Green New Deal vs Donald J. Trump

There are now twenty-two members of Congress who have signed onto the Green New Deal, the most recent being Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Katherine Clark (D-MA). It's only a matter of a few weeks before not being in that Sunrise Movement graphic will be a mark of shame. Last week, writing for The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer noted that the Green New Deal is a winning climate strategy-- something desperately needed at a time when the Trump Regime is moving the country dangerously backward. In the words of New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest member of Congress, "This is going to be the New Deal, the Great Society, the moon shot, the civil-rights movement of our generation." [What happened to New Dem chief Derick Kilmer (D-WA)?]

The Green New Deal aspires to cut U.S. carbon emissions fast enough to reach the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious climate goal: preventing the world from warming no more than 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. In a blockbuster report released in October, an international group of scientists said that meeting this goal could skirt the worst climate effects, such as massive floods, expansive droughts, and irreversible sea-level rise... The Green New Deal aims to... remake the country in the process. It promises to give every American a job in that new economy: installing solar panels, retrofitting coastal  infrastructure, manufacturing electric vehicles. In the 1960s, the U.S. pointed the full power of its military-technological industry at going to the moon. Ocasio-Cortez wants to do the same thing, except to save the planet.

...For the first time in more than a decade, Democrats can approach climate policy with a sense of imagination. They can also approach it with a sense of humility, because their last two strategies didn’t work particularly well. When the party last controlled Congress, in 2009, Democrats tried to pass a national cap-and-trade bill, a type of policy that allows polluters to bid on the right to emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It failed to pass in the Senate. Starting in 2011, President Obama tried to use the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act to fight carbon-dioxide emissions. After President Trump was elected, he terminated that effort by executive order.

Since then, Democrats in Congress have proposed no shortage of climate bills. A few of them even picked up Republican support. Some blue states have also tried to pass climate policy of their own, though the most ambitious of those efforts have failed.

...The Green New Deal, first and foremost, can be understood as trying to fix the BAD [boring as dirt] problem. In the long term, it’s an ambitious package of laws that will touch every sector of the economy. The Sunrise Movement, a youth-led activism group that has pushed for the policy, has listed seven demands that any Green New Deal must satisfy. They range from requiring the U.S. to get 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources to “decarbonizing, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure.” They also call for a massive investment in technology that could directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

These are enormous demands that would require either many small pieces of technical legislation or a new executive climate-change agency. Yet they do not alone make the Green New Deal. The single most crucial aspect of the Green New Deal is its proposed job guarantee, a controversial policy that says that every American can have a job with the government if they want one. Data for Progress, a leftist advocacy group, claims that the Green New Deal could generate 10 million new jobs across the country over 10 years.

This policy-- a job for every American who wants one-- reflects what the party learned from fighting Obamacare’s repeal. Obamacare provides a revealing view into how economists think about policy versus how people experience it. That is, as far as policy makers are concerned, Obamacare comprises a set of clever tweaks and rules meant to change how insurance markets work and lower the cost of health care. Before the law passed, Democratic lawmakers cared deeply about getting those tweaks right.

Yet Obamacare didn’t survive because those new rules worked. They did work, but, in fact, voters hate them. Instead, Obamacare survived because it gave two new superpowers to voters. The first was the power never to be denied health insurance for preexisting conditions, and the second was free or cheap health insurance through Medicaid. The reason Americans jammed the Capitol Hill switchboards last year to protest the repeal-- and pulled the lever for Democrats in November-- wasn’t that they valued Obamacare’s elegant cost-control mechanism. They wanted to keep their superpowers.

“People who are receiving benefits, they’re going to react pretty strongly to that being taken away from them,” said the political scientist and UC Berkeley professor Paul Pierson in a conversation with Vox last year. “A taxpayer is paying for a lot of stuff and cares a little bit about each thing, but the person who’s receiving the benefits is going to care enormously about that.”

