Revenge of the Plans
Image by Grete Stern, courtesy of Beth Scupham
Why do we keep reviving technocratic climate politics when it has consistently failed?
In late 2018 (only a little over two years ago), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Sunrise movement staged a sit-in for a Green New Deal in Nancy Pelosi’s office. One of the most striking images was the signs they wielded: “Green jobs for all”! Bracketing the fact this demand is somewhat nonsensical—can everyone really have a specifically green job?— the “for all” was one of the core reasons the Green New Deal caught on in climate policy conversations. It was no accident that this universal demand mimicked the politically galvanizing slogan of “Medicare for All” at the core of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, and the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America.
“For all” also channeled a vision rooted in the New Deal, harnessing the public sector to create universal economic rights. Few remember the Tennessee Valley Authority also channeled the slogan electricity for all. This vision was actually a form of what Enzo Rossi and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò call targeted universalism. The fact was that “all” did not equally need electricity in the 1930s. While many urban areas were fully wired into the grid, a mere 10% of farms could say the same. Yet by 1950 the vision of “all” was almost complete, with 90% of rural households electrified.
The Green New Deal approach was so groundbreaking because it broke from the longstanding approach to climate policy focused on policy “fixes” supplied by expert and celebrity figureheads: think James Hansen, Al Gore, and Bill Gates. It offered a new theory of change rooted in mass politics, or an effort to create a majoritarian, popular agenda around climate. This strategy suggests climate could be part of a wider leftward political realignment based on wealth redistribution, public goods, and economic rights.
It wasn’t just that organizers understood the climate crisis stitched together these broader elements of a left agenda. It was also the practical conviction that solving the climate crisis at the needed scale – famously stated by the IPCC “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” – required a massive shift in the balance of power in society as a whole.
Furthermore, the GND approach recognized we were in a historically specific moment of crisis like the 1930s or 1970s – complete with escalating “morbid symptoms” – where a new power bloc could set the agenda for decades to come. In the ruins of the neoliberal consensus, the GND was seen as a shot across the bow in the battle for hegemony against right-wing nationalism.
Two years later, I worry we have lost the plot of this original vision of mass politics and political realignment through climate action. The 2019-20 presidential primary cycle saw an explosion of candidate “climate plans” which resurrected the idea that clever, convincing policy designs would be central to solving the climate crisis. While carbon pricing seems (thankfully) mostly discredited, the new policy of repute is something called a “clean energy standard.” It seems we have returned to a mode of politics where rhapsodizing a policy framework is expected to deliver more than political confrontation and popular movements.
What social base does an emphasis on elegant policy design appeal to? Clearly, it’s the base who has always been at the core of climate politics: the professional class of highly-educated academics, scientists, journalists, NGO activists, and others, at most 22 percent of the employed U.S. population. This class is so overly represented in climate justice conversations that it's easy to forget how unrepresentative it is of larger American society. Without such acknowledgement, left-leaning climate politics can easily devolve into an insular mode of discourse that only appeals narrowly to the professional class itself.
From Corporatist Bargaining to Mass Politics
The early Obama years were dominated by a debate over which technocratic fix was better to solve climate change (carbon tax or cap and trade?). These policies purported to simply “correct” for a market failure (namely, that carbon dioxide emissions are an externality). Central to this vision was that these corrections would mostly be invisible and smoothly integrated into decentralized market processes.
In other words, these policy proposals were the opposite of mass politics: their advocates hoped no one would notice. They would not require large-scale societal disruptions or confrontations with vested interests. Market signals would simply nudge market actors in the right direction, and we would wake up one day to a zero-carbon economy.
As political scientist Theda Skocpol showed in painstaking detail, Obama’s signature climate policy proposal (cap and trade) was peculiar in that its proponents never attempted to mobilize a mass popular base behind its passage. Through a process she calls “corporatist bargaining,” the Obama Administration’ strategy instead relied on the idea that if you just got the right stakeholders into the room – green groups, affected industries, unions – you could reach a grand consensus.
Meanwhile, the right – which, unlike liberals, so often seems to understand what politics is – realized they could simply deem this bill “cap and tax” and argue it would cost everyday working families. They mobilized its emergent Tea Party base to make sure the bill failed. And it did.
The Green New Deal offered a new vision of climate politics which learned from this debacle. GND advocates insisted that the world historical challenge of climate change would not be solved by Third-Way market tinkering: we needed a mass political movement. As Peter Camejo once argued, a strategy of mass action centers on widely visible demands: “[w]hat we want is to call for concrete demands and mobilize people to win them.” Green jobs for all was an attempt at this.
