This is from The Guardian, yesterday, by Yanis Varoufakis, and unashamedly borrowed since he borrowed the term Green New Deal:
What Europe needs is a Green New Deal — this is what Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 — which I co-founded — and our European Spring alliance will be taking to voters in the European parliament elections next summer.
The great advantage of our Green New Deal is that we are taking a leaf out of US President Franklin Roosevelt's original New Deal in the 1930s: our idea is to create €500bn every year in the green transition across Europe, without a euro in new taxes.
Here's how it would work: the European Investment Bank (EIB) issues bonds of that value with the European Central Bank standing by, ready to purchase as many of them as necessary in the secondary markets. The EIB bonds will undoubtedly sell like hot cakes in a market desperate for a safe asset. Thus, the excess liquidity that keeps interest rates negative, crushing German pension funds, is soaked up and the Green New Deal is fully funded.
Once hope in a Europe of shared, green prosperity is restored, it will be possible to have the necessary debate on new pan-European taxes on C02, the rich, big tech and so on — as well as settling the democratic constitution Europe deserves.
Perhaps our Green New Deal may even create the climate for a second UK referendum, so that the people of Britain can choose to rejoin a better, fairer, greener, democratic EU.
- Yanis Varoufakis is the co-founder of DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement) and former Greece finance minister
We are seeing massive growth in support for a Green New Deal in the USA. Now it is growing in Europe too.
It seems it takes a decade for ideas to get into their stride.
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Fantastic Stuff and fingers crossed.
The term preexists your use of it Richard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_New_Deal#History
Actually, none of us were aware of that
Yes, and note when this idea was being floated around by Friedman, 2007!
Imagine if he’d been listened to then, the grief and hardship of the Great Recession might have been avoided, we might be on course to mend the planet, at least to stall its decline, and Brexit might not even be a word.
Varoufakis is right to revive it, riding on Bernie’s support in the U.S., he’ll have Green support all over the EU too.
Varoufakis is often in the right place at the right time, I’ve noticed… so long as he has the talent and the intellect to spread the word in EU, and enough gravitas to move things forward, all the better for all of us.
We published in 2008
It’s clear we were developing simultaneously
But I really don’t care
It seems we kept the idea alive
And linked it to QE
Frankly Ross who gives a rats arse about who first used the term?
Frankly we need Green New Deal in practice NOW – – the actions never mind the sodding not words. That is Richard’s enduring point and has been for as long as I can remember.
Next!
Oh no, belittling people is much more important……
Indeed, it doesn’t matter one jot who ‘started it’, except to those with overinflated egos, and even then, let them have their 5 minutes, if they need it. Even overinflated egos can have their use. No one’s perfect, fortunately!
What really matters is that things get going now. NOW. No delays. No time. No excuses.
Agreed
Good to see what Varoufakis is proposing.
However, the devil is in the detail. On the energy efficiency side the need is to find ways to aggregate projects in to large-scale “lumps”. The EU via the H2020 programme is funding projects to do that – but one senses that it is all both small-scale and fragmentary – it is almost as if the EU gropes its way forward – knowing what the problems are – but refusing to take executive action to address them.
At a practical level – there is not even a portfolio of projects (technical & financial) or an overview of financing actions – no sense of how it all meshes together (I guess it does not – the EC taking the old Mao approach – let a million flowers bloom).
On the renewable side – the big companies are able to take care of themselves – I see Orsted will issue Euro30bn in bonds – doubtless there will be plenty of takers – including if they are sensible – German pension funds.
Question: why does the EIB issue bonds to the market – why not issue them to the EIB as others have proposed.
I hope everyone gathers I support money-tax-green and think Richard concisely explains we should be doing this and that not doing so reveals a dire state. We should be wary though of FDR’s New Deal. The literature is shot through with contradiction and loads of bias. US recovery was slow from 1933 – 39 and some say the New Deal was responsible. This is a typical paper – https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/conferences/research-events—conferences-and-programs/~/media/files/research/events/2000_10-20/Cole_EquilibriumAnalysis.pdf
Food was actually destroyed as people went hungry and some of the policies encouraged racism. Programs often worked at cross purposes. There’s a review here – https://www.cfr.org/content/thinktank/Depression/Fishback_NewDeal_Chapter.pdf
There is a history to learn from is all. Sadly, much of it is written from libertarian and Austrian perspectives. Interventions are tough – it helps not to fall into old pits and traps. Meanwhile, scientists work on such as vaccines for bees (tough as they don’t have antibodies) and have found a way. At some point we need to replace the ideology of “groaf” with exciting green prospects on green lives worth living.
The New Deal proved interventions worked economically
Socially the States had a long way to go
It still has
Archytas: We should be wary though of FDR’s New Deal. The literature is shot through with contradiction and loads of bias. US recovery was slow from 1933 — 39 and some say the New Deal was responsible.
