Today, Explained - The Art of the Green New Deal

Episode Date: April 5, 2019

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DC's hottest club is the Green New Deal, and we have not yet talked about it on Today Explained. But Noam Hassenfeld, you have been reporting on the Green New Deal for Today Explained, and today is the day. Today. Today. Explained. Explained, and today is the day. Today. Today. Explained. Explained. Where do we start?

So I think we should actually start with Republican Senator Mike Lee. Utah. Utah. This is, of course, a picture of former President Ronald Reagan naturally firing a machine gun while riding on the back of a dinosaur. Okay, yeah, I think I saw a photo or a video of this online, but it was long. What does this have to do with the Green New Deal? You just got to be patient.

Okay, I can do that. You'll notice a couple of important features here. First of all, the rocket launcher strapped to President Reagan's back. And then the stirring, unmistakable patriotism of the velociraptor holding up a tattered American flag. Now, critics might quibble with this depiction of the climactic battle of the Cold War, because while awesome, in real life there was no climactic battle. There was no battle with or without velociraptors. But this image has as much to do with overcoming communism in the 20th century

as the Green New Deal has to do with overcoming climate change in the 21st. Okay, so, yeah, I heard Green New Deal in there. Is he trying to say that the Green New Deal is like a fantasy? It doesn't exist? Basically, yeah, the Green New Deal is as much a fantasy as Reagan riding a dinosaur, firing a machine gun. Okay, fair. But that actually might understate how ridiculous Mike Lee thinks the Green New Deal is. Okay. This is a picture of Aquaman. These images are from the indispensable documentary

film Sharknado 4. Tauntauns, Mr. President. Hairy bipedal species of space lizards. A founding member of the Super Friends. I draw your attention to the 20-foot impressive seahorse he's riding. Okay, so thanks to C-SPAN, we know that Mike Lee, Republican from Utah, thinks the Green New Deal is about as ridiculous as a giant seahorse, a Sharknado, Reagan riding a dinosaur with machine guns. Yeah, but Mike Lee isn't exactly wrong. Oh? Right now, the Green New Deal is completely, totally outlandish. It's got two goals.

One, get carbon emissions all the way down to zero. And two, create millions of jobs without leaving anyone behind. Oh, that's it. Just stop carbon emissions and help everyone at the same time. That's it. And other than that, it's pretty vague. But the thing is, Sean, what's the thing? This is all going exactly

according to plan. The Green New Deal isn't trying to be the next tax cut or even the next Obamacare. The Green New Deal wants to be a revolution. You often hear about revolutions once they're done. But I'm going to tell you how this one might be starting. So we got to go back to November of last year.

Hi, everyone. My name is Varshini Prakash. We are here in front of Nancy Pelosi's office in Washington, D.C. Varshini Prakash is the founder of Sunrise. It's a group of young climate activists. We're here as you can see behind me, hundreds strong, more people turned out than I ever thought they would. This is the moment when a lot of people first heard about the Green New Deal. Speaker Pelosi, come of age with us and we'll join in that great American tradition of rising to meet a challenge.

Jeremy Ornstein had just graduated high school when he spoke outside Nancy Pelosi's office. But if you can't, if you're too scared to try, then get out of the way. But it blew up because of what happened inside the office. I just want to let you all know how proud I am of each and every single one of you for putting yourselves and your bodies and everything on the line to make sure that we save our planet, our

generation and our future. It was the first big viral moment for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after winning her election. I want to thank you all because you are giving us as a party the strength to push. After AOC left, Sunrise stuck around in Nancy Pelosi's office and the hallway and just started singing. This is like when it's 5 a.m. and those strangers no one invited still won't leave the party. And just like when you're at that.m. and those strangers no one invited still won't leave the party. And just like when you're at that party, someone eventually has to call the cops. I'm Lieutenant Bedell Adams, the United States Capitol Police.

This is your final warning. You do not want to be arrested. 51 activists got arrested. You are in violation of the D.C. code. Those cheers were because the activists weren't really upset about it. The arrests are kind of the point. Arrests get attention. And they've taken the Green New Deal from never going to happen to probably never going to happen. Even so, Democratic candidates have started endorsing the plan.

Elizabeth Warren. Green New Deal is a way that people are now getting organized, and they're behind it. So what can you do? You keep pushing on it. Cory Booker. Our planet is in peril, and we need to be bold. It's one of the reasons why I signed on to the resolution and co-sponsored the resolution for the Green New Deal.

Kamala Harris. I support a Green New Deal, and I will tell you why. Climate change is an existential threat to us, and we have got to deal with the reality of it. These candidates are all riding a wave of energy and attention that's been bubbling up from the bottom. So I went to see what it looks like down there. It is wonderful to be with you here today.

I have the best job in the world. The Sunrise activists are meeting at an old church in D.C. We're here together to fight for a Green New Deal. It's February, it's dinner time, and there's some pizza. Rooted as a tree. Rooted as a tree. These people never stop singing. Sunrise is planning to get a big group arrested again, this time outside Mitch McConnell's office. We're going to make a lot of noise. So that is our plan. You're not allowed to make noise inside of the halls of Congress.

