Front Burner - A primer on the Green New Deal in the U.S. and Canada

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

This week a new government report outlined the most pressing threats facing Canada due to climate change. The report warned of infrastructure failures, flooding and storm surges on the coasts, and melting shorelines and permafrost in the North. Global warming is a massive problem for Canada and the world. But some big solutions are being debated. One idea is the Green New Deal, an ambitious and controversial plan in the U.S. Today on Front Burner, Geoff Dembicki explains the Green New Deal and how the movement is translating here in Canada. He’s a Vancouver-based journalist who writes for The Tyee and Vice, and the author of "Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change".

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. I'm Trana Winter. And I'm Thomas LeBlanc. Welcome to Chosen Family. Every second week, we talk about art, sexuality, and identity with a special guest.

Usually queer, but not always. I completely struggled coming out to my parents as a comedian. Being in the entertainment industry for Middle Eastern people is unheard of. Affecting change requires people to shake it up. Listen to Chosen Family wherever you get your podcasts. What sign are you, by the way? I'm an Aries. Of course, I love it.

Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. Yesterday, Canada got yet another reminder about the very real and concrete effects climate change will have on this country. A government report outlined a dozen of the most pressing threats. The top three? Infrastructure failures. Flooding and storm surges on the coasts, melting shorelines and permafrost in the north. It's a huge problem. And a huge solution has been proposed.

Though it doesn't get as much press up here as it does in the U.S. I'm talking about the Green New Deal. What is it, and where's the movement here in Canada? Today I'm talking to journalist Jeff Dambicki. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Jeff. Hey, thanks for having me on. Thanks so much for coming on to the podcast.

So I know you've written a lot about this concept of a Green New Deal for the Thai in Vancouver and vice in the United States. There's so much rhetoric around this right now. The green generation has risen up. The cost of pursuing a Green New Deal will be far less than the cost of not passing it. It's a green socialist manifesto. An absurd socialist manifesto. It's a token of elite tribal identity for the chic and woke. So today what I want to do is try and cut through that and just explain what this is. How would you describe the Green New Deal?

So basically the Green New Deal is a plan to completely transform the U.S. economy. Its goal is to address and mitigate climate change and inequality at the same time. So the idea is that our present economic system has led to greenhouse gas emissions at such a level that they're potentially destabilizing the foundation for all life on Earth. such a level that they're potentially destabilizing the foundation for all life on earth. And this economic system has led to inequality reaching levels not really seen since the Gilded Age. So the Green New Deal tries to address both of those huge existential challenges at the same time. That was a really good summary, I have to say. And the New Deal in the Green New Deal is a reference to President Franklin Roosevelt's Depression-era New Deal, right? This involved

mass financial reforms, government programs. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system, and it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem, my friends, no less than it is mine. Together, we cannot fail. You know, this was at a time of great, very clear Depression-era crisis. Yeah, and I've heard the present Green New Deal referred to as sort of a progressive make America great again. to a sort of a progressive make America great again. So it harkens back to this moment in America's past when there was great crisis

and then large swaths of society and business and government came together on this plan to transform the U.S. economy, make massive investments in infrastructure, and basically lift the United States out of these crippling crises that it was facing. Sometimes they will call it fascism, and sometimes communism, and sometimes regimentation, and sometimes socialism. But in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical and so obviously that's that's a very like cole's notes version

of what's happening but the the current green new deal is sort of referencing that directly and trying to update it for the era we're now in. Can you tell me a bit more about the origin story of how the new Green Deal came to be? I understand it sort of initially had its roots in the UK, but it didn't really go anywhere until it very much took root in the United States. Yeah, I mean, the concept has been around for a number of years. But the Green New Deal, as we know it really started practically in November 2018. So we're here to say to our politicians, we need you. We need you to back a Green New Deal. Right after the U.S. midterms, a bunch of activists with a group called the Sunrise Movement,

occupied Nancy Pelosi's office in Washington. And they said, we want a Green New Deal. We want a policy that will address climate change with the urgency it demands. This is not about Republicans. This is not about Democrats. This is about humanity. And so while that protest was going on, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez showed up. And because this was her first day in Washington, all of the media followed her. So suddenly there were major TV networks covering this protest. And that night, the Green New Deal was heard all over the country for the first time in most cases. And since then, the momentum behind it has just grown and grown and grown.

