Upstream - Documentary #15: The Green Transition Pt. 2 – A Green Deal for the People Part 2

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Starting point is 00:00:59 Upstream. Upstream. Upstream Upstream A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Join us as we journey upstream to the heart of our economic system

Starting point is 00:01:17 and discover cutting-edge stories of game-changing solutions based on connection, liberation, and prosperity for all. President Biden today signed into law the recently passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a stripped down version. This bill is the biggest step forward on climate ever, ever. That's going to allow us to boldly take additional steps toward meeting all of my climate goals,

Starting point is 00:02:05 the ones we set out when we ran. It's been a long, tough, and winding road. At last, we've arrived. And we are elated. Every member of my caucus is elated about what happened, because we've really, we've changed the world. Inflation Reduction Act of promise. The fossil fuel industry has handed off millions and millions of acres of public lands of waters. Major handouts to the fossil fuel industry. Manchin's the largest recipient of fossil fuels.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Cherry picking numbers do. You look at the numbers that flatter your argument and you blur it in. Literally, it's like an advertiser showing you the nice shiny car, but forgetting to mention that there's an enormous dent in the fuselage and you're like, uh-oh, and what does that mean? The best you can say for it is what the Democrats say. In a way, they admit it. This is better than nothing. That's about it. It is better than nothing. So the IRA, Inflation Reduction Act, essentially it's about $369 billion of spending, you know, stretched across various different programs. Matt Huber is a professor of geography and the environment

Starting point is 00:03:45 at Syracuse University and the author of Climate Change as Class War, Building Socialism on a Warming Planet. Just that number alone can tell you something that it's very much scaled down in terms of spending and ambition. You know, Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign was a $16 trillion Green New Deal plan. So it's a lot less than that. And across the $369 billion variety of things, but most of the program is about tax credits for various types of clean energy productions and also consumer products

Starting point is 00:04:24 like heat pumps or electric vehicles. And so essentially, because it's framed as tax credits, essentially the legislation is pretty much gambling the planet's future on this idea that we can still just sort of put out some incentives and hope that market actors will freely choose to do the right thing when it comes to climate. So invest in clean energy, if you're a capitalist, or purchase good carbon reducing consumer durable products, if you're a consumer or worker, whatever. But ultimately, there is very little in the way of, you know, any kind of coercion of the fossil fuel industry, let's say. And in fact, there's a lot of handouts to the fossil fuel

Starting point is 00:05:12 industry in the legislation. But there's also like a really a lack of coordinated planning, which a lot of people think is really what we need to build an entirely new energy system and infrastructures. So essentially, it's really just hoping that if we nudge the market and give people these incentives, such as tax credits, we will just sort of seamlessly guide our way into a clean energy future. The allergy towards any kind of industry-coercive central planning and a fetishization of market solutions is a hallmark of late neoliberalism. Market sticks and carrots, things like carbon taxes and carbon tax credits, respectively, are at best flimsy mechanisms for change,

Starting point is 00:05:59 and more realistically, they're no more than a gentle nudge, which is quite unfortunate when you consider that we are in the midst of an unprecedented planetary emergency, which requires drastic systemic changes right now. weak neoliberal climate policy. And the tax incentives that serve as its foundation are actually going to disproportionately benefit the richest among us, further increasing inequality and grotesque levels of wealth among the U.S.'s ruling class. Basically, the only people who are interested in taking tax credits are rich people who have what are called high tax burdens. And they're the ones that have the wealth to take advantage of these things as, let's be clear, like as a tax shelter for their enormous wealth. Now, in the past, this has been a very narrow market for people that are willing to do this because in the past, basically, if you're a solar and wind developer, you need to sell these tax credits to what are called tax equity investors who actually will take ownership stake of the project alongside the developer to be able to get access to these tax credits.

Starting point is 00:07:15 And these are some of the wealthiest corporations in the world, like Goldman Sachs or Berkshire Hathaway or Bank of America. These are the players in what's called the tax equity market. But I will say the Inflation Reduction Act has made some changes to the tax credits in ways that might open it up to a different set of players. The first change they made is that they now have these tax credits. You don't need ownership stakes in the project to get them. You can just sell the tax credits to any rich person who needs to shield their wealth from the tax authorities. So it's called transferability provision, which allows people to sell it basically makes them more liquid, makes them more exchangeable. So

Starting point is 00:07:57 it's still going to only benefit rich tax burden people, but there's going to be more people interested in purchasing them because they don't have to take the equity or ownership stakes. Tax equity investors are incredibly rich people who buy up tax credits in order to avoid being taxed on their vast amounts of wealth. This applies to carbon credits, too. In this sense, the Inflation Reduction Act is making renewable energy projects effective tax shelters for the wealthy. As billionaire Warren Buffett once expressed, the only reason to build a wind farm is to get the tax credits. Since the Inflation Reduction Act is essentially all tax credits, this means that most of the money going to decarbonize the economy will be turned into profits for

Starting point is 00:08:43 billionaires and will further shield them from having to pay taxes, that is, to redistribute their stolen wealth downwards. Putting aside the critiques of its reliance on market solutions and the fact that the bill will only increase inequality, the Inflation Reduction Act doesn't even begin to address the scale of the climate catastrophe. Groups like the Climate Justice Alliance have gone so far as to even state that the harms of the bill as it's currently written outweigh its benefits. Not only does the IRA give out tens of billions of dollars to the fossil fuel industry, but it also requires a 60 million acre oil and gas lease sale every year the federal government wants to lease public lands for renewables. When it comes to the actual decarbonization of our

Starting point is 00:09:32 atmosphere, the Inflation Reduction Act is looking like it's going to fall far, far short of what's needed. There's been a lot of modeling that suggests that the IRA will lead to 40% reduction in emissions over 2005 levels. What they don't tell you is that those same models project that emissions would decline about 25 to 31% by doing nothing at all. So that's with, you know, where technology is going as it is with markets as they are, we project those emissions to decline quite a significant amount. The other thing is, even if we're taking the Biden administration on their face value, they projected to basically half emissions by 2030. So 50% decline. And so 40% doesn't get us to those projections, which are in line with the Paris Agreement. So even if 40% is correct in these models, there's a lot of uncertainty with them about

