Upstream - A Green New Deal with Thea Riofrancos

Episode Date: June 1, 2021

COVID has in many ways monopolized the public imagination in the last year or so, and at times it’s seemed like many other conversations were put on hold — or at least had their volume turned down. Now, with the threats of COVID subsiding — at least in the U.S., and at least for the time being — we’re remembering some of the other important conversations that need to be picked up again. Perhaps the most pressing of all is the conversation around climate change. In this Conversation, we spoke with Thea Riofrancos, Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College, and co-author, along with Kate Aronoff, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Alyssa Battistoni, of "A Planet to Win: why we need a green new deal," published by Verso. In this conversation, Thea gives us an update on where we are on climate change — and what the Biden administration is proposing to do about it (spoiler alert: it’s not nearly enough). We also talk about the problems with neoliberal attempts to address climate change, how capitalism is at the heart of the climate crisis, and why we need a Green New Deal. This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project crisis from the history of global capitalism. It is a symptom of the way in which global capitalism has developed over the past 500 or so years, and also even more approximately than that very long durée history. It's a symptom of the modes of economic development, production, and consumption that took off in the post-war era, because quite a lot of the environmental harm currently afflicting the earth and also the amount of carbon emissions in the air can be traced to this moment that scholars refer to as the Great Acceleration, which was just an accelerated period of economic growth,

again, in the sort of post-war boom era. So absolutely, we need to think of these as intertwined analytically, and we also need to think of them as intertwined in our political analysis and our strategy. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. An interview and documentary series that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics.

I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. In this conversation, we spoke with Thea Riafrancos, Associate Professor of Political Science at Providence College and co-author of A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal, published by Verso. In this conversation, Thea gives us an update on where we are with climate change and what the Biden administration is proposing to do about it. Spoiler alert, it's not nearly enough. proposing to do about it. Spoiler alert, it's not nearly enough. We also talked about the problems with neoliberal attempts to address climate change, how capitalism is at the heart of the climate crisis, and why we need a Green New Deal and how we go about making sure we get one. Welcome, Thea, to Upstream. And I guess to start, can you just introduce yourself to our listeners and talk a bit about how you came to do the work you're doing? Sure. My name is Thea Riofrancos. I'm a political scientist, and my research focuses on renewable energy, green technologies, climate change, and also social movements and social change in general. And that also intersects a lot with what my political work focuses on, which is primarily

around the Green New Deal. But the Green New Deal, as we're going to discuss a lot this hour, is a really big and capacious paradigm that a lot of different projects and policies and ideas fit into. So saying that I focus on the Green New Deal is saying that I focus on lots of different things, but I view it as a amazing kind of vehicle and concept to push at the edges of climate policy, of how we think about climate and inequality as related to one another and with the different scales at which we can produce the change that's needed. Yeah, I'm really excited to get into the Green New Deal more specifically with you in a very short amount of time. But right now, I like to usually

just start a lot of my conversations with people about whatever topic they focus on, and bringing it into the context of COVID. That's such a huge part of our lives right now. And so, you know, there was a record drop in emissions in 2020, due in large part to, you know, COVID and the recession and less people flying and that sort of thing. I'm wondering sort of what are your thoughts on that more broadly? And also, what lessons has COVID taught us about climate change? Yeah, there are so many parallels and direct connections between them that it's almost hard to know where to begin. But you started with a good example, which is that there was an emissions drop during COVID.

And in large part, that was driven by changes in commuting and travel patterns. So a big drop in car use or getting to work and in leisure travel and other forms of travel. And I think that that shows a few different things. forms of travel. And, you know, I think that that shows a few different things. One is that we can tackle emissions by changing how we get around, right, by changing transportation policies and frameworks. But it also shows us that very clearly, I think that a lockdown or shutdown, like the sort of changes to the economy and to society that were necessitated in order to protect public health are not actually good climate policies, because as soon as those policies were lifted and people were allowed to room around more freely, and this, you know, depends context to context, but I'm just going to speak generally,

as soon as those policies are lifted, emissions bounce back immediately, right? Because nothing structural has changed in the underlying way that we build our societies and interact in our societies to make that a more enduring change. So it shows us, you know, lockdown is not a good climate policy, not that anyone thought it was, but I think that it's worth drawing out the point that more enduring changes would need to be implemented in a more sort of thoughtful and intentional and forward-thinking way. I think that another thing that COVID shows us is that economic recoveries, if they're not designed to be green and good for the climate and good for social equality, are often the opposite of all of those things, right? We know this from the 2008 crisis and the

recovery to that financial crisis, which produced a spike in emissions as the global economy came roaring back. And we know that that was a very inequitable recovery, right? Like, for example, the racial wealth gap increased a lot after that as a result of that crisis, but also as a result of the policies that the U.S. government implemented to address the financial crisis. You know, something similar is happening with COVID now. There's lots of recovery plans around the world. And a lot of those plans, though sometimes they claim to be green or sort of trying to change economic policies to make them less carbon intensive, they haven't really been green enough. And we're seeing