Let's talk about what the Green New Deal is. It's actually a pretty simple document. It's 14 pages. It's not policy, but, you know, I would say it's closer to like a mission statement. Tell me what it says needs to be done. So basically, the Green New Deal says that we need to cut our carbon emissions in half by the year 2030 and get to effectively net zero emissions by 2050. So that's kind of a wonky way of saying that we're totally going to transform the way that you and I do most things in our lives. So you could imagine you're driving around in your electric car, you come home and you charge it up from the solar panel that's on the roof of your house. There's high speed rail between cities. You're

eating meat that is grown in labs. You are walking to and working in buildings that are releasing zero emissions in the air. You're seeing the phase out of polluting industries and factories. Basically anything you can think of that releases an emission would somehow have to be changed. Right. And I mean, this is far more ambitious than, say, the Paris climate goals, which, you know, much of the world has signed on to. And, you know, you talked about the elimination essentially of polluting industries. Like we're talking about coal and oil here. And so this would also result in job losses and massive upheaval in the economic system. Yeah. And so the Green New Deal tries to address that fact by making job creation and a really robust social security net central to the plan.

So it promises a federal jobs guarantee, which would mean a green job to any American who wants one. You would have potentially universal health care. potentially universal health care. There would be measures to help coal country for example transition into this new modern green economy and this is all very high-level stuff but the idea is that you have this massive disruptive transition and then people and society come out of it better on the other side. And so now let's talk about the biggest criticisms of the Green New Deal. The main criticism, which comes from a lot of conservative politicians and thinkers, is that this is just an absolutely insane overreach of government. It's basically a Trojan horse for socialism. Washington is coming to take

away your pickup truck. It's coming to take away your hamburgers. There's been much made about hamburgers, right? Because this would also revolutionize agriculture. Yeah, exactly. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved. If this goes through, this will be outlawed. So before they take it away from me, pass it around.

Every cow I spoke to said the same thing. Boo. And the plan is not about forcing people to not eat meat and be able to have barbecues anymore. But it says we need to produce this meat more sustainably and perhaps people will eat less farm grown meat in the future. And a lot of conservatives have seized on this and said government is coming for everything you hold dear in America. No planes, no energy.

When the wind stops blowing, that's the end of your electric. Let's hurry up. Darling? Darling, is the wind blowing today? I'd like to watch television, darling. But I think, you know, in a lot of ways, these are kind of bad faith arguments from people who have opposed aggressive climate action for a long time. And I think the more interesting critiques of the Green New Deal are coming more from the political center in the U.S. And so what are those? So the political theory of the Green New Deal is to say we are done compromising with people who don't support aggressive action.

We are going to propose something so huge and visionary and transformative that we create this mass popular social movement and everyone is forced to catch up. And so whether that would work or not is up for debate. But a lot of people in the political center see that as kind of dangerous. And they think that it's really impossible to get anything done in the US if you can't reach some sort of bipartisan compromise. And people in the center fear that if we just give up that pretense altogether, then we could be living in a much more polarized and difficult to govern society. Senator Dianne Feinstein gets into a heated discussion with a group of kids representing the Sunrise Movement.

We're trying to promote the Green New Deal. Well, there are reasons why I can't, because there's no way to pay for it. That resolution will not pass the Senate. It may not feel like it as we're going about our daily routines and commuting to our jobs and just keeping our heads down focused on the present. But we are in the midst of an absolute global emergency right now. United Nations predicts that climate change could be contributing to the loss of over

a million species. They say species are being lost at a rate tens or even hundreds of times faster than in the past. And that rate is likely to increase over the coming decades. I mean, that's difficult to wrap your mind around. And to bring this back to Canada for a second, the federal government put out a report in the spring saying Canada is already warming two times as fast as the rest of the world. With the highest rates of warming seen in the prairies, northern BC, and especially the Arctic, where it's 2.3 degrees warmer on average than it was about 70 years ago.