Fixing climate change will include lots of technocratic tweaks, lots of bills about dirt. They will be hard to defend against later repeal. So it would be nice if lawmakers could wed them to a new benefit, a superpower that people will fight for years after passage. Hence the job guarantee-- a universal promise of employment meant to win over Americans in general and create more union jobs in particular.

...For her first day on Capitol Hill, and her first public act as a representative-elect, Ocasio-Cortez chose to focus on climate change. The decision is notable all by itself. Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is also the first member of Congress who was born during the George H. W. Bush administration. And the Bush administration is when the modern era of stagnant climate politics began: It’s when Exxon and other oil companies began publicly advocating climate denialism, when the United States blocked a treaty that would have restricted global carbon emissions, when the Senate ratified the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Almost exactly a month after Ocasio-Cortez turned 1, Congress approved the Global Change Research Act, a law requiring regular federal reports on climate science. It hasn’t passed a major climate bill since. Ocasio-Cortez has spent her entire life watching climate change not get fixed. Now she’s getting her shot at addressing it.

National Geographic published what it called a running list of how the Trump Regime is changing environmental policy-- changes that will enshrine him and his enablers in historical villainy. His "tumultuous presidency," they note, "has brought a flurry of changes-- both realized and anticipated-- to U.S. environmental policy. Many of the actions roll back Obama-era policies that aimed to curb climate change and limit environmental pollution, while others threaten to limit federal funding for science and the environment. The headlines:

• December 8, 2018- Trump Administration rolls back Obama-era coal rules
• December 6, 2018- Interior eases drilling controls protecting sage grouse
• November 30, 2018- Five oil and gas companies have been given the green light to use seismic airgun blasts to search for lucrative oil and gas deposits that could be buried in the sea floor from New Jersey to Florida.
• October 24, 2018- After years of heated debate between conservationists and the petroleum industry about risks and rewards, the federally controlled waters of the U.S. Arctic are cleared to see their first oil and gas production wells.
• October 19, 2018- U.S> pushes to end children's climate change suit
• October 11, 2018- EPA to disband air pollution review panel
• September 28, 2018- Trump Adminstration predicts 7 degrees of global warming by 2100
• September 18, 2018- EPA repeals Obama-era methane rules

• August 21, 2018- Trump EPA unveils plan to nullify federal rules on coal power plants. The Trump Administration’s new plan-- called the Affordable Clean Energy rule-- dismantles Obama’s federal rules over all American coal plants and gives regulating authority to each state. Some states, like California, may propose even harsher targets. But others, such as coal-rich states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania, are likely to loosen emissions regulations that coal industry leaders have called burdensome and expensive.
• August 2, 2018- Trump announces plan to weaken Obama-era fuel economy rules, dismantling an Obama-era policy that would have increased vehicle mileage standards for cars made over the next decade
• July 23, 2018- Trump officials set aside evidence of national monuments' successes
• July 19, 2018- Trump officials propose rollbacks of Endangered Species Act rules
• May 9, 2018- White House cuts NASA climate monitoring program
• April 24, 2018- EPA issues controversial rule on Science "transparency"
• April 2, 2018- EPA starts rollback of car emissions standards
• March 16, 2018- FEMA expels "Climate Change" from strategic plan
• February 26, 2018- EPA mulls shake-up to environmental research program
• February 12, 2018- Trump proposes cuts to climate and clean-energy programs
• January 31, 2018- Trump mulling major cuts to clean energy research
• January 25, 2018- EPA loosens regulations on toxic air pollution
• January 15, 2018- Most of National Parks Advisory Board resigns in protest
• January 10, 2018- Climate Change web sites censored under Trump
• December 18, 2017- Trump drops Climate Change from list of national security Threats
• December 4, 2017- Trump unveils plan to dramatically downsize two national monuments
• October 23, 2017- Interior Department proposes largest-ever oil and gas lease auction
• October 9, 2017- Trump EPA poised to scrap clean power plan
• August 22, 2017- Mining health study halted; Climate advisory panel disbanded
• August 15, 2017- Trump revokes flood standards accounting for sea-level rise
• August 10, 2017- Report: EPA enforcement lags under Trump
• August 2, 2017- EPA drops delay of Obama-era Ozone standards
• June 13, 2017- The Trump Administration this week cancelled a rule that would have helped prevent endangered whales and sea turtles from becoming entangled in fishing nets off the U.S. West Coast