pretty dramatic increases in emissions, not just from like people returning to work or to travel or other things, which is what I already mentioned, but also governments recovery policies have been pretty carbon intensive, just like let's build a bunch of infrastructure and not think about what type of infrastructure. I'm not just talking about the US again, I'm talking about globally and lots of countries in the world. So I think, you know, we see those connections between COVID and climate. But there's also like parallels, maybe in addition to like direct connections, which are the way that public health or environmental crises interact with inequality. And I think a lot has been revealed maybe to people that weren't as aware about the

deep race and class inequalities in our society in the U.S. by COVID, by the differential impact of COVID with infections, with deaths, with vaccine access, with medical care access, all of those showed starkly that people experienced COVID very differently depending on where they fall in a sort of race and class hierarchy in the United States, right? And the same is very true about climate and maybe even more so. Like it's that intersection of inequality and climate is maybe even more dramatic in some ways. And one reason that I say that is that COVID, despite affecting people of color and working class communities much more intensely than it did wealthier people or white people in the US, it did affect wealthy

and white people. They got COVID. It's ultimately a disease that can travel in all sorts of ways, right? And so it doesn't totally stay confined by socioeconomic grouping. Whereas climate can impact people even more differently, right? Rich people have the resources to be much more resilient to climate change, even if like fires and rising seas are raging around them, they can build fortresses, they can protect themselves, they can build bunkers, they can move to higher ground. And I mean that figuratively and literally. And so I think that we might see even more dramatic intersections of inequality in the climate crisis. But COVID is in a way a

preview or a window into something that's unfolding that will accelerate with climate. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for bringing that angle. And I think that's really important to always keep in mind. OK, so let's let's zoom out a little bit here. Can you give us an update on where we are exactly on climate change right now? You know, one of the first things the Biden administration did was to reenter the Paris Climate Accord, and they made some modest climate proposals. It's definitely a step in the right direction. But are we anywhere close to where we actually need to be? There are so many gaps that it's almost hard to know where to begin this question, because there's so many ways in which we're not where we need to be, right, and ways to measure that shortfall. And I don't want to get too wonky, but I'll give a few examples of what I mean. We, the world, and we, the U.S., as a big part of the world in terms of climate emissions.

So the U.S. has an outsized role historically. We contributed a lot to the cumulative emissions that are in the atmosphere. And just to note, like carbon stays in the atmosphere a really long time, right? So emissions that we produced 70 years ago, let's say, they're still in there and they're still doing the work of warming the climate. So the U.S. is a big historic emitter because of the size of our economy, because of just the way that we grew rapidly, industrialized rapidly, et cetera. But the U.S., it's not just about history. The U.S. is also a big part of the present climate crisis. We still have the highest per capita emissions in the world. Right. And so when I say that, like, we're nowhere near where we need to be globally, I also the U.S. is a large part of why we are nowhere near where we need to be globally.

in the world are on a path to far exceed a number of limits and targets, right? One is the Paris Agreement. So yes, Biden reentered it. No, we're nowhere near on track to stay within a two degree warming scenario, which is what the Paris Agreement sets forth as a goal. We're also therefore nowhere near on track to conform to a 1.5 degree warming target, which is what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change strongly suggests as the best for safety and equity, right? 1.5 versus 2 is huge, right? So we're nowhere near 2. That means we're also nowhere near 1.5, as I said. And I just want to say that the difference between 1.5 and 2 is dramatic. It cannot seem that way because like 0.5 degrees Celsius, so what? But that's like

lots of lives lost, lots of coral reef loss, lots of species being extinct. These really granular differences in temperature have very material impacts on the world, right? So we're kind of way off course globally. And as I said, the recovery plans that are being implemented around the world don't look very good. And I think that there are predictions out there that we're going to see like pretty historic CO2 increases this year due to those recovery plans. So things are not looking good in terms of where we are vis-a-vis where global leaders have agreed we should be. And then there's a question of, let me just bring it back briefly to the U.S. Can the U.S. meet its own goals, right? So Biden came back to the Paris Agreement after Trump had left it,

and Biden has put out a climate policy that so far has taken the form of a climate infrastructure bill that is currently being like hotly debated in Congress. That bill, by all accounts, would do very little to actually have us do what Biden's goal is, which is to cut emissions by half by 2030. The bill just doesn't have the size and the scope and some of the specifics in order to radically reduce emissions in the way that he says is his goal. And there's two reasons for that. One is it doesn't do anything to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Not that we would want an infrastructure bill to do that. One would probably need separate regulatory legislation. But regardless, it doesn't keep fossil fuels in the ground. And it also doesn't do enough to build out renewable energy in a rapid enough way to expand carbon free energy.

Right. So it doesn't do either of the two things needed. And it's not exactly clear on what timeline Biden or Congress are going to implement laws that actually keep us to the stated commitments of the White House. And I just want to add one thing, not to make it even more dire, but we need to be realistic, I think, or know what the climate science says, and to know, you know, kind of where we're falling short. So not only does it not achieve the 50% cut by 2030, the policies on the table thus far, but also the 50% cut by 2030 is not really good enough for the United States because of what I mentioned earlier, which is our historic contribution to the climate crisis and our ongoing contribution to the climate crisis means that, you know, for global equity,

global climate justice, we need to cut faster than that, you know, on the order of like 70% by 2030, combined with a lot of aid to the rest of the world, especially the global south, in order to help lower income countries also transition more quickly to renewable energies. So the policies on the table fall short of Biden's goals of the climate science, but also fall even shorter, I would say of like more equitable climate goals. Yeah, and I want to I want to touch more on those global inequities in a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about the sort of zooming out and sort of the ideologies behind a lot of the responses that we're seeing right now.

