Listen to the audio version >>This commentary presents an overview of the elements that are necessary for a Green New Deal 2.0 in the era of the Polycrisis.

The Green New Deal 2.0, like earlier Green New Deals, is a project to abolish the extraction and burning of fossil fuels while rapidly expanding equality, justice, and wellbeing. To do that it will have to learn from the earlier Green New Deals but also develop far beyond them. It will be aided in doing so by the radical reduction in the cost of fossil free energy and the ways in which energy is used – the Greentech Revolution. But the Green New Deal 2.0 will also have to function within – and help transform – the period of global disorder that has come to be known as the Polycrisis.

To succeed, the Green New Deal 2.0 will need to be multi-level: local, state, regional, national, and global. From the start it needs to be global in its perspective and to transcend national borders in many of its actions. But it will initially have to be built from the bottom up, community by community, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Eventually it will need to control and wield the power of national governments.

The Green New Deal 2.0 won’t happen all at once; it will have to develop over time. In the U.S. the Green New Deal 2.0 may start with an Emergency Green New Deal addressing the catastrophe now being experienced by the American people and its impending intensification. This catastrophe includes the crises of food, housing, energy, health, public safety, climate, inequality, democracy, and the rule of law – a veritable American Polycrisis. In some ways it resembles the “Yeltsin Era” that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union when systems from employment to food to healthcare to housing to the rule of law broke down; male life expectancy at birth fell by six years just between 1990 and 1994.

There is little likelihood of immediate federal solutions to this catastrophe – indeed, those currently in control of the federal government are taking extreme measures to exacerbate it. Addressing it requires people organizing themselves from below to implement an Emergency Green New Deal that will put people to work doing the things are that are necessary to ensure survival and wellbeing in the face of the American Polycrisis.

Achieving the goals of the Green New Deal 2.0 – abolishing fossil fuel extraction and burning while rapidly reducing inequality, injustice, and deprivation – will require simultaneous action at many levels from local communities to global institutions. It will constitute an era of social reconstruction.

Realizing the objectives of the Green New Deal 2.0 –while a gigantic leap forward for humanity – will not in itself be sufficient to put human life on a secure basis that makes possible a good life for all. The Green New Deal 2.0 must make part of its project laying the groundwork for what we might dub the Green New Deal 3.0.

Elements of the Green New Deal 2.0

 

 

Here are some of the ways in which the Green New Deal 2.0 can incorporate but go far beyond previous Green New Deals:

The Greentech Revolution Protecting the climate by replacing fossil fuels with fossil free energy was the central pillar of the original U.S. Green New Deal. Since then, climate catastrophe has truly arrived. But the global Greentech Revolution has created a new basis for moving to fossil-free communities, countries, and world. The Green New Deal 2.0 will accelerate the timetable for the transition to climate safety, while utilizing it as the pivot for other transformations.

Green Jobs The original U.S. Green New Deal resolution noted a “4-decade trend of wage stagnation, deindustrialization, and antilabor policies.” It proposed to use climate mobilization as a vehicle to transform the world of work through high-quality union jobs, worker rights, labor standards, and a “job guarantee” that would ensure a job for every worker who wants one doing the work that is necessary to protect the climate and create a more just society. Since then, inequality has exploded and artificial intelligence (AI) threatens to eliminate millions of jobs and turn millions of others into excruciating daily oppression. The Green New Deal 2.0 will expand the jobs programs proposed by the Green New Deal, ensure that there are good jobs for those affected by AI, and empower workers to organize and act collectively on the job.

Affordability Rising prices for the necessities of life are a crucial concern for working people today. The Green New Deal 2.0 will address this from the start by replacing fossil fuels with far cheaper fossil-free energy, reducing the price of everything that uses energy – that is to say, everything. It will also make massive investment in energy-conserving housing, food production, and other necessities of life that will both protect the climate and reduce the cost of living. It will tax the rich to reduce inequality and provide resources for the 99%.

Human Needs The Green New Deal specifically addressed the unmet needs for housing, education, healthcare, and other necessities of life as part of the transition to a climate-safe society. Recent bills in Congress have proposed Green New Deals for housing and education. The Trump administration has devastated all aspects of our already inadequate social provision and is taking aim at what’s left. The Green New Deal 2.0 will establish new systems of social provision that empower local communities while providing the resources necessary to meet individual and social needs.