While many reflexively rejected the GND because it “smuggled in” supposed non-climate demands, these critiques completely misunderstood the mass politics approach. The GND aimed to propose a vast, and far reaching vision of social transformation rooted in what some called “21st Century economic rights” – the right “for all” to health care, a living wage, paid family leave, and also public infrastructure at the core of the climate crisis itself like public transit, housing and, above all, electricity.
The GND mass politics strategy presumed this kind of vision might be the only one able to build majoritarian support. Crucially, the idea was that ordinary Americans might support this agenda even if they didn’t understand climate science. They would just instinctively consider the prospect of GND projects hiring their family members and building new infrastructure in their communities, and conclude it was good.
2020 Vision: The Return of Climate Wonkery
Now, we should be honest. The GND vision of mass politics also hinged on electing a mass politics-friendly leader, and this failed with the defeat of Bernie Sanders. It should be no surprise that the same movement that sat in on Nancy Pelosi’s office (Sunrise) voted overwhelmingly to endorse him. Bernie claimed that as president he would be an “organizer in chief.” He repeatedly stressed his agenda could only be implemented alongside a mass political movement:
“The truth is that the powers that be…they are so powerful, they have so much money, that no one person, not the best president in the world, can take them on alone. The only way we transform America is when millions of people together stand up and fight back.”
Bernie was alone in this vision of a “political revolution” through mass politics. His progressive rival Elizabeth Warren – a candidate many liberals claimed wasn’t that different than Sanders – proposed a completely different vision of politics that you might call enlightened wonkery – or, “I’ve got a plan for that.” Although Warren often claimed herself as a “fighter”, she envisioned the “fight” would be similar to her struggle over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, completely confined to the terrain of elite maneuvering: think personnel appointments, sharply-worded reports, and conference room confrontations.
Then something startling happened in late 2019 and early 2020. Perhaps it was because of the interminably long presidential primary cycle, but the GND vision of mass politics became overwhelmed by a technocratic game show of competing “climate plans” offered up by the various candidates. Meticulously reviewed and deconstructed on Twitter, these climate plans became increasingly central to climate politics discourse itself.
Perhaps most important was the emergence of Jay Inslee’s climate-centered candidacy, heralded as the “the most ambitious climate plan from a Presidential candidate.” The plan surely had some promising and aggressive proposals to phase out fossil fuel extraction, but policy wonks fixated on his proposal to move toward 100% clean electricity nationwide by 2035.
His campaign didn’t last long, but out of its ashes grew a new force in climate policy agenda-setting: Evergreen Action. This think tank – shaped by a mixture of academics, political consultants and other policy professionals – took its inspiration not from sit-ins or mass demonstrations of the 2019 climate strikes, but rather a document: “When Gov. Inslee left the presidential race, he made his 218-page ‘gold standard’ policy plan into an open-source document.”
The flagship policy that anchors all others in Evergreen’s approach is the federal clean electricity standard, which they call “a foundational pillar in a national mobilization to defeat the climate crisis and build a more just and thriving American economy.” It is astonishing how quickly this policy has assumed the new mantle as the policy fix amongst climate wonks, a mantle formerly occupied by carbon pricing.
Evergreen’s maneuvers proved central to the Biden campaign’s inclusion of a “100% clean electricity by 2035” goal in his $2 trillion climate plan, which was heralded by Sunrise and others as the most progressive general election climate plan ever – a Green New Deal in all but name. This good cheer was soured when Biden and Harris refused to endorse the GND in name, but optimism still abounds in some quarters.
Now, with the Democratic margin in the Senate razor thin as it is, Evergreen and others have pivoted to imagining how we might pass a clean electricity standard through the process of “budget reconciliation,” which only requires a simple majority vote. In order to do so, the policy must abide by the so-called “Byrd Rule” to ensure all measures have direct budgetary relevance. This has forced the proposals into parody-levels of wonkiness,with some including arcane metrics like “zero-emissions electricity credits'' that can be tracked on the Federal budget’s books. These workarounds are eerily familiar: in both design and tone, they resemble amendments to the doomed cap-and-trade proposal of 2010.
Despite these unflattering similarities, Evergreen claims such a standard has mass appeal, pointing out that polling suggests “two-thirds of voters support it.” Yet, there are lots of polls suggesting a carbon tax or carbon fee and dividend is popular. But polls do not always translate into actually winning your policy demands: recall Jay Inslee’s dismal record in trying to build a mass popular base around carbon pricing. As Governor, he has advocated for not one but two failed carbon tax referendums, first in 2016 and then again in 2018. The 2018 effort, despite drawing universal support from liberal environmental justice organizations, lost 56 to 44 percent. It turns out, any policy that highlights fees or taxes or costs is not going to appeal to the majority of Americans who are living paycheck-to-paycheck. Winning the survey questionnaire is one thing; winning the corporate-dominated public sphere is another. A mass politics approach insists winning such demands can only come through political organization and mass support.
