Aditya Chakrabortty had this to say about an article he wrote for the Guardian yesterday:
The column that will probably lose me the most friends: Why i think the Green New Deal is a bad idea https://t.co/Cohs2dVE06
— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) November 11, 2021
I think Aditya to be a friend and we won't fall out over this. But that does not mean we might not disagree, a bit.
That's not surprising. As he notes, I was one of the members of the Group who in 2008 put together the idea of the Green New Deal. From 2011 to 2017 there was probably more written on the Green New Deal on this blog than anywhere else in the world. And since then, as he points out, it's gone ballistic. I am not regretting that. But, as Chakraborrty puts it:
Only one project truly unifies the mainstream left across Europe and America today: trying to limit climate breakdown by overhauling a noxious economic model. Ask the individual parties how and a hundred flowers duly bloom, but all will be branded with those same three little words.
It is apparent that as far as Aditya is concerned this is a problem. I see it as something of a strength. I think much the same of his next criticism, which is:
The project itself – supposedly a stark, bold, urgent idea – is a conceptual fog. Like some kind of policy peasouper, it nestles densely around arguments of ecological limits, social justice and economic transformation, allowing only a glimpse of their outlines.
What else might be expected when this idea only really hit the ground three years ago after a gestation that was longer than I wished for?
His suggestion is that the result is:
For AOC and today's US left, it is about jobs ... and infrastructure; for Lucas, Labour's Clive Lewis and others currently pushing a green new deal through parliament, it includes citizens' assemblies and a shorter working week. It is both “a green industrial revolution” in the north of England and debt cancellation for the global south; both low-carbon Keynesianism and nationalisation of the energy industry. It is, in other words, a big duffel bag stuffed with pent-up progressive demands and jumbled up with highly dubious history and tiresome war metaphors.
So? Was there ever one political idea that enjoyed both success and consistent intellectual purity, let alone consistency of support, at the same time?
But what really reveals Chakraborrty's frustration is this:
Why hark back to FDR, who entered the White House nearly a century ago, if you want to be a contemporary global movement? Why lean on Keynes as your crutch, when he set out to save capitalism not to scrap it?
Why FDR, for those who get the reference? Because in the face of systemic financial failure based on dogmatic dedication to markets we need radical change, again. FDR delivered it. We want to. No wonder the right don't get the Green New Deal.
And why the crutch of Keynes? Not because we agree on what Keynes said, for sure. And some of us most definitely buy the ideas within modern monetary theory, and others do not. Rather, let's simply refer to Keynesianism as shorthand for the idea that markets fail to deliver optimal outcomes for society, and that those markets can leave large numbers unemployed or underemployed in jobs with little meaning when state intervention can deliver something so much closer to opportunity for all. We are, in other words, committed to full employment using minimum natural resources for all who want it.
As for capitalism? As matter of fact the Green New Deal does not buy the idea that there is a pure state solution, or a solely market-based one, come to that. Nor do we see a purely community-driven one as likely, which Aditya seems to think there might be. There is no evidence that this can or will happen, so we don't entertain it. But we most certainly see the need for constraints on markets, clear limits on their scope for activity, decided measures to create the inequalities of all sorts that they create, and the need for them to work within the constraints laid down by governments. Does that leave us with a hotch-potch? Of course it does. That is what life in the real world is like. It's how it actually works.
So, what to make of Chakrabortty's call in his final paragraph?
This is not about green growth versus degrowth, and all those old dichotomies. It is about recognising that large swaths of Britain are now effectively post-growth, and that the proceeds of whatever growth we have had has been very unfairly divided. So let us stop haring after “British-owned turbine factories” and “dominating the industries of tomorrow” and all the other boilerplate of politics. Let's get real.
I have no idea what that means. I accept the premise he makes. The evidence is that we are post-growth, at ground level. Wage stagnation proves it. But his rejection of discussion of what might be called industrial policy makes no sense, even in the context of his previous paragraph, which said:.
I hope what comes next is a more focused, locally rooted and inclusive politics based around asking people what they actually need in their lives, and working out how to fit those things within an environmental framework. That can be done with universal desires such as housing and food, healthcare and education.
I would sincerely hope that is true: it is why the Green New Deal supports things like citizen assemblies, although some of us see them as more advisory and not policy making because I, for one, am not sure that they can be democratic. But even if the things he suggests are the focus, energy is required, as is transport and domestic heat and maybe some really difficult things like cement, all of which are the focus of policy that must be beyond the local. It makes no sense to claim otherwise.
Every columnist has their off day. I'm afraid Aditya did with this one. But I will note this comment from him:
Measured from the start of 2018 until this week, the phrase “Green New Deal” appeared in this newspaper and on our website almost as many times as “levelling up” and far more than “Narendra Modi”. Seeing as one of those is Boris Johnson's signature policy and the other runs the world's second-most populous country, that is quite the showing.
