Winning Friends, Crushing Enemies: An Interview with Alyssa Battisoni and Thea Riofrancos

The two scholars, writers, and activists review their new book, survey the (literal) battlefield for a Green New Deal, and denounce the idea of scholarship as a substitute for politics.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop.

In this installment of our interview series, we sat down with Thea Riofrancos and Alyssa Battisoni, two of the four authors of the newly-released A Planet to Win: Why We Need the Green New Deal. Riofrancos is a professor of political science at Providence College and on the steering committee of DSA Ecosocialists. Her book on Latin American extractivism, Resource Radicals, will be published by Duke Press in 2020. Battistoni, a founding member of Jacobin, currently resides in Cambridge as a postdoctoral scholar within Harvard University’s Center on the Environment.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Johnathan Guy: You talk in your book about beating our opponents who stand in the way of a Green New Deal. One opponent is the fossil fuel industry, which has certain structural power and lots of money to spend on politics. I think everyone agrees that we need a grassroots movement, but how do we confront the industry’s power as it is entrenched by embedded institutional advantages?

Thea Riofrancos: The first task is making visible what is invisible to most voters: the political-economic nexus of fossil power, what corporations benefit from it, what types of nefarious actions they've taken, and then what the human consequences are. Paradise and the more recent ongoing fires right now in California are some ways to do that. It's not a direct answer for how to undo policy capture. But I think the first thing is to mobilize public awareness of it, and then open up the political space in which supply and demand-side policies might have some political purchase.

Alyssa Battistoni: The fossil fuel industry is powerful. But it may be more vulnerable than we think. For example, the Bank of England recently warned about the potential of stranded assets. This is something that fossil fuel divestment campaigners have worked on for a long time: the prospect that fossil fuel companies' value is inflated because it is premised on the idea that they're going to extract and sell all of their reserves. If there were to be some kind of supply-side restrictions, or even a carbon tax, that would make their market value decline, and we are starting to see some anxiety among investors about this. That's a good thing, obviously. We don't want finance to do all of the work for us, but I think that it would be important if they turned on the fossil fuel industry. I do think that if fossil fuel futures start look like they're in more trouble, things might start to spiral faster than we think. 

Dealing with working-class backlash is where the labor question is really important. I guess I would characterize the relationship to fossil industry workers as a fig leaf, or a scapegoat. Let's be real: unions are not what's keeping the fossil fuel industry going, because nobody cares what the unions want to do on basically anything else. But when it comes to something like building a pipeline, suddenly Democrats are all ears for the unions. The more that we actually are able to offer a real alternative for people in the fossil fuel industry, the more we undermine the companies' pretense that they're really just doing what's best for these people, and Democrats lose their excuse for why they can't fight the industry. In the meantime, we should call them out on that more, because I do think that there's a lot of obfuscation happening.

TR: There's that terrible but illuminating recent news item about Pelosi saying that unions are not going to be in favor of a Green New Deal, which is just factually incorrect. Union members in general are supportive of Green New Deal, as Data for Progress's polling shows. To just say that workers don't like the Green New Deal or unions don't like it serves exactly the cynical purposes that Alyssa said. It just blames working class people for what is capital's fault, and obscures a real conversation that we need to have about ensuring a just livelihood for everybody after the transition to a new energy system. 

JG: I have one more question about anticipating and responding to opposition-- I've been thinking about this a lot lately with the Albertan separatist movement and the failure of the Oregon cap-and-trade bill earlier this year. In those cases, fossil fuel companies and a few labor allies certainly played their role, but we also saw a deeply ingrained carbon ideology in a lot of reactionaries spill into outright threats of insurrection. If we’re proposing change on such a great scale, how do we anticipate and avoid civil unrest that might come from an even bigger and nastier version of the Tea Party, especially since it seems like the Right is becoming more violent and active?

AB: I worry about that all the time, actually—the kind of Ruby Ridge militia types who are stockpiling guns and hate the government and love big trucks. I'm not sure that we can completely head it off. But, two things. One is that we do need to be thinking about how to reach people in rural parts of the country who have been underinvested in for years and in many cases are very suspicious, but who also would like to have some federal spending in their community. Frankly, I don't know if we can win over the militia members, but we don't need to get a total consensus on the Green New Deal. I think we need to win over as many people as we can. 

In the chapter on the built environment [in our book], we talk about how we can change it in ways that aren't completely running roughshod over local concerns: consulting with communities, talking to people about what changes are going to happen, what benefits people—you know, actually coming into the community so it's not just like, "Oh, great, you're going to build a big ugly transmission line to my backyard. I'm not going to get anything for that." But ultimately, some people will probably be pretty pissed about the Green New Deal and I'm not really sure that there's a way around that. But I think we have to face that head-on.

TR: Something I think about a potential Bernie presidency and not just the Green New Deal, but just having a left-wing person in office at the national level, is that Ralph Miliband essay about the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende. The whole essay is about what led up to the coup and engages in counterfactual brainstorming: at what moments could that coup have been avoided or mitigated or diverted in some way? Should the peasants and workers have been armed—which Allende was completely against—being a devout pacifist and parliamentary-route socialist type. I'm not suggesting that we need to arm everybody to counter the armed militias, but you should be game-planning out scenarios when you're leftists seeking state power, because there absolutely will be backlash. The question is: how do you prepare for it both on an ideological level and on a logistical level if there are actually forms of state defense that need to be available for deployments, should X thing occur? 