Justice and Equity The original Green New Deal resolution proposed to use its programs to “promote justice and equity by preventing current and repairing historic oppression” of “indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.” Today the further degradation of all these groups is being actively promoted by the Trump administration and its supporters in all spheres of life. The Green New Deal 2.0 will use resources, policies, democratic processes, and law to reverse both historic and new forms of injustice and inequality.     

Democratization The original U.S. Green New Deal was defeated in large part by the inordinate wealth and power of the fossil fuel industry and its power base within both Republican and Democratic parties. Since then, the Trump administration and the forces of plutocracy have further degraded our democracy and empowered the billionaire class. The initial U.S. Green New Deal resolution called for “ensuring the use of democratic and participatory processes that are inclusive of and led by frontline and vulnerable communities and workers to plan, implement, and administer the Green New Deal.” The Green New Deal 2.0 will rebuild democracy from the bottom up. That includes establishing democratic institutions at the grassroots and establishing genuine political equality for all people. It will also extend democracy within workplaces and the economy. Donald Trump has greatly expanded the role of government in the economy for the worst of purposes, to enrich kleptocrats and war contractors. The Green New Deal 2.0 will utilize that expansion of powers to provide planning and investment to serve the common good.

Constraining Corporations and Technologies The original New Deal of the Great Depression aimed to control the anti-social behavior of “malefactors of great wealth.” The startling growth of hyperscale data centers controlled by a handful of tech billionaires has forced new attention to the need to constrain corporations and their technology. To realize its objectives, the Green New Deal 2.0 will have to go far beyond previous green new deals in halting the anti-social behavior of today’s malefactors of great wealth, the corporations they control, and the destructive technologies they are seeking to impose. It will need to implement the “precautionary principle” that forbids introduction of new technologies until they are proven safe. More broadly, it will need to make the actions of private economic entities accountable to the public and those they affect.

Global Cooperation Neither the climate nor the economy can be fixed at a purely local or national level. The growing chaos of the global Polycrisis with its breakdown of international cooperation has led to a collapse of climate protection, proliferating warfare, economic chaos, and an inability of any nation to provide security and wellbeing for its people. The Green New Deal 2.0 will treat a worldwide Green New Deal as a common project of the world’s people and will make cooperation among movements and nations a primary part of its local and national programs. It will promote mutually managed international trade in the interest of protecting the climate and the world’s people rather than either economic nationalism or unconstrained globalization.

Laying the Groundwork for the Green New Deal 3.0

The Green New Deal 2.0 will not solve all the world’s problems; that will require more fundamental forms of change, including a changed relationship between humans and nature and new ways of guiding human society as a whole. Part of its objective, therefore, must be to lay the groundwork for further change – the Green New Deal 3.0. While the parameters of that change can be seen only hazily from the vantage point of today, we can aim to ensure that the Green New Deal 2.0 opens rather than closes the way to a peaceful, just, and climate safe world order.

The elements of the Green New Deal 2.0 will rapidly improve the lives of workers, communities, and ordinary Americans. The Greentech Revolution will not only retard climate devastation, it will reduce pollution and reverse soaring energy costs. Putting millions of people to work addressing human and environmental needs will not only provide quality employment but rapidly expand provision of food, housing, medical care, public safety, and other necessities of life. Rebuilding democracy from the bottom up will offer protection against the aggressions of authoritarian government and promote our ability to control our common life.

By itself the Green New Deal 2.0 won’t quell the global Polycrisis. But working with other forces it can begin to constrain Polycrisis dynamics while also starting to transcend them. The rapid reduction in burning fossil fuels and the transition to fossil free energy can slow and eventually reverse the destruction of the earth’s climate. The reduction in inequity and injustice, the meeting of social needs, the provision of full employment, and the constraining of corporate power all address the inequality promoted by rightwing policies and the Polycrisis. The drive for international cooperation can help begin to bring warmaking, war crimes, nihilistic geopolitics, and global plunder under control. Cooperation of diverse forces can begin to bring together “patchworks” of order and justice that can constrain the Polycrisis and develop toward an alternative world order.

The Green New Deal project has been promoted by a wide array of social forces. It has brought together people operating inside political systems with social movements organizing outside of them. It has used both the institutions of representative democracy and the direct-action power of the people to implement its objectives. The Green New Deal 2.0 will draw on comparable sources of power – but on a more continuous and more extensive scale.

(The next commentaries in this series will delineate the American Polycrisis and the Emergency Green New Deal.)