And if this continues, it's feasible that entire communities, such as Richmond, for example, in the lower mainland, could be underwater. I want to get into Canada more with you in a moment, but first, when we're talking about the United States here, these ideas from the Green New Deal, like we mentioned, this isn't policy, right? Like there is no policy framework here, no steps yet on how to achieve this. And so for advocates of the Green New Deal in the United States, what happens next year? What's happening now is that many of the major Democratic candidates for president have said that in principle they support the idea of a Green New Deal.

I'm an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. We're talking about the Green New Deal is the urgency of the moment. It's a resolution that requires us to have goals. So now there are groups of activists who are trying to put as much pressure as possible on those politicians to keep them committed to this idea. And what could happen in theory is that you have a Democrat take the White House and then they would face the task of actually turning the Green New Deal into policy. That's when you really get into the messy, difficult policymaking side of this. Let's go back to Canada.

You mentioned parts of Richmond could essentially be underwater. And this week alone, there was a report released by the Treasury Department that talked about how our buildings are at risk from winds and violent weather. Our coastlines are at risk and northern of are at risk from, you know, winds and violent weather. Our coastlines are at risk and northern communities are at risk. And these are sort of the priority issues for us in this country. These are what will likely be affected first by climate change. Where is the movement for a Green New Deal here? So the movement for a Green New Deal in Canada began with a lot of climate launched this spring, and it's basically a loose coalition of all sorts of groups across Canada that want to see the Canadian economy transform so that it better addresses climate change and inequality. We don't take bold transformative action now. Every generation that will come after us is going And so right now, there are discussions going on in dozens of communities across the country about what that actually looks like on a local level, who gets to be part of those early

conversations, and how this plays out leading up to the federal election in the fall. Let's talk about that. How are the federal parties responding to this concept of a Green New Deal and this new movement? So when Canadian groups looked at what was happening in the U.S., a lot of the thinking was that if you could get the NDP and the Greens and the Liberals to an extent to support this type of policy, and the Greens and the Liberals to an extent to support this type of policy, you could sort of pull the whole political debate over to the side of aggressive action. And so there were activists in the spring, for example, who went to an event with NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and pressured him on this. Can you commit to campaign on a platform that includes a bold package of Green New Deal legislation. He said at that event, Yes, absolutely, emphatically, without any question, yes.

And so he was hearing this echoed, and I don't think it's a coincidence that when the NDP released its climate platform, it specifically references a new deal right in the title. A $15 billion platform is called Power to Change. A new deal for climate action and good jobs. It is a bold plan that provides a lasting, living economy that works better for all Canadians. And what about the Greens? How are the Greens responding to this? You would think that this would be right up their alley. I think the Greens have more embraced the transformative vision of the Green New Deal rather than the actual language of it.

Those folks across Canada who are clamoring for where is Canada's Green New Deal. Well, the U.S. Green New Deal is very U.S. focused. One of their bold steps is to have universal health care. Well, we have universal health care. This is a plan that's made in Canada. So when the Green Party released their climate platform, it says right at the top, we need a plan that works backwards from the necessary science. And so the Green target for climate change is double what the current liberal climate change target is. And the Greens also promised that their plan will help create, quote,

millions of jobs in the transition to greener, more efficient buildings. I want to stress again that this is also saying you cannot have climate justice without social justice. Talking about the NDP's platform, are they also embracing that transformation? seen that transformation? Yeah, and I think some people would argue that it doesn't go far enough as far as what the Green New Deal is putting out. But the NDP has very much made job creation central to its plan. So the NDP is promising 300,000 green jobs in the transition away from fossil fuels. So if the NDP is promising, you know, at least aspects of the Green New Deal, and the Greens, even though they're not necessarily using the language of the Green New Deal, are embracing the idea of this transformative