The second thing that I'll say is this. We're not going to win over the white power people. We don't want to win them over. They're our enemies, our opponents. But I do think that we can win over people from the types of communities in which those movements often take hold. There's ways that a Green New Deal can and absolutely should appeal to rural, poor people, including whites but also Latino migrants who are extremely underserved. I was pretty happy when in early September a big coalition came together called Farmers and Ranchers for a Green New Deal. They represent a bunch of smaller farmer-rancher groups, but supposedly have 10,000 members and very deeply believe that agriculture is key to mitigating emissions, restoring ecosystems, and creating sustainable foodways. 

JG: Thea, you spend a lot of time in this book on extraction and the enormous quantities of minerals and land required for renewable energy production, and how that necessitates forms of solidarity with workers and communities who are proximate to intensive mining. Could you say a little bit about how you see readers of The Trouble, for example, in their own work—what kind of actions could they take to start building these relationships that would eventually lead to some sort of expressive solidarity or international political agreement?

TR: The seemingly tragic dimension of an energy transition is that in order to have a low-carbon world, we still need to extract lots of things from the earth and, worse than that, there are some types of mining that will need to be intensified. Some of these types are extremely devastating for the environment and major sources of emissions. How do we get around that? The four of us firmly agree that there is no way to decouple from material inputs—that's a fantasy. But that doesn't mean there aren't better and worse ways to treat the planet and communities that are directly affected by the extraction needed, for example, to construct lithium batteries or wind turbines or solar panels or electric vehicles or any of those things. 

We propose two different ways to think about it. One is proposing our own vision of trade. We emphasize this both because trade policy is what could potentially regulate the shape of supply chains: how attractive and exploitative they are, and also where they are sited. I say potentially because there hasn't really been much concerted trade policy in this area. Neoliberals defend the so-called free trade agreement regime, which is not free at all, except for capital mobility. On the other hand, the Right has co-opted the anti-free trade space with a sort of isolationist vision, but neither of these are satisfying for the Left, which is internationalist and should care about solidarity across borders, and also should have a vision of global capitalism and a planetary scale.

A second pathway is consumption. If we shift away from models of privatized and extremely unequal individual consumption towards models of more egalitarian, public and collective consumption, we can more rationally and socially plan our resource use. We use resources in more rational ways when we use them together: mass transit, for example, is a better use of lithium batteries than a bunch of individual Teslas which sit in garages most of the day but were all extracted with the blood and sweat of humans and with ecosystem impacts. . 

Activists in the Global North can learn about and contact the communities and organizations that are directly affected by lithium or nickel or cobalt or copper extraction. We should ask them what they would like the Green New Deal to look like. Viewing the zones of extraction as sort of tragic areas where people are being exploited by capital and left to deal with its waste certainly makes sense, but this fails to acknowledge that these communities and workers have agency. The thing to do is ask them what can we do in the Global North with the policy levers, choke points, and different tools at our disposal to slow down extraction and make it less environmentally harmful.

JG: I'll leave you with two final questions. First, there's been a lot of planning around the GND: lots of conferences, books, policy papers. Has this process been timely enough, and has it been sufficiently democratic? Second, and related: what role do academics have to play in the movement? Some of us write policy, obviously. But for those of us who aren't policy experts, what role do we have to play? Is it indulgent at this late hour to spend our time in the academy rather than on the front lines?

AB: In general, I think academics should be politically engaged, especially in fields like political theory, political science, sociology. And I think that it is good for academics to be doing things like conferences and thinking about the Green New Deal in those places. I don't think we should confuse that for political organizing, or vice versa. I do think the ideas are important, that people connecting those ideas and talking through these problems and multiple solutions is really worth doing. But I don't think we should expect that to be something entirely or even primarily coming out of the academy. 

TR: Join an organization, or use the organizations that you already belong to, and leverage their collective power to fight for reforms at whatever scale is appropriate to that organization. If you're a professor at a public university and you belong to a union, there are lots of things unions can do, whether in terms of taking stances or being very picky about what types of candidates they back, or building Green New Deal policies into collective bargaining agreements. But maybe you're at a small private liberal arts school like I am and can't do that type of political activity. I organize in DSA, and DSA may not be for everybody, but there's a lot of political organizations that we need in this struggle. The first step is to join one and then ask your fellow members and comrades how you can be useful for them. It might look like, "Oh, you have access to university spaces for meetings? Can you like help us in that way? Or, you are knowledgeable about this thing? Could you help with our policy document?"

Academics, just like anyone, have access to certain resources, and there's particular ones that might be useful in a particular movement or mobilization. I think that's kind of the way to think about it, rather than think that academics are philosopher-kings that are going to somehow guide us to the future when most of them are not only politically uninvolved but actually, in my experience, don't understand how politics works.

So the first thing is to get organized or allow yourself to be organized, and be open to collective action. Second, think about, with your specific position, what resources you can access, institutional resources included, that can be helpful for a broader movement.