So we're going to be out singing, chanting, making sure our voice is heard. And the police will eventually have to come and decide whether or not they're going to let us continue sharing our stories or if they're going to stop us and Mitch McConnell's going to abide and allow them to arrest us. This is how the sausage gets made. And Sunrise activists, they choreograph these arrests like a music video. delivery person. All the handhelds that are going to go in the office are going to be in one person's backpack. Two door holders. They will be at the front of the A-Team group. Six banner holders. I'm going to need a banner backpack person and maybe like five art transporters. I need someone who has a good camera doing like Instagram, maybe other phones in the audience.

Yeah, did I have any song leads in the audience? Yes! I was such a fast hand in the overalls. Let's just go for it. Yeah, let's do four song leads. Cool! Wow! This is so fun! There are charts. There are maps. There are rules. First one is physical. So no physical violence. Second rule, no property destruction.

If they see you breaking something, if they see you kicking in a window, flipping over a desk, they will view that as violence. Third, watch your gosh darn mouth. So we don't want to be pushing up a storm, saying F you to the police as we're getting arrested. And then, the dress rehearsal. These two chairs are where the desk is.

We're going to try and replicate this diagram. There's a doorway here and a doorway there. Cool, so let's just do the thing. It's Sunday night, 11 o'clock. I'm in a church in D.C. watching 50 of the most earnest people I've ever met rehearsing their arrests. And practice makes perfect.

Where do we want it? Now! Where do we want it? A Green New Deal! Where do we want it? Now! Where do we want it? A Green New Deal!

The next day, Sunrise meets up outside the Russell Building where McConnell's office is. They make a bunch of noise outside, calm it down for security, follow their maps down hallways, through tunnels, upstairs, and they finally make it to McConnell's office, where they do what they do best. The police show up, Sunrise activists get arrested, but somehow it's not for singing off-key. And that's how you green New Deal. At least for now.

Rehearse, perform, arrest, repeat. It's almost like the cops are part of the sunrise show. But you can't argue with results. The only reason we are here is because of the activists across the country that created the energy to get us here. This is AOC at the unveiling of the Green New Deal resolution in February. If Sunrise was not here, and if all of those young people were not sleeping in a church 20 minutes out to come here during orientation. Who knows if we would be here right now? She introduced the resolution with Senator Ed Markey. In 2009, Markey had an ambitious

climate bill die in the Senate. But this time? We now have the troops. We're ready to fight, OK? And so the difference between 2009 and 10 and today is we now have our army as well. Alright, so you've got your army, your politicians, your catchy name. What do you do next with your Green New Deal? You figure out what those three words really mean. After the break, Noam gets into the green new weeds. I can't fall asleep or wake up in the morning in peace anymore because the first thing that enters my consciousness now is... You don't know what you're missing Right off some stage you got bump I can't throw whatever in this shit You don't know what you're missing

Right off some stage you got bump I can't throw whatever in this shit What are you doing? Five stars What are you doing? Love this show You don't know what you're missing Five stars Five stars

Waiting there Five stars The Green New Deal. What's in it? Noam asked Dave Roberts he is Vox's climate wonk. Dave said before we get into the what of the Green New Deal, we need to talk about the why. That became clear last October when the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published a bombshell. And the whole report was about the difference between if temperatures rise 1.5 degrees versus 2 degrees Celsius. And it turns out what's going to happen if the temperature rises 2 degrees is really bad. Turn on the news and read about the flooding that's coming to the U.S. this spring. And just imagine that being regularly two to three times per season. Imagine the wildfires in California that were so disruptive and crazy last season. Imagine five times that much wildfire in California every

year. That's just a microcosm of what's going to be happening in the Southwest with drought, on the coasts with sea level rise, storms in the Gulf Coast, on and on and on. And here's the kicker. Two degrees is not worst case scenario anymore. It will be a miracle to limit temperature rise to merely the disaster that the IPCC describes in this report rather than some much worse disaster. That means eliminating U.S. emissions by mid-century or sooner. Everything else follows from that. The only way to achieve that goal is radical,

rapid emission reductions across the entire U.S. economy. Which brings us to the what, the substance of the Green New Deal. There have been some leaked proposals, but as of today, the only official document we have is that resolution put forward in February by Markey and AOC. And it's just not much. It literally does not contain any policies or exclude any policies because it's not a policy document. It's very broad goals.

Again, goal number one. Decarbonize the entire U.S. economy, which is itself a gargantuan task. We're talking about something that could involve retrofitting most of the buildings in the country, changing how most homes get their power, and switching the entire auto industry over to electric vehicles. To put it lightly, it's going to be disruptive. People will lose jobs. They'll need to be retrained. It would just be an enormous amount of churn. So the architects of this plan say,

we need that second goal. Let's also make sure that U.S. workers are protected through this transition. How do you do that? Create millions of high-wage jobs and even a jobs guarantee. The question of what policy tools will be appropriate for meeting those goals

remains to come. That's what the next two years are for. They're basically thinking this. Nothing's going to pass in the next two years. So let's use the next two years to develop policy that actually addresses the need as described by the IPCC reports and then run on it in 2020. Now, developing these policies takes a special kind of deep thinker.