Starting point is 00:10:31 whether or not they'll actually realize these emission reductions. So it's been said that this has to be the worst climate bill that we've ever passed because it's clearly inadequate and we need further action down the road. So hopefully it could be a first step in a series of legislative breakthroughs on climate that really, I would argue, need to put more emphasis on not just spending any kind of spending, which in this case, tax credits to largely private capital, but actually taking the goal of public investment, planning, and actually coordinated conscious rollout of a clean energy system would be much more along the lines of what I think we need. The Inflation

Starting point is 00:11:19 Reduction Act is an incredibly anti-democratic piece of legislation. It provides tax breaks to businesses to incentivize renewable infrastructure, but it says nothing about if, when, where, or how this will happen. Because many businesses are going to be selling their tax breaks to banks and wealthy tax equity investors, we're basically leaving it up to billionaires to not only decide how these projects move forward, but if they move forward at all. The Inflation Reduction Act is just another example of the insanity of market-driven policy. We're kneeling at the altar of the profit incentive and hoping that our capitalist overlords

Starting point is 00:12:13 decide it's profitable to decarbonize. So if the Inflation Reduction Act is barely a climate bill, and definitely not a just or equitable one, what would just, democratic, and truly transformative climate solutions look like? In this episode, the second in our two-part series on the green transition, we're going to try to answer that question. We'll explore policy proposals, international campaigns, people's climate agreements, manifestos, and the dreams and visions and actions of those who are actually serious about equitably

Starting point is 00:13:03 achieving the rapid systemic transformations that the climate emergency requires. We line up in the capital basement. And I'm so nervous. We're all in this line. We start walking towards the office basement, and I'm so nervous. We're all in this line. We start walking towards the office, start walking, walking. And I think, oh God, they're going to stop us. They're going to stop us. Jeremy Ornstein is a youth climate activist with the Sunrise Movement.

Starting point is 00:13:57 Then, like a snake, this line of people just curves around the corner, and I can't see what's in the office, just the light coming from it. And person by person, we file into the room. And then we're all in the room. People are dropping envelopes on the desk. It's an envelope and inside says, here's what I'm fighting for. Here's the person, place, principle that I'm fighting to protect. And then we're all in the room and it's like all of us wearing our sunrise shirts just to see a wave that's washed up into the room. And then we speak and we sing. I wonder if you remember this past June, Speaker Pelosi, you came and spoke to us.

Starting point is 00:14:34 I wonder if you remember how well dressed we were, how serious and attentive we were, how serious we were about fixing these problems because we have endured bullets and storms and fires because we have had to grow up one too many times. Speaker Pelosi, Democratic leadership, we are asking you to grow up. When will you confront? It's November 13th, 2018, and over 250 youth activists from the Sunrise Movement, flanked by Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have stormed in and occupied Nancy Pelosi's office in Washington, D.C., demanding that the House Speaker commits to passing Green New Deal legislation when the Democrats regain control of the government. You know, I've got a sort of a feeling that she's going to come out of the office and she's going to shake our hands and say, now, now is the day. I have hope in her,

Starting point is 00:15:35 and I have hope in the Democrats who I've worked so hard to support. And there's this sense rising in me that we aren't going against the Democrats, that there is some faith. And I remember when we finally sit down in front of the room and the police put the wrist cuffs on us and they walk us out, people are singing, and we walked out and we're put around these fences and then we're put in a van and we're taken to the jail. I have a faith that Speaker Pelosi is going to somehow come out of the office and say, I'm sorry, you guys are right, we do need to act on Conrad. And she doesn't at that point.

Starting point is 00:16:17 And so amazing to see Democratic Party leaders, including Speaker Pelosi, prove to be ineffective sometimes and to not be really daring at all to take timid little steps in ways that disappoint and even betray. 51 Sunrise activists were arrested by Capitol Police that day, including Jeremy. I remember getting out of jail, or it was a holding cell. I remember getting out of a holding cell and Pelosi, Speaker Pelosi, gave me a message saying, I applaud the young activists for standing up for what they believe in. Climate change is so important to me. Which was like, wow, what a great way to cover up all your slight cowardice and inaction.

Starting point is 00:17:01 Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership proved without a doubt in the months and years following the Sunrise sit-in that they had no interest in following through on a Green New Deal or any similar form of climate legislation. It never even turned into an actual policy proposal in Congress, its fate relegated to a slow, prosaic, bureaucratic death, perhaps best articulated by the casual, hand-waving dismissal of Nancy Pelosi, who in an interview just a few months later would infamously refer to it as the green dream or whatever. As Max Eil writes in A People's Green New Deal, the notion of swirling together the red of labor with the green of environmental protection didn't emerge like a divine revelation from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Starting point is 00:18:06 The idea is quite old, and we'll get into that more in a bit. But for now, we're going to dive a bit deeper into what's known best as AOC's Green New Deal. Proposed by AOC and Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey, the Green New Deal is a blueprint for a kind of green Keynesian program advocating for a just transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Along with climate solutions, the resolution also proposes a federal jobs guarantee, major infrastructure investments, and even a universal basic income. AOC and Markey's Green New Deal was never really a fully formed policy proposal as much as it was a vision document, and although it didn't make it very far in the halls

Starting point is 00:18:53 of Congress, its impact has rippled out far and wide. The Green New Deal is a framework that is being used both by institutional actors and social movements to try to frame different programs with different focus and depth, mostly in the global north. Sergio Chaparro is a Colombian human rights activist and researcher. Whereas the term Green New Deal appeared in academic and policy debates since at least the 1990s, it was only until a coalition of grassroots environmental groups, progressive politicians, and policy think tanks in the U.S. advanced a new formulation that made it gain traction among the public opinion. So the milestone for the Green New Deal concept to occupy the public imagination was the experience of the Sunrise Movement positioning it in the US debate after they sit in Nancy Pelosi's office and they started a

Starting point is 00:20:29 campaign to raise the importance of climate issues in the political mainstream debate. So the Sunrise Movement in the U.S. used this concept in order to try to change the narrative for trying to position the climate justice issue at the court of the presidential and political debate in the U.S. So after they sit in in Nancy Pelosi's office and politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez supported the movement. And they used the rallying cry of demanding a Green New Deal. They managed to position this topic in the domestic U.S. agenda. domestic US agenda. And afterwards, many other actors in global North countries, including in the UK and other countries in Europe, have used this framework in order to try to frame programs that aim to achieve different objectives, including decarbonizing the economy, creating jobs,

Starting point is 00:21:43 building green public infrastructure, tackling inequalities, among others. One thing I think we forget is that the brilliance of the Green New Deal proposal was that it basically identified two major crises we're facing. One, the climate crisis, but two, the crisis of inequality. Here's Matt Huber again. The Crisis of Inequality. Here's Matt Huber again. The fact that we've been living under this gilded age form of capitalism where the rich have been getting richer and poor and working class, middle class people have just been seeing erosion in their living standards for decades now.

