Obama Had a Green New Deal, and It Worked. Let's Do That Again. [View all]

[ehrnst]

More recently, acknowledging the poll (which he brought to my attention) showing that the enthusiasm is heavily weighted against the Green New Deal, Roberts is presenting the grassroots wave as a future aspiration rather than a countable asset. “Intensity is what matters in politics,” he argues. “Democrats and climate hawks need to figure out how to generate some.” Roberts is a brilliant policy analyst from whom I have learned enormously. But I believe the theory of political change upon which he has hung his support for the Green New Deal strategy is showing its fatal flaws.

The second rationale for the Green New Deal is the belief that Democrats need a radically different strategy because what they tried under the Obama administration failed. Mike Konczal defends it as “a reaction to the failed strategy of cap-and-trade.” Kevin Baker, writing in Harper’s, calls Obama’s climate agenda “woefully inadequate in the first place,” and insists it has “now largely been squashed by President Trump.”

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The successes, by contrast, occurred with barely any fanfare. Obama’s stimulus included $80 billion in green energy subsidies, the largest investment in renewable energy technology in American history. The stimulus was written and passed in mere weeks, during an atmosphere of economic crisis when its impact on a long-developing environmental problem hardly registered with the news media. (Its tax credits for wind and solar power were extended in 2015, as part of a low-profile bipartisan budget deal.)

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All of this suggests Obama’s presidency offers a model, after all, for how the next Democratic president can address climate change. The three tools used by the 44th president — green energy investment as part of a stimulus bill, tighter regulation, and aggressive international diplomacy — may lack the transformative ambition of the Green New Deal. But the Green New Deal is nowhere close to overcoming either the technocratic challenge of designing workable policies to fulfill its grand designs, or the political challenge of enacting them.

A scaled-up version of Obama’s model, by contrast, is workable. Democrats might have to alter the rules for what kinds of spending the Senate allows to pass with 50 votes to allow for green energy subsidies. That will be a hard task when the 50th Senate vote comes from a red state, but not as hard as getting that 50th vote to approve a revolutionary overhaul of the entire economy. It’s not impossible to imagine a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema approving a bill to deploy lots of new green energy infrastructure if it included enough investment for their states.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/obamas-green-new-deal-worked-climate-change.html