And I think that they all are really falling squarely along sort of neoliberal policy and ideological lines. And I'm wondering, what are the shortcomings of things like carbon offsets or tax incentives or disincentives when it comes to actually really addressing climate change through policy? Great question. And I want to actually situate it in the climate infrastructure bill. So the climate infrastructure bill relies a lot on the private sector. It doesn't say that explicitly, but it does that in practice. And the main way that you can tell that it does that is because the bill as currently on the table, and we'll see there's, again, a lot of politicking happening, and the numbers could go up or down. But as currently written, it's around $2 trillion

for infrastructure, a subset of which relates to climate, and it's spread out over eight to 10 years. And so that means that it's about 0.5% of US GDP, which is much, much, much, much lower than even more like pretty mainstream economists or like the IMF or, you know, whatever like agency one might look to in the world for advice, says should be spent in order to make an economy like the US is more resilient to climate change and to mitigate climate change at the same time. So it's way under investing. And it's doing so because I think the guiding theory is that if the government nudges things, you know, lays down some initial investment and create some maybe regulatory standards and incentives, the private sector

will do the rest, like the private sector just waiting for the government to like push them a little bit towards green investments or climate investments, and the markets will take care of the rest, right? And I think that this, if this ever made sense, it's too late for it, right? And not to say we are going to have a revolution tomorrow and get rid of the private sector entirely, right? We need to think of how public and private interact in a sort of mixed economy kind of way. We can talk about that more later if you want. And there are all sorts of interesting heterodox ideas for how like the state can take a role in driving private investment pretty forcefully. But it needs to do so forcefully. And it needs to do so with

also a lot more public investment, right? It can't just rely on private capital to pick up the slack. And that just relates to the timeframe. It's too short. Like we have now less than 10 years to cut global emissions in half. That needs to move faster in the United States because of our historic contribution, as I already said. And it's so multifaceted. It affects every sector of the economy and also the climate and energy and climate safety. It affects every sector of the economy. In order to reduce emissions dramatically, we need to reshape the energy system, how buildings are built and how they're powered and the guts of

the boiler room and all of that kind of stuff. We need to change how we get to work, where we live, how we live, what we eat. I mean, it really just relates that emissions are produced everywhere in our economy, right? And to dramatically reduce emissions, we have to think sector by sector. And that's something that, you know, the public sector, the government, like as a sort of, you know, in theory, a guarantor of well-being and a sort of overseer of all these parts of the economy has a particularly privileged position to do. And that capitalists looking for their immediate self-interest, even with some regulatory nudging, it's just too myopic, too fragmented, because we need to think about how sectors interact with one another, how industries interact with one another,

which is why there's been kind of a resurgence in heterodox economics of ideas around industrial policy. And the basic insight of industrial policy is how does the state shape the economy as a whole, right? And how does it do things like phase out fossil fuels and dramatically phase in renewables in ways that affect economy-wide, right? And so a market mechanism, a market nudge, a carbon offset, which by the way, there's lots of scholarly research evidence that carbon offsets have not been effective at actually reducing emissions and instead have led to lots of greenwashing and maybe opportunities for profit. But they haven't reduced emissions. It's just not they aren't the right tools, given the urgency, the scales and the complexity. And, you know, ultimately, I would say, as well, that we should think of

climate as a public good, right? Climate is something that we all either benefit from, or when it is in crisis, hurts many of us, right? Hurts natural systems when it's in crisis. And so I think we need to think kind of holistically. And that is something that governments can do and that the private sector, profit competition, and shorter time horizons and thinking about shareholders like those aren't actually good mechanisms to protect a public good, which is why even more conventional economic theory would have public goods provided by the government. Absolutely. And I'm really glad you brought up that whole dynamic between sort of the state and the market, because I mean, we all know at this point that governments create markets and

the fossil fuel industry would not exist if it wasn't for massive amounts of subsidies. And so, yeah, speaking of the government and the large impact that governments can have on these kinds of policies. I'm assuming most of our listeners already have a fairly good understanding of the idea of a Green New Deal. But just for good measure, and just to get your perspective on it, what exactly is a Green New Deal? And why do we need it? Green New Deal departs in a few major ways from all other climate policy paradigms that pre-existed it or that currently compete with it. And those few ways are the following. First of all, it doesn't see carbon as like something out there disconnected from the rest of social life, but as something that is produced by

the everyday activities that constitute our society and the economy, right? So it looks at how emissions are produced through our social system, right, and tries to get at the intersection there to reduce emissions. So it's not just about carbon pricing, not that I'm fully opposed to that. That's a whole other set of arguments. But, you know, I don't think carbon pricing is sufficient. I'll put it that way. It's not just about carbon offsets or cap and trade as if carbon was something that just existed disconnected from reality. and more equitable. And so that equitable piece relates to the second feature that is distinct about the Green New Deal as a policy paradigm, which is that it doesn't just look in general at the intersection of society and emissions, but specifically at the intersections of inequality, socioeconomic inequality and emissions, and takes the basic insight that there's a big connection between inequality and emissions in a variety of ways. I'll give you two examples. One is that the most well-off people in our society account for the most emissions. The

least well-off in our society and globally account for the least emissions, really like the least, it's a very dramatic inequality in how emissions are structured by social class, and are at the same time the most vulnerable to climate harm. So there's a totally inverse relationship between what groups or people produce the climate crisis and who is vulnerable to climate-related harm, right? So that gives you a sense of how deep the nexus is between climate change and inequality. But there's also like a more political maybe way and kind of theory of change way to think about the inequality climate crisis connection, which is that in order to get. But one reason is that they haven't been very politically popular. Like it turns out people don't like get jazzed and mobilized and inspired around the idea of a carbon tax or a cap and trade system. Not only do they not get excited, they might feel negative about it. Like, wait, you're going to tax me when I go to fill up my car and my car is my only way to get to work. And so basically, you're taxing me for like being alive, because I have to work to live and I have to get my car to work to, you know, so it can feel like it's it's like an austerity policy for ordinary people. And it can be one,

you know, if it's not intentionally made equitable. And so the flip side to that, what the Green New Deal approach is, is to say, policies that simultaneously reduce carbon, is to say policies that simultaneously reduce carbon and uplift the material circumstances of working and middle class people who are suffering from economic insecurity, precarity, not having enough of like basic social services right now, unemployment, obviously with the pandemic. Right. So there's a lot of different social needs that are not being fulfilled. And if we can figure out ways to reduce emissions and meet an existing social need at the same time, then we have something that is good for the climate science, right? Because it reduces emissions. And it's also good for politics and for people's economic and social dignity, right?

And that's like a win-win situation where you can get popular support for climate policies. And I'll just give just a couple of examples of how this might work out in practice. And this is something that my colleague, Daniel Adana Cohen, works a lot on and has been introduced into Congress through AOC's legislation around green public housing and through some other legislative pieces that exist. So the idea is there's a housing crisis, right? There's a crisis of unaffordability of housing in many major cities in the U.S. There's also concomitantly a homelessness crisis in a lot of those cities connected to one another, right? So there's people that have trouble paying their rent, and then there's people that straight up can't pay their rent, and they are on the streets right now, right? And so we need to deal with this housing crisis.

But we also know that in the U.S., and especially in major cities, buildings are major emission sources, right? Because of the fact that all the heating and cooling and electricity lights run through our buildings, right? And all of those, for the most part, rely on fossil fuel energy sources right now. And so building a new, green, energy efficient, totally renewable, totally electrified building is a way to address a lot of these crises at the same time, right? Or retrofitting with public money, existing buildings to make them greener, more energy efficient, etc. Right. So you can sort of tackle with one piece of legislation or one proposal or policy, literally tackle the

intersection between inequality and carbon. And I could give a bunch of similar examples, but I think that that gives people the idea. And then just to add one other thing, not only does that benefit the housing residents who might then want to vote for Green New Deal type policies or candidates, it also creates lots of jobs, right? And also a lot of the jobs that relate to the sector are unionized, right? In the buildings, trades and electricians and sectors like that. So you can create these sets of coalitions. And I'm not saying it's easy, right, to get like building trades unions and low income

community residents and, you know, climate scientists all at the table to kind of figure out like coalitions are difficult. But there's at least a mass coalition that could support such a policy. And you really can't say the same for the more technocratic and market-oriented policies, which also don't act at the speed or scale that we need them to because they have this kind of nudge and little incentive approach, as we discussed earlier. And that's just, you know, the last way that the Green New Deal departs from other climate policies is just the scale and speed and kind of scope of its imagination of what we need to do to transform to avert the worst of a climate crisis. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Thea Riafrancos. We'll be right back. And the warblers sing And the sparrows sing Through the winds

Through the winds on the interstate There's no refrain refrain And the beagle creeps On the crippled trees Dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig dig And it looks down to where the storm must have been One drive One breath And no, you're not alone No, my cousins, you're not alone You're in our talents now

And we're never letting go You're in our headlights frozen and no one are stopping You may not believe but even we were scared at first It takes a lot of nerve to destroy this wondrous earth We're only human This at least we learn That was In Our Talons by Bowerbirds. Now back to our conversation with Thea Riofrancos. I think there's a growing understanding, especially among younger people, that to really address the climate crisis, we need to address sort of the elephant in the room, which is capitalism.