Starting point is 00:22:18 And basically, you're seeing this skyrocketing inequality between rich and poor. So their proposal was that we'll solve both these crises at the same time by rolling out huge investments, public investments, and building out a green energy system, but also making sure those investments involve unionized labor, but also like pairing those investments with a rollout of wider public goods like Medicare for All, which is a big improvement on the Affordable Care Act. Also things like increasing paid vacation time and child care. And at the core of many of those early Green Deal discussions was a federal job guarantee, which would be a very clear kind of way in which the federal government, like they did in the original New Deal,

Starting point is 00:23:04 be a very clear kind of way in which the federal government, like they did in the original New Deal, would directly employ people at good unionized type wages and get them involved in projects that are about decarbonization, about solving the climate crisis and improve not just them and their families, but also whole communities and rebuild a lot of our country, which has been hollowed out by capital flight and deindustrialization and complete devastation of both rural and urban communities around the country. So that vision, I think, is what a lot of people were excited about, about the Green New Deal. The Green New Deal was modeled on the original New Deal, a series of programs, public works projects, financial reforms, and regulations

Starting point is 00:23:46 fought for by mass mobilizations of workers and enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1939. The New Deal was an important step in strengthening the government's role in improving people's lives through public programs. Much of what the New Deal achieved has been forgotten or brushed under the rug in our modern neoliberal era, but New Deal projects shape many, many parts of our daily lives. You look at the AOC visions of a Green New Deal and it tries to harness that. We can actually build beautiful parks, beautiful public housing projects, beautiful rail lines, and all the rest of these kinds of investments, which will bring benefits to people. And because we've been living

Starting point is 00:24:33 under neoliberalism for four or five decades, people have just forgotten that the public sector is even capable of doing this kind of big stuff, like big, large scale building and investment. So some of the original architects of the Green New Deal, they had this way of saying that we need to recover what they call deleted history, right? This history of like, what the public sector can do by wrestling a lot of resources from capital and the rich to do it. Because let's also be clear that the New Deal was financed by massive changes in tax policy to tax the rich at much higher levels to provide the funding for all these wonderful investments. And so we need to sort of recover that kind of vision of

Starting point is 00:25:19 if we actually build up the social power to take on the elite and the rich and the capitalist class, we can actually harness that investment for public good. It's just hard for people to even imagine that being possible these days. For me, the Green New Deal builds on decades of what we might call the global climate justice movement of movements in various places, primarily in the global south, but also in the global north, that have demanded rapid and just climate action and have specifically made the connection between inequality in a social and economic sense, on the one hand, and the climate crisis, on the other hand. Thea Riofrancos is an associate professor of political science at Providence College and co-author of A Planet to Win, Why We Need a Green New Deal. class and racial and gender hierarchy that pervade our world and our country,

Starting point is 00:26:25 and the system that they're rooted in, which we can call capitalism, on the one hand. On the other hand, between the forms of the climate crisis and environmental devastation that are intimately linked to those. And so that insight that there's a connection between inequality and climate crisis was thought of long before the Green New Deal existed as an idea. What the Green New Deal does is kind of crystallize that into a public policy paradigm and sort of focus the energies on, you know, what might the public sector do in some kind of synergy with social movements and civil society to kind of push through a rapid and just energy transition. In the years since AOC and Markey's resolution was first made public,

Starting point is 00:27:19 versions of the Green New Deal have emerged all over the globe. From the European Union's Green Deal, to movement campaigns like DiEM25's Green New Deal for Europe, to manifestos like the Red Nation's Red Deal here in the U.S. There are many versions of the Global Green New Deal now. Here's Sergio Chaparro again. We can identify at least three generations of Global Green New Deals. So the first generation that we can call Global Green New Deal 1.0 is basically an institutional narrative that aims to boost economic growth, to boost green financing, for example, by supporting public-private partnerships in order to expand renewables or, for example, build green infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:28:42 The orientation of the Global Green New Deal 1.0 is more neoliberal or liberal, and the state plays the role of de-risking the investment of capital to invest in green assets. So this generation of Green New Deals is very much driven by market-based solutions and it feels very comfortable with this concept of net zero that allows global north countries to not significantly reducing carbon emissions if they can compensate that with green bonds and other mechanisms to capture carbon in global South countries. So examples of this generation of green New Deals are the billions to trillions World Bank agenda, or the European Green New Deal, or the United Nations Environmental Agency Global Green New Deal. This would also include climate bills like

Starting point is 00:29:46 the Inflation Reduction Act here in the U.S., which is heavy on public-private partnerships, economic growth, and of course, green financing through tax incentives. There is a second generation of Green New Deals that has a social democratic approach, and the aims of this generation of global green new deals are tackling inequalities, creating jobs and expanding green infrastructure. But the orientation is more Keynesian. So the state plays this role of leading massive redistribution

Starting point is 00:30:23 through public investment and examples of the second generation of Green New Deal, for example, AOC's Green New Deal proposal in the U.S. It's important to note that these different generations are not linear. For example, AOC's Green New Deal is in the second generation, but it was proposed years before the Inflation Reduction Act. And this breakdown of generations gets a little messier when you start to realize that AOC's Green New Deal, despite being much more progressive than the Inflation Reduction Act, actually has quite a bit of 1.0 material in it as well. It was the CEO of Amazon himself who, when asked about a Green New Deal, said very explicitly, it would depend what kind of Green New Deal we're talking about. Max Eil is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen

Starting point is 00:31:25 University. He's also the author of A People's Green New Deal. So it would depend upon the policy mix. It would depend upon what type of orientation it has to the specific supply lines that Amazon relies upon. It would depend upon such a Green New Deal's orientation to capitalism, to developmentalism, to the third world, to technology transfer, to mining, and all insundry-related sectors. So what he said very explicitly was Green New Deal, if you want to carry out some form of ecological transformation in the U.S., sure, that could be okay. But we need to get into the details in order to understand,