I am not apologising for that, or the 733 references to the Green New Deal was a major theme of an article on this blog before this one was published which helped put it where it is. We got people to believe in something. And that something is making change happen. What is wrong with that?
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I think the GND is well intentioned but is based on a false premise.
Renewables can not replace fossil fuels, like for like.
No matter what happens, the economy will need to contract massively and then not grow again.
There is a very serious question as to if the remaining fossil fuels can even fuel the transition to renewables. Link below explains the problem.
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
The ebook link below explains all the energy options available to us in detail. Their pros and cons and their impacts etc. It’s a 400 page book, but we’ll worth the effort. It explains the reality of our situation really well.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
Why is that incompatible with the GND?
Who in the GND I have been involved in does say we are simply substituting renewables?
The GND will fail unless there is a massive reduction in the size of the economy. This is never mentioned. It’s all about creating more well paid jobs, but the reality is that there has to be a massive reduction in economic activity. This means big job losses not job creation in nett.
We can’t maintain anything like the present standard of living and decarbonise. I don’t feel that environmentalist are being honest about the scale of the problem.
We are looking a fundamental changes to society, not just switching from one energy source to another.
We can’t just switch from diesel to EV and everything is going to be OK.
It’s still “cake and eat it” politics.
Why will we have many fewer jobs?
That is only true if you believe we cut what we do and then do nothing else with out time
Candidly, that’s bizarre thinking
And just wrong
Why won’t your fundamental change still involve working for their own well-being and that of others? If it doesn’t what sort of vision is that?
Any job that requires energy inputs and is part of the discretionary economy will disappear. That’s a lot of jobs!!!!! What is considered “discretionary” will increase as energy availability shrinks. There’s lots of “bullshit jobs” out there.
People will be involved in the production of food perhaps, as this will need lots of humanpower when the energy inputs from fossil fuels are greatly reduced.
I’m not really doing “vision”.
Living on Mars is a vision, but it will never happen.
Sorry – but your vision is wholly inconsistent with what is actually possible
We are not heading back to caves as you would seem to have it
Without an abundance of high density, easily accessible energy, the complex modern world we live in, can no longer function. But those days are gone. The energy inputs in creating/extracting energy are increasing all the time.
Renewables do not fit the bill.
At present, RE can only be created using fossil fuels.
Those renewables will need replacing in 40 years time using only RE energy. RE is going to have to do that as well as supply all our other energy needs. The physics just doesn’t add up.
Perhaps not back to caves, but to something resembling pre-industrial levels.
Let’s disagree
Current science is not in your side though as much as it is on the need for urgent action
Aditya and his like is what makes you so good Richard to be honest. This is not feint praise or brown nosing BTW.
As with much of the Left, Marxism helped the Left to become superb analysts of problems but unfortunately poor managers, movers and shakers of the alternatives. Some of this is not their fault because we know how well organised, funded and tooled up the Right are.
This is because the Left is haunted by the spectre that (1) they could be wrong (people actually love capitalism) and also (2) because they see things in a too narrow political way – for example a Left that had fully embraced environmentalism would be in a much stronger position today than they are now I wager.
As we know though, there is good capitalism and bad – too much of the latter.
The Left has ran out of ideas in this country at least because they have not argued well enough in the face of economic orthodoxy. They’ve treated the orthodoxy as a populist issue and have wanted to be seen embracing capitalism instead. Big mistake, because now they are confused, lacking confidence, riven with division etc.
As Varoufakis has said, the Left’s job was to save capitalism from itself (however reluctantly) – but the methodology was never clear.
The GND was a clear methodology in my view that would make a big start on the problem. And you are right – it has been enunciated here for some time and too often ignored and won’t we begin to know that more and more if it is not embraced properly in the coming years.
Heterodox is the way forward – it has been for a long time.
The left are materialists
It is why they aren’t good environmentalists
Materialists – yes that makes sense.
The problem I see here is about ownership of the phrase, to focus popular attention on the major environmental issues/problems, largely created by the production and consumption in the developed countries. Mostly Western, Northern, Anglo / European, a population that makes up about a tenth of the world.
The problem being that the malfeasants , the owners of Finance and Capital who have always benefited from the raping and razing of natural resources by deploying their slave workers and slave masters -have as usual, captured that call to arms. The GND. And as usual corrupt it to their purposes, divide the people and get us fighting against each other to deflect being punched up at.
I last wrote angrily and despondently about the farce of COP, Bozo the Clown and Patterson vote in Parliament that the Opposition didn’t resist; which also had swirling around it the corrupt SNP and the constructed Greens alliance with made up job titles, who were reportedly absent from that showcase.