We've come fairly far from the days when, you know, Al Gore encouraged us to just turn off light bulbs or take military showers or buy green products, sort of this, you know, individual response to climate change. We know that's not really going to work at all. We know now like these issues are structural, right? So with that, do you think it's possible for us to talk about climate change and, you know, addressing climate change adequately without talking about fundamentally transforming our current economic system or, you know, addressing climate change adequately, without talking about fundamentally transforming our current economic system, or, you know, really dismantling capitalism? I think that there are different ways I would answer that question, depending on the context and who the other people in the room are, maybe that we're imagining this conversation taking

place in. And, you know, so let me kind of break down what I mean. I think analytically and historically, to be rigorous in our analysis, there's no way to separate the climate crisis from the history of global capitalism. It is a symptom of the way in which global capitalism has developed over the past 500 or so years. And also even more approximately than that very long history. It's a symptom of the modes of economic development, production, and consumption that took off in the post-war era. Because quite a lot of the environmental harm currently afflicting the earth and also the amount of carbon emissions in the air can be traced to this moment that scholars refer to as

the Great Acceleration, which was just an accelerated period of economic growth, again, in the sort of post-war boom era. So absolutely, we need to think of these as intertwined analytically. And we also need to think of them as intertwined in our political analysis and our strategy. So as I laid out with the Green New Deal a bit, and in some of the prior questions, when we address the climate crisis, we need to do so in ways that really transform in piecemeal, but hopefully rapid fashion, the whole economic system, which is the culprit for why we have such runaway emissions and other forms of environmental harm. And doing you know, doing something like having the government build a bunch of green social housing is a way to, you know, in fancy terms to decommodify,

partly decommodify the housing market to actually sort of take housing out of the free market, so to speak, and to directly provision it. And so that's a departure from at least sort of like the neoliberal form of capitalism that we've been living with for a minute now. So I think, you know, on an analytic level, on a strategy and policy level, it's absolutely important to connect those dots and show how they're connected to broader publics. But now let me complexify it a little bit. And I think everything I said just stands. But it is also the case that we can't, in revolutionary fashion, or in a sort of rupturous fashion, depart from capitalism before we address the climate crisis. And this is kind of like an age old debate among Marxists, among leftists, among socialists, of which I consider myself all of those things,

you know, can we do x before we get rid of capitalism, right? And I think, you know, the answer is often that we need to do multiple things at once, right? And so I think rather than sequence, like first, you know, we can't make any progress on climate while we still have under capitalism. That's just not true, both because we can start to dismantle or undo parts of capitalism in a way that are good for the climate, while capitalism might still be the prevailing and hegemonic system. And we need to do that. That's kind of what the Green New Deal does. The Green New Deal is a transitional program, right? It gets us to a different type of economy. For me, that is socialism. But I'm not saying that's the ambition of everyone that supports the Green New Deal. But regardless of what your endpoint is, the Green New Deal is a transition to something else.

And the transition is important. And transitions don't happen all at once. They unfold over time, right, in uneven ways. And so I think we need to think about, like, what do we want to do first? You know, what's the first mode of attack to get at the climate crisis and the way that capitalism is responsible for it, rather than thinking we do all of one thing, i.e. get rid of capitalism before we do the other thing, i.e. deal with the climate crisis. And so I guess the second thing that I want to say, just to complexify my prior comments, is that it depends where people are at that you're organizing with, right? We haven't talked a ton yet about organizing. It's come up a couple of times in my examples around like social housing and how to build a coalition. But, you know, if you're organizing community members, your neighbors, constituents, union members, whatever the sort of like type of person is,

they may or may not already know that capitalism is the cause of climate crisis. It might be pretty intuitive to them. Like, I don't actually think it's a hard argument to make or requires a ton of like prior formation or education or anything. But I think it's simple to express. And I'm not at all saying that like folks aren't ready to hear it. But what I mean is that folks may not already agree with that, right, or may not already think that. And, you know, it's an organizing question whether that's the first thing we say when we walk into a room. Maybe the first thing we say is you're having trouble paying your utility bills. Wouldn't it be great if like utilities like wasn't like existing for private profit and instead was like there to make sure that the lights stayed on, right? Or you're having trouble paying your rent. Wouldn't it be great if like we just didn't have to think

that because we provided affordable housing to everyone that needed it, right? And then maybe step five is to get to like the history of of capitalism, colonialism. And you know, so all I'm saying is that I think that these need to be strategically inflected conversations, like who you're talking to, what is your goal? Where are they at to begin with? What are the needs that they have immediately? And like, at what point do you build in different analytic frames so that people feel like they have agency and are empowered? You know, if the first thing you do when you walk into a room is say there's a huge 500 year old system that is responsible for where we're at, that might not be empowering to people. It might just feel like, damn, like not a lot to do about that. That seems like a really big thing

to dismantle. But if you start from maybe the concrete, the everyday, the things that people already know from their experience, and you build in more layers to that through political education and popular education over time, I think anyone can get to that analysis. But I think there's often a question of where do you begin that conversation? And that's a very contextual decision. Yeah, no, absolutely. I really appreciate the nuance in your response. I'm totally the kind of person that would say, like, it looks like you're having trouble paying your utilities. Wouldn't it be great if we just completely abolished capitalism? But I'm also I'm also not an organizer.