Starting point is 00:32:05 is this going to be a Green New Deal that can work with my business model or it's not going to work with my business model? So we're actually dealing with very distinct political stakes, political interests, orientations to capitalism, and critically, orientations to imperialism and neocolonialism when we're talking about different proposals that compose a different type of Green New Deal. A Green New Deal that doesn't fundamentally change the structure of global capitalism could absolutely work for someone like Jeff Bezos, who, according to a recent piece by Brett Wilkins in Common Dreams, has, along with other billionaires like Bill Gates, invested nearly $200 million this year alone in companies like Kobold Metals, which, according to Mining.com, is on a global

Starting point is 00:32:54 search for key battery metals like cobalt, lithium, and nickel, as well as copper, which are key to the green energy transition. A Green New Deal could also work very well for companies like Tesla, which stand to make huge profits from the transition to electric vehicles. Billionaires like Elon Musk have no compunctions around their intentions here. Musk actually said the quiet part loud in a now-deleted tweet discussing access to Bolivian lithium on Twitter, which read, We will coup whoever we want. Deal with it. The capitalist class understands that the green transition is happening, and they're making sure that they can continue to profit and plunder as

Starting point is 00:33:37 the world goes green. What are the actual parameters and what are the actual programs, what are the actual policies that these new deals are promoting? And if you look at them, they generally are resting a great deal of their hopes in terms of actors on corporations. They state it outright. I mean, you state this in the World Economic Forum's green programs. They state it in the United Nations Development Program. It was in Ocasio-Cortez, calling for state, community, corporate partnerships. Of course, the corporation, both private and publicly held

Starting point is 00:34:13 corporations, are the basic institutional form, although contingent, but in our period, the basic institutional form through which capitalism perpetuates itself. form through which capitalism perpetuates itself. AOC's original document outlining the vision for a Green New Deal actually emphasized the need to consult with industry leaders and to partner with businesses. The document was also riddled with neoliberal buzzwords like economic security and labor market flexibility, which could perhaps be translated more accurately as protecting bottom lines and leaving room for more flexible labor regulations. So if you are saying these people are, these corporations, which are people in the United States, legally speaking, right, are permitted to have a part in this process of green social transformation. You are stating outright

Starting point is 00:35:06 that these corporations whose fundamental logic is to increase the share value for their shareholders and also to deliver large salaries to their boards and their CEOs and top level management and so forth. You're saying that these corporations will have to maintain some form of logic of exploitation and value flow and extraction from the South and also, of course, from working classes in the North, right? That's what happens if they're part of your program, because that's the agenda that they bring to the table, right? And this was very clear in Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal. We devoted the majority of the first part of this two-part series to this connection between public-private partnerships and the logic of exploitation and extraction

Starting point is 00:35:51 from the global south to the global north. But just to reiterate, exploitation and extraction are baked into the capitalist system, which is a global system. The global north must ensure a flow of resources from the global south in order to provide the cheap raw materials that keep this system going. This requires colonialism, imperialism, the hyper-exploitation of workers, the displacement and sometimes genocide of indigenous populations, and the destruction of the environment. So, if we talk about bringing the private sector into climate change discussions, we're bringing all of that with them. Now, in addition to that, it was about the potential of funneling large amounts of northern taxpayer capital to these corporations as part and parcel of this

Starting point is 00:36:46 attempted green social transformation. So it was going to be a taxpayer-funded green social transformation. In funneling taxpayer capital to private businesses, it seems like AOC's Green New Deal wouldn't have strayed too far from the logic of the Inflation Reduction Act. It would still be industry-driven and would benefit businesses with huge infusions of money. In maintaining the basic structures of capitalism, it also wouldn't do anything

Starting point is 00:37:12 to address North-South relations in a systemic way. The thing with this second generation of Green New Deals is that they have a vague commitment to internationalism. Even if the global north go green and implements green new deals, there are consequences for the global south that can be devastating. And the global south is not having a meaningful voice to participate in the design of those deals that are being designed in the north

Starting point is 00:37:50 and that will be implemented in the coming years. So there is no meaningful participation from the south in policies that will create negative impacts mostly in global south countries. So, in response to that vague commitment to internationalism, there is a third generation of global Green New Deals that we can call as post-extractivists, but that include also feminists, indigenous, and other people's perspectives. And the aim of this generation of global Green New Deals is basically producing a paradigm shift, emphasizing the limits of growth, changing power dynamics, and the core demand is climate, economic, social justice at global scale, while redressing historical harms and inequalities created by colonialism and imperialism.

Starting point is 00:39:47 nature-based solutions and recognition of care work and reparations. The concept of climate debt is at the core of these post-extractivist versions of global Green New Deals. And examples of these global Green New Deals are the Green New Deal for Europe, coming, for example, from the degrowth movement, the red deal coming from indigenous groups, and, for example, a feminist agenda for a Green New Deal? It's a very good question to think about the global justice implications and international implications of Green New Deal thinking. Here's Thea Riofrancos again. It's a good question to ask sort of, you know, are most folks that think about a Green New Deal thinking. Here's Thea Riofrancos again. It's a good question to ask sort of, you know, are most folks that think about a Green New Deal, whether in the US or elsewhere, are they

Starting point is 00:40:31 thinking globally? Or are they thinking more domestically? And I think it's a mix. I think that, you know, on the face of it, in the US, at least, many people associate the Green New Deal with, of course, the earlier New Deal, and think of it as a domestic policy paradigm. There are, I think, a growing number of people that think about those global implications and maybe, you know, even more importantly, take a global justice and what we might call an internationalist lens to even if it is a domestic policy, like how can we make it maximally in solidarity elsewhere in the world? And what might some of those transnational activists and intellectual and policy connections look like? Because I think in order to have a globally just Green New Deal, it involves being in conversations across borders, right? I advocate for a flexible framework or set of frameworks that trigger organic alliances between plural movements rather than imposing an homogeneous single model for advancing towards a global Green New Deal.

Starting point is 00:41:46 Having said that, the main strength that I find in the umbrella concept of the Global Green New Deal is that it can be used to point out that solutions to the crisis we are facing cannot be solved in isolation. We have to look for solutions that allow us to simultaneously address the climate crisis, the crisis of extreme inequality, and the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. In this context, a globally just Green New Deal would have to at the very least recognize the climate debt that the global north countries have to the global south and would design its policies around this recognition. A Global Green New Deal from the South will mean to recognize the debt that global north countries have with global south countries as the main contributors of the climate crisis. This means also that debt cancellation programs must be in place for global South countries as a first step to recognize that there is a climate debt that must be paid.

