[ The Inflation Reduction Act would not have happened without the
movement for a Green New Deal, but it shouldn’t be confused for one.
The climate left now faces a novel problem: how to deal with having
won something—and keep fighting for more.]
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WHAT’S NEXT FOR THE CLIMATE LEFT? THE IRA IS AN INVITATION TO
ORGANIZERS  
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Kate Aronoff
May 1, 2023
Dissent Magazine
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_ The Inflation Reduction Act would not have happened without the
movement for a Green New Deal, but it shouldn’t be confused for one.
The climate left now faces a novel problem: how to deal with having
won something—and keep fighting for more. _

The Inflation Reduction Act is a huge victory in this existential
fight - Climate activists demonstrate at the White House, 2021, Photo
credit: CNN

 

It’s understandably hard for those who supported Green New Deal
proposals for transformative investments in public goods to see the
IRA—a bundle of tax credits whose benefits accrue largely to
corporations—as a consolation prize. For the many climate hawks
galvanized by Bernie Sanders’s bid for the Democratic nomination in
2020, it’s also a far cry from what, for a moment, looked to be
within striking distance: governing power.

In some ways the IRA’s passage—and Republicans taking back the
House a few months later—marks a return to normal for the climate
left. But Democratic Party politics have changed. Top Democratic
policymakers openly discuss the need for industrial policy (what one
International Monetary Fund paper dubs “the policy that shall not be
named”), and hundreds of billions of dollars will soon go out the
door to build up domestic supply chains for things like battery
storage and critical minerals. In practice, however, that means
letting the public sector shoulder the risks of an energy transition
while the private sector reaps the rewards. By all accounts the White
House seems to imagine climate policy as the project of turning clean
energy technologies into a more attractive asset class for investors.

None of this obviates the need for a Green New Deal. Every path to
staving off runaway climate catastrophe runs through enormous
investments to scale up zero-carbon energy and a simultaneous, brutal
confrontation with the fossil fuel industry. Even given unlimited
resources, the former simply won’t overpower the latter fast enough.
Trillions of dollars in future revenue—coal, oil, and gas that has
yet to be dug up and burned—need to be made worthless, even when the
market disagrees. Only the state can keep a company from doing what is
profitable.

The Green New Deal’s basic political calculus for making the state
do that still holds, too: getting to zero emissions requires giving
people a reason to be excited about the awe-inspiring project of
decarbonization and to come to its defense at the ballot box and
beyond. Decarbonization should make the kinds of changes in people’s
lives that inspire them to name children after the president they deem
responsible. No one will name their kid Biden because they got a
$7,500 rebate on a Chevy Bolt.

If winning a Green New Deal is still necessary (it is), then the path
to it will be a strange one. A product of the left having shifted the
debate on climate and economic policy is that it’s also created a
new organizing challenge for itself: how do you build durable
democratic majorities for climate action as political elites align
around a fundamentally undemocratic vision for what decarbonization
should look like?

The IRA has made some uneasy progress toward the first half of the
climate challenge (investment) while avoiding the second
(confrontation). Since the war in Ukraine began, the Biden
administration has in fact doubled down on fossil fuel extraction,
chiding oil and gas companies for not producing _more _to keep
prices down and export fuel to our European allies. Still, the process
of building a suite of green industries promises to inflate those
industries’ political importance, too. They stand to grow in
absolute terms—raking in the IRA’s $270 billion worth of tax
credits—and in influence, as strategic industries in the eyes of
policymakers eager to court their business. The question is whether
legacy automakers building electric vehicles, foreign-owned battery
manufacturers, start-up lithium prospectors, and other IRA
beneficiaries can act as a counterweight to the fossil fuel industry.
The current, modest hope is that the green manufacturing and renewable
power sectors might become a louder voice in the ear of some number of
politicians—at the local, state, and regional level—than coal,
oil, and gas firms.

The more difficult part is not leaving the terms of the energy
transition up to those for-profit firms, ceding decisions about what
investments happen where and how fast to entities whose sole purpose
is making money. Even though the IRA presupposes a private sector-led
transition, battles over its implementation can be a venue for
building the sorts of political constituencies and expertise needed
for a more democratic transition—and to take on the fossil fuel
industry.

Among the most exciting parts of the IRA is the invitation it presents
for organizers to create proof of concept for public power as an
alternative to for-profit energy. While for decades only private
companies with massive tax liability were able to use renewable energy
tax credits, public power providers, local and tribal governments, and
others can now take advantage of an uncapped pool of IRA-provided
funds to construct their own not-for-profit clean energy
installations. Municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives can
broadcast the benefits of public investment from the Texas Hill
Country to the Tennessee Valley, touting job creation and cheaper
energy bills. Climate campaigners could join forces with unionized
utility workers to demand that free money from the IRA for everything
from transmission lines to energy efficiency isn’t left on the
table.

Blue states and cities pursuing more aggressive climate action than
the federal government doesn’t add up to a national plan. But such
projects offer opportunities for open-air experimentation in how to
make decarbonization work. Efforts like the Boston Green New Deal, for
instance, can be a test run for a national version. Under the
leadership of Mayor Michelle Wu, the city is now in the process of
rolling out a program to fund retrofits for apartments in large,
income-restricted buildings—with $50,000 committed per
unit—slashing the city’s biggest source of emissions while
providing tangible quality of life improvements for working-class
residents. This will help build a stock of progressive technocrats who
know the nuts and bolts of how to retrofit buildings and make the case
to voters that electing people who run on a Green New Deal, like Wu,
can make their lives better in the short term, whetting appetites for
transformative climate policy with smaller changes they can see and
feel in the here and now.

We shouldn’t be pollyannaish about where things stand: the forces
backing a Green New Deal lost. But they had enough power to
fundamentally shift debates at the highest level about what climate
policy in the twenty-first century should look like, convincing
lawmakers to abandon their commitment to narrow market tweaks and to
focus instead on investment and job creation. The weakness of the bill
that resulted from that shift reflected the power of polluters and a
private sector eager to have the state step in to subsidize its
profits. For better and for worse, the product of that tortured
Beltway compromise is now the ground on which something more expansive
and democratic might be built. It’s time to get ready to win and run
the big green state in the new normal the Green New Deal created.

_[KATE ARONOFF is a staff writer at the New Republic and a fellow
at the Roosevelt Institute. She is the author of Overheated: How
Capitalism Broke the Planet and How We Fight Back
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of Dissent’s editorial board.]_

* Climate Catastrophe
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* Climate Crisis
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* Climate Change
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* Green New Deal
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* the Left
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* Inflation Reducation Act
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* Climate Activists
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* Environmental Protests
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* Environmental Activism
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* Sunrise Movement
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* Joe Manchin
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* Biden Administration
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* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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* Left Strategies
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