The proof of Aditya’s assessment, and my feeling too, was demonstrated by the odious Goldsmith ecstatically crowing about the millions, billions. which are going to slush around in supposedly ‘dealing’ with the causes of the ‘climate crises’.
Not by stopping the historical and current CO2 perpetrators, many of whom have transferred the jobs and the pollution to emerging nations whilst keeping all the wealth created from these ‘investments’.
Cory Morningstar was already warning about this some years ago.
In Glasgow I haven’t seen any MSM reports of per capita emissions current or historical – just about a system of carrying on as usual and planting some trees somewhere far away from where the products of CO2 are being consumed.
A cake and eat it scenario.
A whole new financial industry to take control of the remaining resources of the planet from those who still live there in the name of ‘saving the planet’. Whilst blaming the emerging and more populous nations and demand they keep it under control.
I would like to see the actual GND you proposed and maybe it will emerge from the miasma that it has been disappeared into by its targets – the owners and creators, not the consumers who have no choice but to eat what we are given.
Aditya is speaking from the heart of the machine which he knows has been using him as fig leaf and bait and from which he would be ejected as soon as his truth to power message became greater than his usefulness, as other Journalists have found over the years at that ‘newspaper’.
So you are saying it has been corrupted
How?
I am not convinced
Nor have I seen it captured by those you suggest
The environment issue obviously has been in part, but how are you extrapolating that?
When I read Aditya’s article I immediately thought: ‘Richard will have something to say about that’. I am very pleased you have replied as you have done.
The Green New deal isn’t perfect, it needs development and most certainly will need to be rooted in and accepted by communities. One of Aditya’s main problems with it seems to be that it is too ‘top down’. In fact it is a long way from being top down, bottom up or any sort of mix of the two. Would that we were somewhere close to implementation level. When we (hopefully) get there the process of delivering will indeed require huge levels of community acceptance and local organisation but there has to be resourcing, planning and coordination not only at the local but the regional and national level too.
Aditya is a great proponent of the power and relevance of the local and one of our best reporters on the realities of life and attitudes in our poorer communities; his work on Preston has been a revelation and he is right, local communities have to be front and centre of the GND. But we need too, to have the national and regional level programmes resourced and operating. One of the best national networks of community based and accountable regeneration groups is Locality. They are fiercely community based but also intensely engaged in the business of developing policy and initiative at national level.
Thanks
Aditya Chakrabortty asks “Why hark back to FDR, who entered the White House nearly a century ago,” ?
Perhaps because what he instigated worked (?)
Therefore perhaps we can learn from that and adapt the lessons so they apply to our present woes (?)
To dismiss the GND because it not perfect is a counsel of despair and there’s not much by way of positive alternative on offer in this article.
“Only one project truly unifies the mainstream left across Europe and America today: trying to limit climate breakdown by overhauling a noxious economic model.” Sounds good to me, but Aditya is not happy with that underlying objective perhaps. (?)
Like Alan above I read that Guardian article and anticipated an interesting commentary and lively debate on this blog.
There is a problem Chakraborty is rather poorly trying to pin down. However clear the originators of the Green New Deal were in their own minds about the approach they advocated, the phrase has been widely adopted as a sort of mantra, something politicians can invoke as “the solution” while allowing it to represent something convenient to them. In the end doing the right thing will be far more important than giving it the right label, and those politicians need to specify what they are trying to do not hide behind a nice phrase.
That I entirely agree with
I am currently reading A Green New Deal by Anne Pettifor . Plenty of detail, plenty of common sense solutions, very little waffle . Suggest you send copy to Aniditya.
If I have any major criticism of GND writers and thinkers, it is their lack of talk discussion knowledge etc of regenerative agriculture and the role of soil . But then most people these days are townies !!
The criticism is fair
And I live in the country
Whereas the average environmentalist never looks at the Economics , the virtuous vegan never looks at the terrain or the implications if their soya or quinoa habit , so too the tree planters never look at soil and grasslands. The C02 emissions from ruination of soil associated with industrial agriculture are generally thought to be as copious as from the burning of fossil fuels . But like you have agreed with me , few are mentioning this . Yet time and again I read how incredibly rapidly soil can be regenerated and that soil can sequester carbon very rapidly. I would like to see the following writers’ books widely read by those at the forefront of GND economics and townie “green” lifestylers. I have read most of their books over recent years and they are very accessible to even the most hardened city dweller.
David R Montgomery
Kristin Ohlson
Gabe Brown
Judith D Schwartz
Charles Massey
Nicole Masters
And any books on the subject of mycorrhizal fungi !
I admit I am not familiar with any of them