So that's the difference there, I think. But, you know, last few years, like climate marches and Earth Day celebrations and things like that, like I have really noticed a lot of people's signs, for example, drawing the connection between capitalism and climate change. And I think it's heartening that there is a large group of people out there right now that do see that connection. I think, again, it's mostly younger people. And I do want to talk a little bit more about this and keep this thread going later on in our conversation. But I just wanted to come back again to the Green New Deal. And so Congresswoman Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently introduced the Green New Deal for Cities Act of 2021. And so this is a green new deal for cities, counties, states, tribes, and territories

to respond to the climate crisis, creating jobs and all of that kind of stuff in the process. So I don't want to get into the specifics of the bill necessarily at all, but I'm just wondering if you can sort of talk about why it's important to think about the different scales of like local, state, federal, global. Can you just talk about that a little bit and sort of like why it's important to focus on local contexts and sort of how these Green New Deal policies might need to be implemented on a very scalar way? Yeah, absolutely. What I love about that bill, from what I know about it, is that it envisions federal money. So it's a federal bill. It's U.S. Congress. Right. So that's at this, quote unquote, national scale. And the money is federal. Right. In the forms of block grants and other types of ways that the U.S. federal government can allocate money to things that happen municipally or in states. or in states. But the projects themselves are not necessarily federal. Some of them might cross state lines, you know, if we're thinking, you know, about some renewable energy projects or

the grid or transmission lines. There are all sorts of ways in which, you know, things can happen translocally, let's say, to be jargony about it. But a lot of these projects, whether we're talking about greening housing, greening public schools, distributed energy, solar panels, even utility scale, energy, renewable energy, wind farms, you know, whatever it is. When we're looking at regenerative agriculture, all sorts of things that might fit into the Green New Deal paradigm. particular places that affect particular people, involve particular people, employ particular people, and don't just, in many cases, lower atmospheric carbon or mitigate it, right, and prevent, you know, future warming by being no carbon. But they also, in many cases, are going to reduce localized pollution and localized other forms of environmental harm that our fossil fuel, you know, society produces for people and for especially marginalized people, right?

So there are all sorts of local benefits and local ramifications of the Green New Deal, which is often presented as this big thing, but it's like place by place, site by site, landscape by landscape is how we build a different energy system, a different housing system, a different grid, a different agricultural system, right? And I think what this bill does is like make that clearer to people that like these are projects in your neighborhood, right? And that like factory or power plant that pollutes your neighborhood and makes your neighborhood have high asthma rates, that could be like a wind farm, you know, or that could be, you know, a green building, or it could be like rewilded, you know, a beautiful park or, you know, whatever, it could be something else. And that something else would benefit you and your lungs and, you

know, would be visually much more beautiful, and would also employ people and contribute to local economic development, right. And so that's the way in which the Green New Deal is inherently multiscalar. It involves the federal government with a lot of the financing and also some of the coordination. Because as I said, with like questions of like the grid and transmission lines, there does need to be coordination at a higher scale. But it also looks like a lot of local people getting hired to do things and living in the new spaces and benefiting from the new public works projects that are built place by place. So we talked about this slightly, kind of been a little bit of a thread in the conversation. But I'm wondering more explicitly, can you talk about,

first off, climate reparations, and also what we in like richer countries can learn from the global south in terms of climate response and policy. So the idea of climate reparations, also sometimes called climate debt, points to something that I said earlier, but I didn't fully elaborate, which is that the history of climate change, of global capitalism, and of colonialism are deeply bound up with one another. And I think that we can introduce the term racial capitalism as well to that. And so that means lots of different things. But one thing that it means is, as I said before, the people in the world that have contributed the least to climate change are the most vulnerable to it. That's not an accident. That is testament to what some scholars refer to as unequal ecological exchange, right? So those are some fancy words, and they

come from a body of theory called world systems theory. And what that points to is that the places that experience the most environmental harm often experience that environmental harm as part of the production of commodities, right, linked to global capitalism, right? When we're looking at mining and other extractive activities, when we look at like large scale cash crop agriculture and the way that devastates soil and devastates ecosystems and biodiversity, whenever we look at like the, especially often the raw materials kind of end of global supply chains, or when we look at manufacturing too, which can be a very polluting process, right? So industrial kind of scale

pollution, those are often cited in places, whether within countries or globally that are considered sacrificable or disposable. So there's a very unequal pattern of ecological harm. And then meanwhile, those places, as I said, are also the least responsible for the climate crisis, right? So there's an idea that I think is very valid that the global north, for example, like it's one way to think about it in sort of territorial or geographic terms, owes to the global south formerly colonized places, but that have for the most part still been relegated to that position on the global economy where they get less of the economic revenue and more of the environmental harm. climate debt and then ecological debt, that it has benefited from the ecological devastation of these places, right? And they have been doubly harmed by localized and global forms of environmental harm. And so that is the thinking. And that one way to pay that debt is to have equitable forms of and redistributive forms of climate financing in order to ensure that there are economic resources in those

countries to be more resilient to the climate change that's already baked in to the system and also to transition to renewable, low-carbon, no-carbon economies. And so that's the kind of historical argument. And then there's a very contemporary set of policy ideas for how equitable and redistributive climate financing might work. And some of these already exist, but they're just not at the scale that's needed to actually pay the debt, to repair the debt, and to transition to less environmentally harmful economies in places that, for example, depend a lot on extractive sectors. So that's the first part of

your question. The second is about what we can learn. And I think there is quite a bit, but I'm going to focus on something that I've learned in my own research on the politics of extraction and the political economy of extraction in the global South. And much more specifically, what my research has focused on is, and this is drawing on a book of mine that was just published last summer called Resource Radicals, is on the dynamics of extractive time, has been, in Latin America, has been the emergence of very militant, very principled, and very oftentimes tactically astute and strategically astute anti-extractive protest. And so this looks like all forms of protest