approach to fighting climate change and taking on these very ambitious targets. How do the Liberals fit into this? And the Liberals often get critiqued by climate advocates for not doing enough fast enough and also for supporting fossil fuels. The Liberals, to their credit, have brought in a carbon pricing system that people all over the world are looking at with great interest. Catherine McKenna, the minister responsible for environment and climate change. So when I talk to Canadians they are worried about climate change, they

want us to be ambitious in how we act, but of course they want life to be affordable and they want to have good jobs. So we put a price on pollution and we're giving money back. So 80% of families are better off. And you had liberals saying, oh, we're already doing a version of the Green New Deal to some extent. I think the main difference between what Green New Deal advocates are proposing and what the liberals are proposing. It's just this emphasis on urgency and massive transformative action. I had someone tell me a few weeks ago that the policies the liberals are proposing would have been great if we'd had them 30 years ago because it slowly could have reoriented our economy. But at this point in the game, with the UN issuing dire warnings all

the time, we need to really step up our ambition. One party that we haven't had the chance to talk about yet are the Conservatives. And have they interacted with this concept of a Green New Deal at all? The Conservatives haven't directly interacted with this concept. In previous years in elections, the Conservatives have not been all that eager to put their names behind any sort of climate change plan. And so when Andrew Scheer released his plan, it got a lot of criticism. It doesn't have clear targets.

Few people were unsure what impact this would actually have on emissions. We'll implement green investment standards that require polluters whose emissions exceed strict limits to invest in emissions reduction technology specific to their industry. We will set this limit at 40 kilotons per year. That's 10 kilotons stricter than the Liberals' output-based system. But I think the fact that he released a plan at all speaks to how the terms of debate are starting to change in this country. To some extent, the job is harder in Canada than it is in the U.S. Why do you think it's harder here?

We don't have the historical experience of the original New Deal to draw from. And there are some people I've spoken to who are uncomfortable with the fact that we're using this US analogy in a Canadian context. They wonder if it really translates. But on the other hand, advocates for this policy have much less time than people do in the US. And so the argument in favor of using the Green New Deal is that we just don't have time to build up a new political narrative and brand around climate action. There's excitement around this. We need to embrace it.

But the fact is that's a very short timeline until the election to turn this thing into a massive political movement. And the other really big difficulty that we have in Canada is that our economy is much more dominated by oil and gas than it is in the US. And so any discussion around aggressive climate action inevitably comes down to the impact this is going to have on the oil sands. And so you see a lot of labor groups endorsing the Green New Deal in theory, but also wondering what that's going to mean for the jobs of their members who work in fossil fuel dependent industries.

And so all of those tensions are playing out at the moment. But I will say that Canadians care deeply about climate change. They're very worried about it. 63% of Canadians surveyed in the CBC News poll said that fighting climate change is a top priority. 75% said they were willing to make changes in their daily lives. Only one in four Canadians said they would be willing to pay more than $100 a year in extra taxes to prevent climate change. So there's a huge group of people out there who are following what's happening in the U.S. and wondering if something similar could happen here. But how that actually looks like closer to election day is hard to say. Jeff, thank you so much for this

really fascinating conversation. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it. At the end of the show yesterday, I mentioned a report saying Canada's spy agency CSIS and our cyber defense agency CSEC know about attempts to influence our upcoming election. I bring it up because I want to point something out. Our colleagues working on this beat have made a disinformation literacy guide. It's fantastic. And the point is to help people identify this stuff online. We'll tweet it out. That's all for this week. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Matt Alma, Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Amanda Grant, Shannon Higgins, and Ashley Mack. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Our music is by Joseph Chavison of Boombox Sound.

The executive producer of FrontBurner is Nick McKay-Blocos. And I'm your host, Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening, and see you guys Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011, and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy?

Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.