After failing with the popular referendum, Inslee and the state legislature moved toward corporatist bargaining with the state legislature to pass a clean electricity standard for Washington State with the less-than-ambitious target of 2045. While environmental organizations cheered the law, it is already facing controversy and blowback from forces who claim it will lead to the same problem that would result from a carbon tax: rising energy costs.
The new standard forces electric utilities to account for the “social cost of carbon” in the calculation of their costs and rate structures. One public utility commissioner complained, “[The] typical utility ratepayer could now see rate increases of more than 5 percent per year on top of normal utility spending for safety and reliability of existing electric service infrastructure.” It is not at all clear how forcing electric utilities to adopt a standard will translate into direct material gains for utility ratepayers. In fact, we see people arguing the exact opposite: that the standard will raise rates.
Easily-mobilized opposition by masses due to rising energy costs will likely generate a protracted struggle, with public backlash, legal challenges, and procedural delay all likely even in the most optimistic scenario. It is hard to see how such a policy could possibly be part of the massive and rapid social transformation climate science now insists is necessary if it draws sharp opposition from the same forces required to enact it.
A policy without intuitive mass appeal – what Camejo called a “concrete demand” – is unlikely to generate the kind of popular base we would need. Indeed the whole idea of a “standard” itself is uniquely wonky and abstract to the average person. Moreover, admitting your climate solution will raise costs in the context of wage stagnation and skyrocketing debt is disastrous. Astonishingly, proponents of the clean electricity standard have already ceded this ground in Washington State. A spokesperson for the environmental organization “Front and Centered” essentially gave the game away: “There might be costs, we acknowledge that…that is something that is only concerning to the extent that it's not equitable, that those costs are distributed in a way that [doesn't] overly burden those who already struggle."
In fact, it could be argued that Evergreen has fully abandoned the mass politics vision of economic rights “for all.” Instead, they employ what they call a “justice-centered” approach that would target specific investments to frontline and marginalized communities. Evergreen frames this not in terms of universal rights, but “economic inclusion”. While the GND initially proposed a focus on majoritarian appeal, the concept of economic inclusion is grounded in what George Hoare calls “moral minoritarianism.” The assumption is the majority of society is included in a relatively fair and just economy, and that what needs to be done is make sure the most oppressed and marginalized aren’t left behind. We certainly need to address the disproportionate burdens faced by these communities—yet taking on the capitalist forces which impose these burdens requires a mass, broad-based coalition.
This kind of proposal also made its way into Joe Biden’s climate plan, which pledged 40% of investments would go to these communities. On that front, Biden’s environmental justice plan proposes the most technocratic solution you could possibly imagine: “[the Biden plan will] create a data-driven Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool to identify communities threatened by the cumulative impacts of the multiple stresses of climate change, economic and racial inequality, and multi-source environmental pollution.” There is no other way to say it: this is means-testing. Means-testing as a policy strategy has been disastrous in recent decades: not only for unifying the left, but also for the precise populations means-testing is meant to target. We’ll only have enough power to win a better future for the worst-off among us if we all band together: yet this majoritarianism Evergreen consistently elides.
The Class Basis of Climate Politics
As stated above, the politics of technocratic policy fixes and environmental justice screening tools appeals specifically to the professional class of credentialed knowledge workers and nonprofit activists. For this class, any solution requires a certain level of expertise to understand and appreciate, from budget reconciliation to clean electricity credits. While these plans might certainly convince policy experts, they don’t have much potential to inspire mass popular support. Without such support, they will become increasingly vulnerable to procedural delays and legal blockages by the highly-organized carbon-capitalist class and their political allies in the state.
The original Green New Deal project sought to harness the majority of Americans against the tiny corporate elite responsible for the climate crisis. To their credit, Sunrise and the Democratic Socialists of America have recently launched two campaigns exactly in this vein, centered around “good jobs for all” and expanding workers rights through the PRO Act. These kinds of campaigns seek to combine mass movements with a political program based on universal public goods. This is how large-scale change has historically worked. For example, the Civil Rights movement – the same movement that inspired environmental justice activism in the 1980s – combined sit-ins, boycotts, and disruption with mass popular demands (e.g. the March on Washington was a March for Jobs and Freedom). The Green New Deal originally aimed for exactly this kind of strategy: to use mass politics to force elites into implementing their agenda. Though Joe Biden is president and the Democrats hang on by a thread in Congress, we cannot lose this orientation. If we do, we might be very disappointed in the results.
Matthew Huber is Associate Professor of Geography at Syracuse University.
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