No, we shouldn’t be wary of FDR’s New Deal. First – it was damn Green to begin with. A more accurate name for today’s ideas would be “A Second Green New Deal”.
Second, literature after 1950 is incredibly biased against the New Deal. Economically illiterate trash filled with ancient lies of Roosevelt-haters and distorted statistics is not too strong a characterization for the overwhelming majority of this ocean of pseudoscholarship, especially including that from almost all the progressive/liberal/left/Marxist/socialist side. Exceptions are very few and far between. (Neither of those linked works are exceptions – though Fishback is much the better, halfway decent, but still reciting common falsehoods.)
“US recovery was slow from 1933 — 39” is an oft-seen prime example of how effective this brainwashing is.
US recovery was extremely strong from 1933-37. In fact it was the fastest peacetime growth that the US economy has ever seen, before or since. And the New Deal certainly was responsible. The New Deal is almost always judged by insane standards that are never used for any other period. The diametric opposite of the truth, that has as much connection to reality as 9-11 truth, holocaust denial or flat-earthism, is the academic party line.
New Deal history today is as bad as US Civil War histories were a hundred years ago, when the uniform dogma was neoConfederate revisionism that insisted the US CIvil War was about anything but what everybody agreed it was about when it happened – Slavery.
On Thursday, fifteen-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg addressed the U.N. plenary in Poland, condemning global inaction in the face of catastrophic climate change.
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/12/13/you_are_stealing_our_future_greta?autostart=true (4 Minutes)
Greta said “You only speak of green eternal economic growth because you are too scared of being unpopular. You only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake. …
I care about climate justice and the living planet. Our civilization is being sacrificed for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making enormous amounts of money. Our biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. It is the sufferings of the many which pay for the luxuries of the few. …
If I have children, maybe … they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. You say you love your children above all else, and yet *you are stealing their future* in front of their very eyes.
Until you start focusing on what needs to be done, rather than what is politically possible, there is no hope. We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis. We need to keep the fossil fuels in the ground, and we need to focus on equity. And if solutions within the system are so impossible to find, then maybe *we should change the system itself*. …” [emphasis added]
Do the Green New Deal proposals go far enough? Are they an attempt to continue Business As Usual but greener? Will we still be ‘stealing’ children’s future when ‘we should change the system itself’?
Greta does not fly; neither do climate scientist, Professor Kevin Anderson nor Green MEP, Molly Scott Cato (though she did feel obliged to fly once in recent years). As I see it flying for pleasure and for many profit-seeking purposes is ‘stealing the future’ — as is much (most?) of motoring, fashion clothing, ‘prestige’ buildings and so on. ‘The system’ has to change and soon. How do we ‘pull the emergency brake’? Countries that were early adopters of the Industrial Revolution have already burned far more than their fair share of fossil fuels. Greenland and Antarctic ice are melting. Bangladesh, Pacific Islands — and later, East Anglia and London — are in peril. How can we justify to children that building a great deal more infrastructure is necessary?
We have to try
And we cannot do it without an infrastructure
Joe
If we are to change things it is easier to provide alternatives. That is why we must invest. Otherwise it is much harder.
People have got used to a lot of strange things.
For example look at air travel. We see an improvement in our lives in having cheaper and more plentiful air travel. We see having a car as a key to independence and a job.
Yet we also fail to recognise how we shackle ourselves to the down sides of these phenomena in the form of pollution, congestion and health consequences none of which are factored into their pricing by markets that feel want to fulfill dreams and not responsibilities.
These are really tough nuts to crack and will remain as so with out reinvestment.
Great post!! I would add that Roosevelt wanted a Bill of Economic Rights, imagine if he had lived and succeeded:
a) He wanted to free people from the economic aristocracy, just as they were once freed from the political aristocracy FDR’s 1936 Acceptance Speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=071Wl0N1kAg
Text: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15314
b) FDR’s 1944 State of the Nation address including the Economic Bill of Rights
Video – billmoyers.com/2014/03/07/remembering-franklin-delano-roosevelt-and-the-second-bill-of-rights/
Text: http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html
Economic interventions go back to such as jubilees in Mesopotamia and Solon in Ancient Greece. As with the New Deal, interpretations vary. Some, for instance, state it odd that some of Solon’s mates bought farm land on credit just before he abolished debt. Little is proven on interventions working or otherwise. Indeed, strong claims are made that the USA did not recover from the events of the Depression until the ‘intervention’ of WW2. Even in the length of the Very Short Introduction series, Eric Rauchway demonstrates New Deal as a mixed bag, some of it Unconstitutional.