I think about a lot of things. it's hard sometimes to make them small. This is Rihanna Gunn-Wright. Policy lead for the Green New Deal at New Consensus. New Consensus is a progressive think tank working on actually creating the Green New Deal. Before that, she worked on Abdul El-Sayed's 2016 campaign for Michigan governor. I kind of, I guess, got a bit of a reputation for if you have a big idea and you need someone dumb enough to try to figure it out, you should call Rihanna.

Rihanna had been working on anti-poverty policy, reading studies about how high levels of income inequality, especially in rich countries, worsens emissions. So when she looks back to the Green New Deal namesake,

I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people. Rihanna sees something incomplete. The New Deal did not make the economy more just and fair for everyone, right? Like, I'm Black. My family still lives with the repercussions of being kept out of Social Security for 15 years. That is 15 years of wealth that we could have built, that could have been passed on, that was gone. Rihanna wants to make sure the Green New Deal doesn't fall into the same trap. So she's taking a fundamentally different approach.

We do not believe policy is best done from a closed room and then announced from on high. Get out of the office and figure out what this looks like for people. This approach makes things way more complicated. A good example is like upgrading homes, right? And so... This is Rihanna's process. So we said all buildings. What types of buildings are there? Job quality for residential upgrades is much worse. They can be good jobs if you raise

the wages, if you make sure people have benefits. So how do you want to break up who does that work? If we want to advance equity, mandating that you need a certain percentage of minority or women-owned businesses, other places have structured it as a fine. In this case, maybe we want to structure it as an incentive. But usually what we find is that big local contractors will just build in that fine into their proposal. It could mean that they can hire fewer people or they can do less work. Another way you could deal with that is actually a jobs guarantee. It does not mean that the federal government necessarily runs that program.

But it makes the funding much more stable in order to, like, have people do the residential work. The way that the Green New Deal is being put together, I'm sort of skeptical that it's headed in the right direction. Joseph Miket is the director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center. It's a think tank in D.C. It's taking something that's already quite challenging to do from a policy perspective and adding on a lot of other things that are also hard to do. He's fully behind lowering carbon emissions, but he's not sure why goal two, economic justice, needs to be part of the Green New Deal. I have no problem with social justice. Social justice should be accomplished. But like

social and economic justice issues and climate change in some huge package, I think limits our ability to treat things incrementally and one at a time. Dave Roberts isn't so sure. The idea that we're just going to transform every sector of the U.S. economy in a way that is sort of like not going to bother the average U.S. worker to me just seems like fantasy. Plus, even if we're able to solve climate change. If we solve it on the backs of some people, their descendants are going to live with the effects for generations. So this idea that another transformative moment will come later and we will want to deal with equity then when we have not addressed it in all of these mobilizations, that's unacceptable. And we've seen the effects. But this issue of economic justice is just one sticking point. There's an even more fundamental question. How ambitious should this

plan really be? I think that there's a real risk of overselling the cost of the transition. It's going to be really hard, in my opinion, to pass anything. Joseph is interested in something pragmatic, something that could conceivably pass with the Republicans he works with. ExxonMobil, BP, a lot of these companies are willing to talk about things like carbon taxes. They can suddenly put all their really smart engineers on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they don't see a march to the guillotine necessarily. Things like a carbon tax give companies time to plan. Pragmatism. You could really start dealing with the problem in a big fundamental way without sort of putting a deadline at which these folks are going to be out of business. Dave is trying to be pragmatic too.

I just feel like the time we had in which that smooth glide path was possible, we blew that. He's just a little more worried about everything. Obviously the climate crisis. And? The crisis of growing income inequality and overlaying that crisis is a third crisis, which is the crisis of U.S. politics being utterly broken. Look at the past 10 years of history. It's not like incremental advancing is a serious live option here. We're not doing that either.

Which side are you on now? Which side are you on? This is why groups like Sunrise are singing songs at the bottom while things are stuck at the top. The whole point of this from the Green New Deal activist perspective is pushing the Overton window, the sense of what's on the table. Already you see discussion where people are saying the sort of moderate compromise options being thrown around are way more strong and powerful than the most powerful proposals of five to 10 years ago. So it's already working. Maybe I was wrong. This has gone from never going to happen to probably never going to happen to just maybe starting to happen. Maybe. The overwhelming likelihood is that the U.S. political system is going to produce

more gridlock and crap. And the default position will be to sort of back into the future, like we always do. Things will get worse and worse, but there will never be a sharp break, right? So we'll feel better about it. So we're probably going to blow this. But it's possible not to. We have a road out. Dave Roberts writes about climate change for Vox. Noam Hassenfeld reports for Today Explained from Vox.

Today Explained is a co-production with Stitcher. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. Irene Noguchi, Bridget McCarthy, and Afim Shapiro make the show, too. Sayona Petros is our intrepid intern. Hannah Bolaños helped out this week. And the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder is with us in spirit always.