by Mark Hertsgaard
Anti-globalization forces scored a major victory at the WTO talks last December, but what's next? The alliance forged in Seattle between labor and environmentalists has the potential to transform American politics by empowering a civil society counterweight to the increasingly corporate-dominated system of the 1990s. But to achieve this, the alliance must enunciate a clear, compelling vision of a better society and how to get there.
One idea of great promise is the Global Green Deal, a practical yet transformative program to environmentally retrofit human civilization from top to bottom. Led by governments - but making full use of market mechanisms - the Global Green Deal would put people and corporations to work at tasks essential to our future: Leaving fossil fuels behind in favor of energy efficiency and renewables; averting the looming global water crisis by installing drip-irrigation systems; halting the catastrophic epidemic of species extinctions (and the forest destruction that drives them) by drastically reducing our demand for wood; and so on.
We have no alternative but to pursue this environmental transition. The good news is that we can make money doing it. Such establishment voices as AT&T and Japan's Planning Ministry predict that a global environmental retrofit would be the biggest economic enterprise of the 21st century: A huge source of jobs and profits, not to mention poverty alleviation.
The idea is to renovate human industrial civilization from top to bottom in environmentally sustainable ways - everything from farms to factories, garages to garbage dumps, schools to shops, houses, and offices. We would do so in both the wealthy Northern Hemisphere and the impoverished South. The redirected economic activity would address the problem of poverty that is the irreducible other half of the environmental equation.
The "Global Green Deal" is a slogan that can be easily grasped by both the media and the public - across the political spectrum. Polling data shows that 93 percent of Republican voters consider a healthy environment to be more important than lower taxes. A Global Green Deal would stimulate business as well as labor.
Just as the "living wage" campaign has given economic justice advocates the upper hand in 40 US cities, so a Global Green Deal campaign could shift the terms of debate about environmental and economic issues and confront America's leaders with the kind of public groundswell that can't be denied.
The Greening of Washington
This transition will not happen by itself - too many entrenched interests stand in the way. While Ford and General Motors often talk green, they have made only token efforts to develop "green cars," for the simple reason that their hulking SUV's are hugely profitable. Hence the need for a government-led program.
Every year, the US government buys 50,000 new cars for official use. Under a Global Green Deal, Washington would require that cars no longer be powered by polluting fossil fuels.
By replacing the government's vehicle fleet with fuel-cell or hybrid-powered cars, Washington could help create market demand for green cars - demand that private capital could then step up to accommodate.
Detroit would doubtless scream, but if Washington stood firm, the US auto industry would comply. Before long, carmakers would be climbing the learning curve and offering greener cars at competitive prices. (There's a certain poetic justice in this, for the government's lavish subsidization of conventional automobiles throughout the 20th century is a main source of our current problems.)
China is the world's largest consumer of coal and its second largest producer of greenhouse gases. But China would use 50 percent less coal if it installed currently available energy efficiency technologies, especially better motors, lights, and insulation. Under the Global Green Deal, Washington would help Beijing buy these technologies, creating jobs for American and Chinese workers while simultaneously reducing global warming and the horrific air pollution, which has been linked to nearly one of every three deaths in China.
Washington wouldn't have to spend more money, only shift subsidies away from environmentally dead-end technologies like coal and nuclear power.
The Solutions Are at Hand
The Global Green Deal would enable labor, environmentalists and other civil society forces to take the offensive with a broad, positive vision of what we are for - a healthy environment and a prosperous economy. If our side wants to start winning for a change, we need to take the initiative and think big.
Fuel-cell cars and solar-power panels could be just the beginning. In the words of an executive from AT&T, one of the few US corporations that recognizes these possibilities, "We are talking about restructuring the technological basis of our entire economy… integrating environmental considerations into all technology and economic behavior."
Numerous labor and environmental organizations are already pursuing parts of this agenda. Friends of the Earth has its "Green Scissors" campaign; the Sierra Club, Earth Island Institute, the United Steelworkers and others have formed an Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment; Ralph Nader and his associated groups have long pushed government procurement reform; and Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute has shown that the technologies to change our environmentally harmful ways are already in hand.
Releasing Captive Wealth
In the medium term, population size must be stabilized both in the South and the North, and the hyperconsumption that is now common in the North and among elites in the South must be cut back. In the medium to long term, capitalism will probably have to be transformed so that the constant expansion in material terms of production, consumption, and waste is no longer a central feature of the system.
The race to the moon in the 1960s showed how a clear mission and deadline can focus resources and fire public enthusiasm. It also demonstrated that certain overarching public challenges cannot be left up to the marketplace; government must play a central and leading role.
Another model worth emulating is the New Deal launched by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s to propel the US economy out of the Depression. As analysts from Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes have noted, capitalist economies have an inherent tendency toward stagnation and inequality. The routine workings of the capitalist system generate more wealth than can find profitable investment outlets and too little money at the bottom to generate sufficient overall demand to keep the system churning forward.
As journalist William Greider reports in his book, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, such pillars of the world economy as the steel, auto, aircraft, and consumer electronic industries are all struggling in the face of insufficient demand for their products.