Starting point is 00:42:56 So the climate debt issue in the international arena started being articulated in the late 80s and the early 90s in Latin American spaces, and then really took form at the Rio Summit in 1992. Here's Max Eil again. And it was basically oriented to a simple statement from the South to the North, that the North was fundamentally responsible for the ecological crisis, that this was a Northern problem, and that the North had created this problem as part and parcel of creating many other problems it had created the problem of colonialism and it created the problem of neocolonialism it had created the problem of the worldwide environmental crisis not at all

Starting point is 00:43:35 reducible to the climate crisis although you see that happening more and more that these were northern problems and it was a way of shifting the entire tenor of the conversation and stating very clearly that this was a problem which came from the North. The recognition of the North's responsibility for climate change and the need for debt cancellation are just two facets, albeit very important ones, of materially recognizing the autonomy and right to self-determination of people and countries in the global south. The success of a global Green New Deal from the south will mean also that mechanisms to allow communities to control.

Starting point is 00:44:18 This will mean also that there are mechanisms that must be in place for local communities to hold control of their resources and their lands and taking decisions with prior and meaningful consultation that can lead to reject projects that they do not agree with in their lands. So it is important to provide mechanisms for these communities to develop their own economic alternatives and not necessarily prioritizing the interest of foreign capital over those lands. And that means transforming tax policies, transforming debt policies, transforming the way investment is regulated in global south countries and promoting an ownership and control from local communities of natural resources in order to live according to their own principles and recognizing that there are alternative ways of living that must be respected in the global south.

Starting point is 00:45:34 But that cannot happen if a global Green New Deal doesn't recognize that it is important to secure control from grassroots communities over their lands and resources. In the making of a globally just Green New Deal, feminist perspectives, indigenous voices, and racial justice advocates all need to be at the table. From a feminist perspective, this could mean that there needs to be a recognition of care work and a redistribution of care work between the state and families, as well as within households by providing public health care facilities in the global South and valuing care differently. From an indigenous perspective, a Global Green New Deal needs to recognize nature-based solutions to climate change. And the essential demand from indigenous peoples in the South has been to be able to have control over their lands and access to the lands that they have lost historically by colonialism. And from a racial justice perspective, the Global Green New Deal needs to recognize the unpaid debts of colonialism, including the fact that the advantage that advanced economies have now lean mostly on the mechanisms that these economies use historically to secure cheap labour and cheap resources from other regions of the world. So the legacies of slavery and a policy of reparations at a global scale needs to be taken into account for advancing a meaningful global Green New Deal.

Starting point is 00:47:58 Friends, we confront the terminal crisis of a civilizing model that is patriarchal and based on the submission and destruction of human beings and nature that accelerated since the Industrial Revolution. competition, progress and limitless growth. This regime of production and consumption seeks profit without limits, separating human beings from nature and imposing a logic of domination upon nature, transforming everything into commodities, water, earth, the human genome, ancestral culture, biodiversity, justice, ethics, the rights of people, and life itself. What you're hearing are words from the People's Agreement of Cochabamba, a people's statement which arose in 2010 out of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which was convened by Bolivia's then president, Evo Morales.

Starting point is 00:49:13 Under capitalism, Mother Earth is converted into a source of raw materials and human beings into consumers and means of production, into people that are seen as valuable only for what they own and not for who they are. Capitalism requires a powerful military industry for its processes of accumulation and imposition of control over territories and natural resources, suppressing the resistance of the peoples. It is an imperialist system of colonization of the planet. Humanity confronts a great dilemma. To continue on the path of capitalism, depredation, and death, or to

Starting point is 00:50:08 choose the path of harmony with nature and respect for life. The Cochabamba People's Agreement emerged out of the achievement of the forced failure of the Copenhagen Agreements in late 2009 to basically enshrine the rejection of the idea of common and differentiated responsibility. You know, the Copenhagens basically sought to create as an international covenant the idea that the different countries of the world, with all of their colonial, neocolonial histories, to enshrine the idea that they did not have different types of responsibility for dealing with the climate crisis. That is, everyone had to reduce their emissions or no one had to reduce their emissions. The countries of the South, led by Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and also South Sudan, were like, well, no, we don't accept that. We don't accept that as a negotiating position. And in fact, we are the countries

Starting point is 00:51:12 who not only are not responsible for the ecological crisis, but many of us were put into office on programs of progressive ecological transformation of our national development strategies. So we are going to not only block that, which they did very effectively, we are going to put in place a new discourse stating, okay, what is agreement that reflects the interests of the world's peoples, meaning the world's poor peoples? What kind of ecological, political, social agreement would actually reflect those interests? And let's put that out on the table. The Bolivian city of Cochabamba, where the agreement was written, just happens to be the same city in which a water war took place in the year 2000, after the World Bank embarked

Starting point is 00:52:15 on a campaign to pressure the Bolivian government to privatize its water system. Water prices skyrocketed 35% after this plan was implemented, and water became one fifth of the average Bolivian's expenses. People took to the streets and rose up in anger against this effort to commodify water, which even went so far as to criminalize rainwater collection. so far as to criminalize rainwater collection. For months during the uprising, the Bolivian military fought civilians in the streets, arrested hundreds, and even shot and killed a 17-year-old boy. Ultimately, the people won the war and expelled the U.S.-based company which had bought and privatized the country's water system, Bechtel, the largest construction company in the U.S., which also has

Starting point is 00:53:14 a mining and metals unit headquarters based in Chile. For those who remember our exploration of copper and lithium mining from part one of this series, Bechtel is actually also heavily involved in the water system in and around the Atacama Desert. Not only do they operate many of the desalination plants on the Pacific coast, but they're also piping that desalinated water into the desert, where it's used in the extremely water intensive copper mining process. Thank you. Cochabamba is a symbolic site for the defeat of international capital's attempt to privatize and commodify access to basic human needs. And it was a very fitting place for a people's conference on climate change and the rights of Mother Earth. So they put forth, they invited some hundreds of organizations with a very large representation across Latin America especially, but also from the rest of the Third World,

Starting point is 00:54:57 and also representatives from the North. And they put forward the planks of what was needed for a genuine ecological, basically socialist transformation in the world system. They said we are against imperialism, we are against militism, we are against capitalism, we are for the popular control of technology, we are against unilateral coercive impositions of unneeded technology, we are against speculative technologies, we are for food sovereignty, we are for development of national technological

Starting point is 00:55:26 systems. We are for the sharing of knowledge, the sharing of information. We are for the abolition of the U.S. military. And we are for the payment and the transfer of climate debt to the 206 percent of northern GNP as part and parcel of a broader decolonization of the atmosphere. To face climate change, friends, we must recognize Mother Earth as the source of life and forge a new system based on the following principles. Harmony and balance among all and with all things. Complementary solidarity and equality. Collective well-being and the satisfaction of the basic necessities of all.