against extraction that is rapacious, that is harmful to the environment, that violates indigenous and other local community rights, and that fundamentally serves imperatives of global capitalism and profits often people and corporations that live elsewhere and doesn't do anything at all for local flourishing or local needs or local conceptions of what a better economy might look like. And what I've learned is that there is a lot of power, a lot of strategic power in communities that, through activism, decide collectively to resist the expansion of the extractive frontier and to resist both ongoing and planned oil and mining extraction

that in some cases in very asymmetric power relations, like communities that are doubly or triply marginalized by class, ethnicity, race, geography, et cetera, like indigenous communities in the sort of peripheries of a given country, in this case, Ecuador. But this applies to other countries, too, meaning in my book, explore this in Ecuador, but it's a pattern across the Americas, that such communities when they collectively decide to resist a new oil, you know, planned oil project or an expansion of oil drilling or a new mining project, right, they can actually be very powerful in slowing down or obstructing or changing the terms of that project, despite the like dramatic seeming asymmetries between such a community and, you know, the behemoth oil and mining companies or like the entire complex system of global capitalism. to think about this is in terms of what some scholars and labor activists call choke points,

right? That there are places in the global economy where communities or workers, you know, depending on, you know, who the agent of change is in the given context, can exercise leverage in ways that reverberate more broadly. So like if a mine is shut down, that can affect production processes elsewhere in the world, right? We've seen this a lot with oil shortages and disruptions to oil supply chains. Or, you know, if you can shut down a port or other forms of transportation that the globalized economy relies on, you can exercise quite a bit of power. I love Timothy Mitchell's book, Carbon Democracy, which shows how, you know, in the 19th and

early 20th century, coal miners and beyond that, but especially in those moments, coal miners exercised a lot of leverage because they were this key intersection between industrial processes, which needed the coal, transportation, railroads, like this kind of, they were at this nexus where like a strike could shut down a lot of the economy, right? And so I'm not saying that every time an indigenous community or environmentalists or, you know, whoever blockades an extractive site, they shut down the entire global economy. But just to say that there are these choke points where communities can use direct action and really, you know, force corporations that are otherwise quite powerful to come talk to them. Because if the oil is not coming out of the ground, if the ore, the minerals are not coming out of the earth, it's a real problem for the bottom

line of these companies. It's equivalent to a strike in certain ways, to a labor strike. And that, I think, is something that Latin American movements have been really on the vanguard of developing those militant anti-extractive tactics. And we've seen them spread around the Americas. You know, it was amazing to me that during Standing Rock, which was, you know, a beautiful example of this, there were delegations from Latin America, particularly from Ecuador, of people with long histories in anti-oil movements that went up there. And so there was that kind of transnational movement building. And we see that Latin American movements have inspired people around the world with, I think, their militancy on

this topic. And not to say that peoples elsewhere don't also do amazing things, right? But my research is situated in Latin America, and there's been quite a wave of anti-extractive protests there over the past couple of decades. We've talked a little bit about this, and we're seeing the coming together of once disparate movements like the environmental movement, the movement for racial justice and against police violence, the indigenous land back movements, reemerging rise of somewhat of a union movement. All these movements that were once quite atomized struggles are now joining together under the realization that all of these struggles are connected. And yeah, that being said, it also seems like our current

policy regimes are not going to be able to get us even close to adequately addressing the climate crisis, at least if they continue in the same fashion that they have been. So yeah, I guess just a couple big questions. What are the biggest barriers? And thinking big, what do you see as some of the most effective intervention points? And then also, if you just had any final thoughts that you want to share? Yeah, I think that this isn't exactly a barrier, but I want to characterize what I see as the nature of the problem right now, around climate and around addressing it at the scale and speed that the climate science tells us we need to do. And I think there's been a shift over time in what's

accounting for why we're not moving fast enough, right? And I think that not all progressives have observed the shift, but I would like them to kind of think about it or leftists, you know, I think we're very used on the left, even broader progressives, whatever, of thinking of the main impediment as climate denial, right? Of outright denial that there's a climate crisis or of a slightly narrower form of denial where you say there's a climate crisis, but it's not human caused, right? Or maybe even narrow one where you say, yes, there's climate crisis. Yes, humans have something to do with it, but it's not the fossil fuel industry's fault, right? So these various versions of the denial argument. And sometimes they take the form of

the scientists are still debating whether there's really a climate crisis, right? And so I'm 37. I like a lot of my time as an activist, this was like, the main thing. And I would, you know, even the mainstream media, of course, entertained these ideas that were right wing and funded by the fossil fuel industry and x, y, and z. And so, so people are very used to thinking that denial is the main impediment. I think that that's not as much the main impediment anymore. And I'll say what I think is. But what I want to note is that denial was never really about people not believing in the science. I learned this from Naomi Klein in an interview that she did, and it really stuck with me. She said that it's almost the opposite. Like it wasn't like the Koch brothers or the fossil fuel industries didn't believe in the climate science. In fact, the fossil fuel industry in the form of Exxon had been pretty on the early end of learning about the climate impacts of fossil fuel burning in the 1970s, and they covered it up subsequently.

