a lot more carbon, than if the relative prices of labor and resources were corrected, and we produced utilizing far more people and far fewer natural resources.
That's the bad news, and it's also the good news. It suggests that if we reverse the current price signals, we can also reverse the perverse incentives that drive joblessness and over consumption of energy and resources. We can do this by taking the tax burden off payrolls and therefore employment, and putting it instead on energy waste and resource consumption.
OECD countries that have cut their payroll taxes substantially boosted employment and lost fewer jobs in the downturn than countries which didn't, like ours. This week The Economist magazine recommended the U.S. adopt a similar policy. If we cut payroll taxes and replaced the lost revenue with levies on non-labor inputs to business, such as a non-labor Value Added Tax (VAT), carbon permit fees and/or energy taxes, we could create tens of millions of jobs and stimulate economic growth while deeply cutting natural resource use and emissions.
Such tax switching is a revenue-neutral approach that involves no net increase in taxes. It also creates no bureaucracies, choosing of winners or losers, implementation delays, or risk of corruption. It is, not surprisingly, attractive to smart conservatives and liberals alike. Recent advocates range from Charles Krauthammer to Thomas Friedman, Al Gore to Richard Lugar and T. Boone Pickens. This year Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) and Rep. John Larson (D-CT) both introduced climate change bills that recycle over 90% of carbon pricing revenues into payroll tax cuts.
That's a hint of this approach's broad appeal. It would align the relatively small contingent of committed environmentalists who want strong action on climate with the huge constituency of the tens of millions of Americans of all backgrounds who need a job and the hundreds of millions who want a stronger economy. Whereas now, climate negotiations are fractious and expectations from Copenhagen and Washington are depressingly low, such a coalition for real economic and environmental change would be unstoppable and allow us to aim higher.
To fight climate change, we need concrete goals--return to 350 ppm atmospheric carbon, achieve 80% GHG reduction by 2050, hold global warming to an average of 2 degrees Celsius, etc. If we are serious about reaching them, we must add another fundamental one--create tens of millions of jobs by reorienting our economy and our tax structure towards engaging more people and using fewer things.
Reply this comment