I have no doubt we need a policy revolution. I don’t want this to start in glib assertions on myth. New Deal in this sense influenced the World Bank and IMF – hardly successes. Money-tax-green is a paradigm shift against vested interests of many kinds. No doubt, as in New Deal, these will assert themselves, perhaps in morphed form. Organisations do this to market and legislative pressure. Life on Earth is doing it under human pollution-warming pressures. We’re close to measuring warming via micro-organism morphing and have been measuring pollution via shell-fish since 1970. Going green requires its own thinking infrastructure and economics very different from the groaf/GDP conventions of the New Deal context. I’m not reading much tha
Michael Hudson needs to influence this
Here is an idea.
The ECB simply creates the Euros required to fund the research , development, production and installation of what is required to fix climate change… and distributes this money to the eurozone members who have the available resources to put this into practice.
The Eurozone have double digit unemployment… people there, ready to work to do things for the greater good.
And things like german pension fund interest? f**k em. Don’t care – its part of the economics that brought us to this point. Its simply not important at all.
I care that there will be a human life supporting biosphere when I get to retirement age .
Great idea
Could easily be done
Will it be done?
No…..
Yes, Pilgrim, we need to invest in solar photovoltaic energy and solar thermal energy, wind and tidal energy, and geothermal energy. We need electric public transport. We do not need extra runways, high-speed rail or more motorways; in fact we need many fewer (and much more energy efficient) cars — perhaps some self-driving.
We are talking about: the global average atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration was 280 parts per million (ppm) for millennia until the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It was 405 ppm in 2017 and is higher still now; Greenland and most of the Antarctic are melting now and sea-levels are rising; the oceans are more acid and the extinction rate is hard to believe. This *concentration* is the man-made factor affecting the climate.
If it takes 30 years or more to get *emissions* down to zero, then that’s 30 years of increasing concentrations thus making the climate very significantly worse. “We need to focus on the people who are actually emitting,” says Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. “If the top 10% of global carbon emitters reduced their individual carbon footprint to the level of the average European citizen there would be a one-third cut in global emissions. That 10% is responsible for 50% of emissions; the richest 20% for 70%.
Anderson writes “Imagine in the 1940s if the elite binged on a huge food extravaganza whilst folk around them managed on a tight ration. That’s what Boeing’s newest line of business jets is doing whilst they & their morally bereft business passengers stick two fingers up to the rest of us.”
As in war-time, we need rationing! Raising petrol prices triggered the Gilets Jaunes riots in France. Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) would 1) limit UK emissions and set an example that other countries would follow [Also, having initiated the Industrial Revolution, the UK has contributed massively more than its share of CO2 to the atmosphere and to ocean acidity, and has constructed abundant infrastructure in the process.] 2) Redistribute some wealth so that the wealthy would be restricted but the poor could travel.
Then there’s housing: 250, 000 people in the UK own eight or more rooms per person; there are at least a million ‘second’ homes or empty houses. Why not a tradable quota of a number of square meters of floor space per person? We still need some investment in ‘very energy efficient’ homes but there are more than enough large, energy-wasteful houses.
Do you have sources for that data?
The reference to Solon was most important to what is happening. In the remarkable book Lessons of History by Pulitzer winners Will and Ariel Durant we learn that growing populism, and political unrest are not new. That there is a need to address the failure of economic growth being shared by all:
pages 49-51 in my edition
In the Athens of 594 B.C. , according to Plutarch, “the disparity of fortune between the rich and the poor had reached its height, so that the city seemed to be in a dangerous condition, and no other means for freeing it from disturbances… seemed possible but despotic power.” The poor, finding their status worsened with each year–the government in the hands of their masters, and the corrupt courts deciding every issue against them–began to talk of violent revolt. The rich, angry at the challenge to their property, prepared to defend themselves by force. Good sense prevailed; moderate elements secured the election of Solon, a businessman of aristocratic lineage, to the supreme archonship. He devaluated the currency, thereby easing the burden of all debtors (though he himself was a creditor); he reduced all personal debts, and ended imprisonment for debt; he canceled arrears for taxes and mortgage interest; he established a graduated income tax that made the rich pay at a rate twelve times that required of the poor; he reorganized the courts on a more popular basis; and he arranged that the sons of those who had died in war for Athens should be brought up and educated at the government’s expense. The rich protested that his measures were outright confiscation; the radicals complained that he had not redivided the land; but within a generation almost all agreed that his reforms had saved Athens from revolution.
Interesting that Jubillee was a part of this
I just want us to understand the kind of opposition New Deal will raise. Much criticism of it is specious and from economics that has got us in this mess as Calgacus says. Presumably, we don’t want such a successful green economy that people have so much disposable income to spend in the planet-burning economy we bring the need for 5 planets to sustain us closer. This is the repugnant conclusion of groaf-oafism. We have a long critique of consumer fetishism, but it can seem the alternative is sitting round thinking flamenco music is cool. The West we live in is no model for dissemination at all and we are way off a genuinely democratic green global-political infrastructure. If we stop using coal, oil and gas, this leaves the problem of others expanding their use with a cost advantage over our green production, or promising jawbs as Trump did. It’s tough.