Starting point is 00:56:32 People in harmony with nature. Recognition of human beings for who they are, not what they own. Elimination of all forms of colonialism, imperialism, and interventionism. And we can go on and on with all the isms. Peace among the people and with Mother Earth. The agreement also demands the right to water, clean air, comprehensive healthcare, and the right to be respected. More concretely, they demand the restoration of the atmospheric space that is occupied by the Global North's greenhouse gas emissions, or the decolonization of the atmosphere. They also demand that the Global North assumes responsibility

Starting point is 00:57:27 of the millions of people that will be forced to migrate due to climate change and eliminates restrictive immigration policies. They demand an adaptation fund exclusively for addressing climate adaptation and for the right to consultation, participation, and prior free and informed consent of indigenous peoples in all negotiation processes. The focus must not be only on financial compensation, friends, but also on restorative justice, understood as the restitution of integrity of our Mother Earth and all beings.

Starting point is 00:58:18 And in order to coordinate our international action and implement the results of this accord of the peoples, we must call for the rebuilding of a global people's movement for Mother Earth. This should be based on the principles of respect for diversity of origin and visions among its members, constituting a global and democratic space for coordination and joint worldwide actions. The Cochabamba People's Agreement was brought before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in South Africa in 2011, but was erased from the negotiating text. It remains one of the most powerful and least known documents of the 21st century. Hoja sagrada, la Pachamama te puso el nombre, coca,

Starting point is 00:59:27 para quitar el hambre y la sed en la pobreza del campesino y trabajador boliviano que día a día lucha con su trabajo bajo los reinos del indio para mantener su familia y defender su nobleza. The Red Deal takes as its primary inspiration the 2010 People's Agreement drafted in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The agreement spells out principles of ecofeminism, ecosocialism, and anti-imperialism, infused with traditional indigenous ecological knowledge. This is the spirit of this book. The Red Deal, a manifesto and movement born of indigenous resistance and decolonial struggle. The weather is changing, and decolonial struggle. The weather is changing.

Starting point is 01:01:08 And so are the stakes. Everyone feels the temperature rising. Thank you. Cochabamba really came about because of the Bolivia's water wars with the Suez Canal Group, who were in a monopolistic control over the water. Shumani Tu Bluebird is an Oglala Lakota activist, host of the Bands of Turtle Island podcast, and a former member of the Red Nation, which is a coalition of Native and non-Native activists and organizers who created the Red Deal, an expansion and deepening of the Green New Deal from an indigenous perspective. Because of how that worked out, they ended up enshrining certain human rights into their

Starting point is 01:02:37 plural national constitution. And we saw Eva Morales lead three successful terms. They even changed the constitution to allow him to run for that third. And then when he went for the fourth to remove limits altogether, that's when we saw a fascist coup in 2019. So you can see that there's a real struggle that inspires it. And that struggle is sympathized with here in the context of the United States, but groups like the Red Nation, the people inspired by this and that inspire this, such as like the American Indian movement, Indians of all nations. There's a longstanding history of land back and decolonization that goes back much further than people realize. Some people will claim that

Starting point is 01:03:26 it was just a meme that was started in 2017 or something like that. And Land Back is so much more because when Geronimo ran around fighting everybody, that's Land Back. What he was fighting for is self-determination. What he was fighting for is to have the agency within history. I believe it's Walter Rani in his piece, The Colonial Marxism, describes the worst thing to happen to the colonized person is to have their agency and history removed to be colonized. So when you ask what is colonization, it's to have your agency in history removed from you because you are not able to determine the destiny of your nation. The right to indigenous self-determination and the rematriation of indigenous land are integral parts of the Red

Starting point is 01:04:18 Nation's platform and demands that are markedly missing from many Green Deal proposals. Whether it's like the Green New Deal as proposed by Ocasio-Cortez, or like some different variation that's overall the same goal, they always have a lack of consideration for Indigenous people or Indigenous leadership, which to us, it's a spit in the face on top of opening a lot of wounds, because we've been on the front lines of the climate struggle since we were fighting for fishing rights. It's stuff like that where these ideas of doing better don't actually do better, it just causes more harm. The way the red deal tries to go beyond the green new deal, whatever you want to call it, the green deals in general that are being

Starting point is 01:05:12 put out in country to country, they're not addressing the root of the problem. What they're trying to do is they're trying to paste over the problem and move past issues that need to be reconciled. Whereas the Red Deal, we want to and a practical toolkit that encompasses everyone, including non-Indigenous comrades and relatives who live on Indigenous land. Here's Shumanitu reading from the book's introduction. We, Indigenous, Black, and people of color, women and trans folks, migrants and working people did not create this disaster, but we have inherited it. We have barely a decade to turn back the tide of climate disaster.

Starting point is 01:06:10 It is time to reclaim the life and destiny that has been stolen from us and rise up together to confront this challenge and build a world where all life can thrive. Only mass movements could do what the moment demands. Politicians may or may not follow. It is up to them. But we will design, build, and lead this movement with or without them. When the Red Nation released their call for a Red Deal, it generated coverage in places from Teen Vogue to Jacobin to the New Republic. It was endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, and it animated a great deal of organizing and action. Here's Shamanitu again with more from the book's intro. The Red Deal is a call for action beyond the scope of the U.S. colonial state.

Starting point is 01:07:04 It's a program for indigenous liberation, life, and land. An affirmation that colonialism and capitalism must be overturned for this planet to be habitable for human and other than human relatives to live dignified lives. The Red Deal is not a response to the Green New Deal or a bargain, quote unquote, with the elite and powerful. It's a deal with the humble people of the earth, a pact that we shall strive for peace and justice, and the declaration that movements for justice must come from below and to the left. One of the most important points in the Red Nation's general manifesto and their Red Deal framework is the acknowledgement of Native independence and the demand of an enforcement

Starting point is 01:07:51 of treaty rights. And the reason we want a reinstatement of treaty rights is because 83% of biodiversity is protected by Indigenous people. And we only have control of 10% of the land on earth. And most of that land is Bolivia, which is an indigenous country. So a reinstatement of treaty rights represents a reinstatement of protections for the wildlife and ecosystems that are part of those treaties. that are part of those treaties. It was in Bolivia that a U.S.-backed right-wing military coup deposed Evo Morales in 2019, a coup against what the Red Nation refers to as an eco-covenant based on indigenous socialism.