Perversely, the most common corporate reaction is to cut costs by shedding relatively high-wage workers in the US, Europe, and Japan in favor of their cheaper counterparts in the Third World. Of course, this only worsens the underlying problem of insufficient demand.
The basic function of the New Deal was to restore sufficient demand to the economy by raising the "social wage." New Deal policies raised the economy's collective purchasing power by:
- Guaranteeing workers a minimum wage and the right to strike;
- Putting unemployed people to work in government-funded public works projects;
- Providing direct cash payments to tide over the unemployed until they found work, and;
- Establishing the universal pension plan for the elderly (i.e., Social Security).
In short, the New Deal redistributed society's surplus wealth, shifting a portion away from the rich (where it languished unproductively), toward the poor and working classes. Their spending of that surplus, along with the explosion of military spending during World War II, pulled the economy out of depression and prepared it for the unprecedented prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.
Kick-starting a Sustainable Economy
Governments must reform skewed tax, subsidy, and economic accounting systems so that the market internalizes environmental values. Governments should increase public investment to help industries like solar-power manufacturers achieve commercial takeoff. Priming the pump with steady purchases by the Pentagon in the 1960s was what got the computer industry up and running. The Clinton administration did much the same in the l990s by having the federal bureaucracy shift its purchases from virgin to recycled paper.
Under a Global Green Deal, mass transit in the US would no longer be the unwanted stepchild of government policy but its proud focus - yielding transportation systems of such excellence that people would want to patronize them.
Water would no longer be wasted in criminally extravagant volumes: Farmers would be encouraged to install super-efficient drip-irrigation systems. Summertime heat waves would no longer kill inner city residents too poor to afford air-conditioning: Apartment buildings would be renovated with energy efficiency air-conditioning systems, providing jobs for unemployed neighborhood residents.
Northern governments subsidize foreign business deals all the time, notably in the fields of weapons and military equipment. But if taxpayers are going to be subsidizing corporations, shouldn't the corporations be doing something socially useful, like averting climate change, rather than arming the world to the teeth?
Contrary to conventional wisdom, there is lots of money available: We're just spending it foolishly. Nearly ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, US military spending remains bloated at 85 percent of Cold War levels. If even half the estimated $50.9 trillion in environmentally destructive subsidies now being doled out by the world's governments were pointed in the opposite direction, the Global Green Deal would be off to a roaring start.
Learning to Share
Amory Lovins likes to say that the role of government is to "steer, not row." But it must steer in a fundamentally different direction than at present, and that will upset those who profit from the status quo. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor may have made Robin Hood a hero, but it made Franklin Roosevelt a hated man among the US upper class.
The truth is, Roosevelt was doing the elite a service. Without his reforms, the economy would have remained mired in depression and the mass anger finding an outlet in street protests might have evolved into outright revolution.
Today, the danger threatening the rich is not so much mass revolt as inescapable environmental meltdown. Like it or not, the rich need the poor if they are to save their own skins. Without the cooperation of the poor, there is no hope of dealing with global warming, forest loss, and many other environmental hazards that will punish rich and poor alike.
We teach the concept of sharing to our children. Sharing remains a central message of most of our religions. Sharing has been a basic survival tactic for most humans, for most of our history. Can we rediscover it in time?
The most difficult sharing will not be of money (the rich have plenty of that) but of environmental space. As Maurice Strong explained at the 1990 Earth Summit, the wealthy nations must substantially reduce their production of greenhouse gases in order to make space available so that Southern nations fighting poverty can increase their greenhouse emissions.
Many Americans will resist such sharing, in part because they simply do not realize how lavish their lifestyles are compared with the rest of the world's. In taking for granted such luxuries as unlimited hot water at the turn of a tap and cars bigger than many people's houses, Americans inadvertently exhibit the sort of arrogance and self-centeredness that has made the poor hate the rich since time immemorial.
Americans (who like to think of themselves as a generous people) are simply oblivious to how wasteful and selfish their lives appear to millions of malnourished, unemployed and homeless citizens around the world. In the face of such deep, pervasive poverty, how can the world's most comfortable class insist that they cannot cut back on their own consumption?
Most Americans have far more material possessions than they could possibly need. Long before electricity, motor cars, and the other modern "necessities," humans were living lives of consequence - raising children, building cities, creating art, pursuing knowledge.
It may be emotionally gratifying to blame corporations and governments for our environmental problems (and they certainly deserve it), but individuals cannot escape responsibility for their actions.
"In the 'developed' countries, at least, the large [environmental] problems occur because all of us are living either partly wrong or almost entirely wrong," argues author Wendell Berry. "It was not just the greed of corporate shareholders and the hubris of corporate executives that put the fate of Prince William Sound into one ship [the Exxon Valdez]; it was also our demand that energy be cheap and plentiful. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers."
At a time when many sectors and regions of the world economy are in danger of sinking into depression, a Global Green Deal could stimulate enough economic activity to keep the system from crashing down around us. It could also reverse current trends toward environmental overload and a widening inequality.
Humans may or may not still be able to halt the drift toward ecological disaster. We will find out only if we rouse ourselves and take common and determined action.
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our Environmental Future (Broadway Books, 1999).
The Global Green Deal