And I think what that shows us is that climate denial isn't like, oh, I don't believe in it. And therefore, our approach to it shouldn't be to persuade people, but rather it's industries that know that their bottom line would be affected by climate action or that just the industries would have to disappear in the case of the fossil fuel industry if we took climate action. And so it's less a denial of the science and more a very acute awareness of what the implications of climate action would be. And so denial is a tactic, but it doesn't necessarily indicate like an underlying belief system, right? So I think that's important to keep in mind. And just because I think there's often a liberal inclination to say, like, believe the science or we can just persuade people, but it misunderstands like the material bases for different positions on climate change and the class conflict around them that and the class conflict that would be required to deal with them. Right. So, OK, so that's that's denial. But

I actually think that the denial discourse is going to become less and less prominent. And, you know, we even have the fossil fuel industry saying that we need to do something and they're going to, you know, increase their renewable energy assets and whatever. So fewer and fewer politicians and firms are denying. What I see as the new form of denial is just not acting quickly or big enough, right? And so this form of denial, I think, points the finger not just at the right wing, but at the sort of political center as well. Because, you know, to me, it's almost just as much of a denial of reality to say climate change doesn't exist as it is to say that we can like just spend a little bit here and there and fix

the climate crisis, right? Like it not dealing with the scale and speed of the problem is denying the problem. And so I think we need to kind of broaden the category of denial, and therefore hold accountable the establishment politicians that whether it's because of where their money comes from, or their own, you know, ideologies, or you know, whatever the reason is, are not willing to move faster and bigger in order to confront the crisis at scale. So the second part of your question is around like, what is to be done? You know, what are the intervention points where the climate left, like people that, you know, are both committed to a more egalitarian society and also a less brutal and violent one and also want to deal with the climate crisis at the same time,

which I think reflects also the intersectionality of the movements that you mentioned earlier. What are the most effective intervention points? You know, right now, we're in this very contradictory moment in US politics. So we have Biden in office, the most centrist of the, you know, democratic possibilities when we think back to the primary. So disappointment for many of us, on the one hand. On the other hand, the left is in some ways more influential and organized than it's been for a long time, actually, in American politics, which doesn't mean it's powerful enough in my view. But it does mean it's it's you know, we're not starting from nothing. There is some some left political power out there. And we've had amazing social movements and uprisings that

have really like captured the public attention as well. So that's good. People on average, ordinary Americans, voters, and especially Democrats, but even to some extent in a bipartisan way are much more aware of the climate crisis and that something needs to be done about it. So that's good. And another good thing before I go to the bad column again, is that Biden entered office and right away passed a historic stimulus bill that did a lot to just increase like the incomes and material well-being of working class people in a very immediate sense. So he passed a one point nine trillion dollar stimulus that was effective and fast. Right. And so I thought right after that we were going to get like an effective, fast, bold climate infrastructure bill that did not worry too much about how things would be paid for and didn't worry too much about deficits. But we kind of got the opposite. It's like a bill that

is not big enough, that unfolds over too many years, that is hyper concerned with being revenue neutral and not increasing the deficit. And it's like this contradictory moment of like, I feel like there's some left power, there's some political opening and possibility. But yet on the most existential crisis of our moment, somehow we get into this much more constrained policy paradigm that is much more inflected with the neoliberal ideology that we talked about earlier. And so I don't even honestly know how to make sense of that. I have hypotheses, but you know, they're a bit speculative. But the point is that there's this potent mix of like possibility, constraint, and like urgency that can be a little dizzying. And I'm doing a lot of work in Democratic Socialist America that I work with on

Green New Deal, that I do Green New Deal organizing with and in other spaces. And that is a commonly felt like trio of feelings among lots of left activists and organizers right now. Like we know what the problems are. A lot more and more ordinary people know what the problems are. We have a little bit more ideological power to shape the narrative and to even put forward policy solutions at a few different scales of government. But there still seems to be some serious blockages around climate in general and around sort of a federal kind of Green New Deal type policy and as a particular way to address it. And I think, yeah, I mean, we just have to not be demobilized by that set of circumstances, by the conjuncture that we're in and keep, you know,

with our belief that we have cracked open a bit, the the conjuncture that we're in, and keep, you know, with our belief that we have cracked open a bit the political establishment, that we have inserted new ideas and helped lift up new demands into the political conversation, that we're much more, I say we broadly on the left, that I think we have much more innovative policy ideas for how to do a bunch of things at once, like decrease emissions and increase, you know, social and racial equity, right? And that we have to just act as if the political system can be responsive. Otherwise, I think it's very demoralizing. And there's almost like a comfort in a nihilistic posture that nothing can be done. And I don't think we can afford that posture right now. So despite all those, this kind of the contradictions of our moment of mixes of possibility and constraint, I think we have to forge ahead and crack things open wherever we see weakenings of the establishment, of the status quo, and wherever we see social discontent and the possibility for uprisings and social movement pressure. I think we just need to kind of like keep our eyes and ears open to both of those things

and kind of keep moving forward because the climate crisis demands it of us. You've been listening to an Upstream Convers conversation with Thea Riofrancos, co-author of the book, A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal. Upstream theme music is by Robert Raymond. Thank you to Bowerbirds for the intermission music. Upstream is a labor of love. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. We couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans.

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