Starting point is 01:08:38 The Red Deal goes on to say that now more than ever, it is necessary to re-establish correct relations by enforcing the original covenant, a living document or treaty with the earth. This begins by upholding the indigenous interpretation and authority over all treaties and agreements made with colonial powers, whether these agreements were struck 300 years ago or yesterday. There are also hundreds of multilateral agreements and treaties with social movements and the humble people of the earth that require enforcement. We can't and won't wait for colonizers. The power is in our hands to enact natural law and restore balance in accordance with indigenous principles.

Starting point is 01:09:26 Another central pillar of the Red Deals framework is an end to occupation. That means defunding the police, abolishing incarceration, abolishing imperial borders, and an end to the overall disciplinary violence enacted on indigenous communities, especially Indigenous youth. If we're going by all the Native population being criminalized, 70% of them are youth, you know, that's 25 or younger. They're experiencing higher rates of physical and sexual violence, which is correlating to higher rates of suicide, because PTSD, if you all don't have to deal with it, just really messes with your brain and you kind of react differently to situations.

Starting point is 01:10:11 And so when your communities in war-like, basically being monitored by an occupational force, as if you were still at war with the country that had genocided your ancestors. These communities have higher rates of PTSD than act out more violently when police say, come into their home on a, like just opening up the door saying it was unlocked. You know, you're not going to get a good reaction in any community, but a community experiencing severe PTSD, you're going to get an even worse reaction. You know, you could get shot and then that's going to start a whole gunfire. You know, that's just one reason, another of the many reasons, I should say, to end the disciplinary violence against

Starting point is 01:11:07 Native peoples and all oppressed peoples. What makes the Red Deal framework so powerful is that it recognizes what are commonly thought of as separate single issues as actually being structural in nature, and that these issues require a structural response, which has the abolition of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism at its core. Capitalism is the root of a lot of these issues, and capitalism is built through colonialism. Colonialism serves as a means to export misery from the imperial core to third world countries, and we're past a point of colonization and into the point of imperialism where we're at the highest stage of capitalism and that

Starting point is 01:11:52 it's expanding into these markets in order to devour as much as it can in order to keep itself going and now you have bezos musk all looking at space you know rather than solving the issues here on earth they're just going to go into space it's really just somebody fucking up everything and then going not my problem it really is you know the whole reason the Red Nation exists is to actually address those problems instead of running away from them. That when the ruling class abandons everybody, hopefully the ideals being pushed in our platform

Starting point is 01:12:41 will help save the world. We'll see you next time. Υπότιτλοι AUTHORWAVE existentialist crisis. One is environmental. If we are to prevent a catastrophic rise in atmospheric temperatures, we need urgent action. If we fail, the lives of billions of people is going to be made almost impossible, with detrimental effects for every continent, every people, including of course Europe and Europeans. The other crisis is of course social and political and economic. It is the result of 12 years, at least 12 years, of socialism for bankers and corporates and austerity for everyone else. These two crises are bound inextricably together.

Starting point is 01:14:21 They are caused by a nexus of the same private interests and the political elites that represent them. We are duty-bound to face these two crises as one. But the good news is that we have a plan to do it. It's called the Green New Deal for Europe. The Green New Deal for Europe has the capacity to transform our continent and to pave the ground towards a democratic, green, shared prosperity. Together we can make it happen. So join us. I'm Dusan Pajovic. I'm coming from Montenegro. Dusan is the Green New Deal for Europe specialist at DiEM25, or the Democracy in Europe movement. DiEM25 is a pan-European leftist movement with the agenda that Europe will be democratized

Starting point is 01:15:16 once we've overthrown its oligarchy. So our mid-term policy agenda is the Green New Deal for Europe. And our long-term vision includes, of course, a democratic, ecological, feminist, peaceful, non-exploitative system that is free of capitalist bosses, unelected state bureaucrats, and any tendency to colonize others. In 2019, DiEM25 proposed a Green New Deal for Europe, a unique take on the Green New Deal. Basically, if I have to put it short, our Green New Deal is focused on making three bodies, three institutions. The first one would be Green Public Works, the investment plan to power Europe's green transition and transform its economy along the way. The second one would be Environmental Union, a new regulatory framework for the just transition to align Europe's laws with the scientific consensus. Commission, which would be an independent body to research, monitor and advise EU policymakers to advance the cause of environmental justice across Europe and around the world.

Starting point is 01:16:32 To fund this transition, DiEM25 is demanding that the EU put 5-10% of its GDP into a green investment program. They also demand the institution of a four-day workweek with fair pay in democratic settings, the end of privatized energy, an end to fossil fuel extraction, and carbon neutrality by 2030. The Green New Deal for Europe also includes proposals like a universal basic income, guaranteed housing for all, and demilitarization. Of course, the European Union has a Green New Deal of its own. The European Green Deal is a set of climate proposals put forth by the European Commission with the goal of 55% emissions reduction by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. According to DiEM25, however,

Starting point is 01:17:27 these proposed emission reduction targets are nowhere near enough to be in line with the targets of the Paris Agreement. What is the difference between our Green New Deal for Europe and Green Deal by European Commission? Well, to put it simply, ours is a deal between humanity and nature and not between politicians and oligarchs. Basically, the future is up for grabs and we need to seize it before it's too late. The European Commission, when they created the term Green Deal, they erased all the meaning from our Green New deal when they stole the term to be more specific and they had at least the decency of dropping the word new in it because new it is not indeed nor it is green as to the word deal deal we can only understand it as a tribute to the backroom dealing between

Starting point is 01:18:26 Brussels career politicians and well-paid lobbies that brought this disastrous plan to life. And it seems that even this plan is not going to be executed. So I don't know if we don't have DMers and other progressive peoples in parliament, there is not bright time waiting ahead of us. A major difference between DiEM25's Green New Deal and the EU's Green Deal, or even AOC's Green New Deal, is that they take the need for degrowth and the dangers of green capitalism very seriously. They've actually just brought on degrowth advocate

Starting point is 01:19:13 Jason Hickel, who we heard from in part one of this series, onto their advisory panel and as a contributor to their Blueprint for Europe's Just Transition report. contributor to their Blueprint for Europe's Just Transition report. The report's foreword states that we can, and to survive, we must transform the failed system of financialized capitalism that now threatens to collapse Earth's life support systems and with them, human civilization. We must replace it with one that respects boundaries and limits, one that nurtures soils and aquifers, rainfall, ice, the patterns of wind and currents, pollinators, biological abundance and diversity, a system that delivers social, political, and economic justice.