• June 1, 2017- U.S. pulls out of Paris Climate Agreement
• May 23, 2017- Trump budget proposes steep cuts for the environment
• May 5, 2017- EPA dismisses science advisors
• April 28, 2017- EPA scrubs Climate Change website
• April 28, 2017- President Trump signs an executive order that orders a review of Obama-era bans on offshore oil and gas drilling in parts of the Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans
• April 22, 2017- On a drizzly Earth Day, thousands of scientists and science enthusiasts march through Washington, D.C., to the U.S. Capitol, voicing support for science’s role in society. The sign-toting crowds-- many wearing lab coats and crocheted hats resembling brains-- also protest the Trump administration’s environmental and science policies. Satellite events of the March for Science held around the world, more than 600 in all, draw tens of thousands more attendees.
• April 7, 2017- News outlets report that several staff members at EPA’s headquarters who specialized in climate change adaptation have been reassigned.
• March 31, 2017- Environmental scientist Michael Cox retires from the EPA after more than 25 years with the agency, penning a scorching farewell letter to agency administrator Scott Pruitt. The letter, which garners significant media coverage, lambasts the Trump administration for “working to dismantle EPA and its staff as quickly as possible.”
• March 28, 2017- Climate actions undone-- Trump signs an executive order that seeks to dismantle much of the work on climate change enacted by the Obama administration. The order takes steps to downplay the future costs of carbon emissions, walks back tracking of the federal government’s carbon emissions, rescinds a 2016 moratorium on coal leases on federal lands, and strikes down Obama-era executive orders and memoranda aimed at helping the country prepare for climate change's worst impacts, including threats to national security.
• March 24, 2017- Keystone XL Pipeline approved
• March 13, 2017- Science and environment budget threatened

• March 9, 2017- In a sharp break with scientific consensus, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt says in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box that carbon dioxide’s role in the Earth’s changing climate remains unclear. U.S. and international scientists have repeatedly connected rising carbon emissions to the Earth’s changing climate. A 2014 review by the National Academy of Sciences, the United States’ preeminent scientific advisory body, observed that the Earth’s warming since the 1970s “is mainly a result of the increased concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.”
• March 7, 2017- The EPA’s Office of Science and Technology removed the word “science” from its mission statement, based on information provided by the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The updated language, which instead emphasizes "economically and technologically achievable performance standards," marks the latest change to the EPA’s website under Trump, as website updates downplay the Obama administration’s previous climate initiatives.
• March 2, 2017- The EPA withdraws an Obama EPA request for more detailed information on oil and natural-gas facilities. That request, finalized by the Obama administration on November 10, 2016, had aimed to better track the industry’s methane and volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions. (Oil and gas facilities are the country’s largest industrial emitters of methane.) The Trump EPA had criticized the rule for its estimated $42-million cost on oil and gas industries.
• February 28, 2017- Water protection may dry up
• February 17, 2017- The U.S. Senate confirms Scott Pruitt as the head of the U.S. EPA. In his prior role as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt frequently sued the EPA over its regulations, notably leading a 27-state lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan. Emails released days after Pruitt’s confirmation show that in his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt’s office maintained a cozy relationship with oil and gas companies.

• February 16, 2017- Streams reopened to mining waste
• January 24, 2017- Trump issues several memoranda aiming to hasten permitting for the Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines.
• November 8, 2016- Real estate developer Donald Trump wins the 2016 U.S. presidential election. His upset victory comes after a months-long campaign that focused little on environmental issues, but did denounce the Obama administration’s climate policies and champion the U.S. fossil fuels industry.

Rep-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY):