OMNI CLIMATE MEMO MONDAYS, #164, FEBRUARY 5,
2024.
John J. Berger. Solving
the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth. 2023.
From my New Deal
perspective (I was born in 1932), one of Berger’s most important chapters is #14,
pp. 283ff., “New Laws and Politics,” where he discusses “current barriers to
the kind of fair and comprehensive policies that would speed us toward a safe,
stable earth and a more just society.” They
especially include the flood of secret money into “super PACs” used to
influence elections and legislation permitted by the Supreme Court’s Citizens
United ruling, and by implication the rigging of the tax code to allow a
few people to be billionaires and trillionaires and turn our democracy into plutocracy.
Governments will never be able to enact
effective climate-protection programs and social and economic justice until secrecy,
concentration of wealth, and gross economic inequality are ended. Those reforms possess historical precedence
in the Democratic Party’s New Deal of the 1930s, which produced a massive
social and economic turnaround from the Great Depression. And the world is “in a situation even more
perilous than the Great Depression or World War II.” We
need a similar scale and intensity of response “to reverse climate change: a
concerted nationwide industrial effort to produce millions of solar panels,
wind turbines, batteries, carbon capture machines, and zero-emission vehicles
(ZEVs).” The US mobilized in 1930s and
1940s against Depression and War. “We must
do the same for the climate crisis.”
Today we again urgently need a national, science-based,
climate plan to coordinate and fulfill the many city and state programs already
in action and the Green New Deal of H. Res. 109. As important, as in the New Deal it would reorganize
government at the top (FDR “created sixty-nine new federal offices”). The Plan “might be titled America’s Energy
Transition: Achieving a Clean Energy Future. “A necessary early step in mobilizing the
nation is the creation of a powerful cabinet-level Climate Protection
Department ” with separate agencies; such
as Climate Emergency Agency, Clean Transition Redevelopment Agency, and Civilian Climate Corps.
Seven major federal
actions are needed now to curb CO2: all new power plants, new
buildings, and vehicles must use zero-emission renewable-energy technologies. The railroads must be rebuilt to clean and
high-speed specifications. And airlines must reduce their emissions annually by
5 percent. A national green bank should
be established to finance these mandates.
And a national carbon-credit plan must be established.
He discusses a national carbon-tax, argues
that the federal carbon-tax bill H.R. 763 must be greatly strengthened, and he presents
cost projections needed to reach net-zero carbon by 2050. And he rejects the industry-supported Climate
Leadership Council (CLC) proposals that would not phase out fuels or subsidies,
among other liabilities.
He concludes with
a reminder that international collaboration is essential to the success of any
individual national plan. (pp.283-305).