Starting point is 01:20:02 Another distinguishing factor of DiEM25's Green New Deal for Europe is its recognition of the need for a global climate approach, stating that the prevailing economic growth model in countries throughout the global north is premised on extraction of both financial and material resources from the global south. The blueprint goes on, saying, unless Europe's transition is firmly grounded in principles of justice, the price of action on the continent could be environmental and economic devastation elsewhere. The shift from a dirty, stagnant, austerity-battered Europe to a green, economically vibrant, socially flourishing Europe under the current economic status quo could lead,

Starting point is 01:20:53 paradoxically enough, to total environmental catastrophe. And in line with our exploration of electric vehicles from part one of this series, the Blueprint report goes on to say, mobility is a perfect micro example of how the transition to net zero emissions could be devastating to the environment unless carefully planned. Although the electrification of personal vehicles will play an important part of the energy transition, simply replacing petrol with electric vehicles without reducing vehicle use through providing public alternatives can contribute to environmental breakdown while maintaining extractive economic practices that disproportionately impact countries in the global south.

Starting point is 01:22:05 Europe is one of the wealthiest continents in the world. And that is the case because of our colonial past and neocolonial practices that are still happening now as we speak. So we have the responsibility and duty to lead this green transition, but also not on the back of the global south. That is something that needs to be taken into account a lot. That's why we have a lot of working groups, task forces that are constantly debating the issues of how to take things forward

Starting point is 01:22:36 and to actually help Global South. Basically, reparation fees are just one of the policies that we propose. Also, we are currently working with different organizations like Global Alliance for a Green New Deal and Depth for Climate. Regarding the lithium and mining in general, we are very well aware that even those sources that we call renewable still need a lot of mining to actually succeed.

Starting point is 01:23:07 And until the science resolves this, hopefully in some way, we are relying on one main approach, which is people's gatherings or people's assemblies consisted of scientists, activists, and people from that area, where we would discuss what are the pros and cons of all of this, and is that community willing to sacrifice a certain portion of their land in order to benefit from certain resources. Of course, this in order to benefit from certain resources. Of course, this would be a bit annulated through the reparations fee, since the global South countries wouldn't just say yes to everything

Starting point is 01:23:57 because they don't have money, but all of us would have a certain stability to actually make a reasonable choice. And if you follow the situation, you'll see that lithium can be a bit less harmful than it is now if the people are not doing it as fast as possible, but slowly. So that's why we need a radical degrowth as well. Stuff like horizontal buildings, stuff like telecommuting, stuff like

Starting point is 01:24:28 public transport that is connected, shared cars may seem like a small step, but it's a step in the right direction that would free us of a portion of energy prices and it would be a right step in the growth direction. As Jason Hickel has said, Europe didn't develop the colonies, the colonies developed Europe. Infused with this recognition, frameworks like DiEM25's Green New Deal for Europe, the Cochabamba People's Agreement, and the Red Nations Red Deal have baked into them frameworks for climate reparations and for paths forward which don't rely on the continued dispossession and destruction of the global South and indigenous communities. These frameworks expand the notion of we to include those in the peripheries, those who've been dispossessed, and those who've been

Starting point is 01:25:26 left out of the North's discourse on climate change. It depends who is the we and what do we want, right? Who are we, right? Are we people who consider that the peasant and farmers movements in India are the same people and part of our same political movement who have the same right to a decent life and a decent life where they are with their community, with their family, in the place where they grow up to stay there if they want to, but also to achieve the same level, roughly, of per capita energy use and good access to clean water, good access to reliable electricity, good access to good housing stock and so forth, and good access to labor-saving consumer goods that actually free up people's time and allow them to live more decent and less oppressed lives and ultimately moving towards a kind of democratically controlled economy? Like, do we consider people over there who most of us have,

Starting point is 01:26:23 us who are probably listening to this, have never seen, do we consider them over there who most of us have us who are probably listening to this have never seen do we consider them part of us right and part of the political imaginary that we consider and our political groups we consider when we're constructing a certain type of political movement this question is usually not part of the agenda right so it depends who us is once we've addressed who us is then we can adjust whether or not a certain constellation of policies is capable of actually incorporating everybody into a new society, ecological civilization, or whether it's actually just about severing mobilizations basically in the United States from mobilizations outside of the United States in order to maintain a flow of resources and labor from the South to the North. If the North does not actively promote internationalism, it's a fundamental plank of progressive transformation, then it will end up just resubjugating the South in a new system of green corporatist social domination. If we don't want that world, then we have to actively fight

Starting point is 01:27:25 against it, which means first of all, fighting against it ideologically and then fighting against it organizationally and politically. That's it for our two-part documentary series exploring the green transition. Part one, The Problem with Green Capitalism, is available to listen to at upstreampodcast.org, where you can also find full-length conversations with some of the guests in this series, including Jason Hickel and Thea Riofrancos. And just a quick heads up, we recently switched our podcasting host from SoundCloud to Libsyn, so new episodes will no longer be available on our old SoundCloud feed, but you can get them pretty much anywhere else. Thank you to Chris Zabriskie, Pele, Pater, Sergei Cheromyshinov, and Michael Sarah Palin for the music in this episode.

Starting point is 01:28:29 And thank you to Elizabeth Sarmiento of Smart Yards Co-op in San Jose for reading excerpts of The People's Agreement of Cochabamba. Thank you also to Bethan Muir for the cover art. Upstream's theme music was composed by me, Robbie. the cover art. Upstream's theme music was composed by me, Robbie. Upstream is a labor of love. We distribute all of our content for free and couldn't keep things going without the support of you, our listeners and fans. Please visit upstreampodcast.org forward slash support to donate. And because we're fiscally sponsored by the nonprofit Independent Arts and Media, any donations that you make from the U.S. are tax exempt. Upstream is also made possible with support from the incredible folks at the Guerrilla Foundation and the Resist Foundation.

Starting point is 01:29:15 For more from us, please visit upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. And if you like what you hear, please give us a five-star rating and review. It really helps get Upstream in front of more eyes and into more ears. Thank you.

Upstream - Documentary #15: The Green Transition Pt. 2 – A Green Deal for the People Part 2

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