Policy Translation of the Green New Deal: An Introduction to the Symposium
Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, Guest Editors
In 2007, Thomas Friedman called for a Green New Deal (GND). In a 2010 report prepared for the United Nations Environment Program, Edward Barbier outlined a plan for a Global Green New Deal. But the idea of a Green New Deal captured the popular imagination in the United States when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) formally presented the GND resolution to the U.S. Congress (House Resolution 109 & Senate Resolution 59) in February 2019. Their GND proposal outlines an ambitious vision to transform America into a low-carbon economy while addressing equity and justice issues. Several 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls have endorsed it fully while others have endorsed it in spirit. The GND has also had its stumbles and critics. It was barely mentioned, leave aside debated, in the June 2019 Democratic Presidential Primary debate. Even more strikingly, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has shrugged it off as a “green dream.” Furthermore, virtually all Republican leaders have opposed it. They have dubbed it as socialist, un-American, and so on.
Notwithstanding the criticism, the GND has energized climate politics, especially among youth. It has provided a new “theory of change”: a clear narrative that outlines “what” needs to change (goals), “why” this change should happen (rationale), and “how” the GND will bring about this change.
This blog symposium seeks to develop the GND’s “how” dimension. This is probably the most profound challenge because transformative changes are disruptive. Importantly, a transition to a low-carbon economy is perceived as imposing costs and benefits asymmetrically across communities, sectors, and countries. Given the rise of populism, climate policies could become collateral damage, as witnessed in the “yellow vests” protests in France. In Canada, Alberta and Ontario are opposing a carbon tax. Political leaders in Australia and Brazil seem to have abandoned their countries’ Paris pledges. Thus, the GND needs careful policy translation which minimizes societal disruption.
In the United States, climate policy remains a polarizing issue. The Trump Administration has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, rolled back the Clean Power Plan, and diluted fuel economy standards. Although U.S. cities and states have sought to fill the policy vacuum, here again important challenges remain. California has canceled the high-speed rail project linking San Francisco with Los Angles, citing cost overruns. Washington State citizens voted down initiatives for a carbon tax in 2016 and again in 2018. Even Seattle, whose Mayor took the leadership role in founding the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement in 2005, is witnessing rising carbon emissions.
Given these policy challenges, 26 commentaries in this blog symposium distill lessons from across the world in designing and implementing climate policies. The authors, located across eight countries, bring vastly diverse perspectives. They reflect the wisdom of multiple disciplines, including business strategy, economics, energy and environmental policy, geochemistry, geography, geology, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy and administration, and sociology.
These commentaries examine the challenges the GND needs to confront, given the short time frame for climate action. These include issues important in the study of public administration, such as top-down versus bottom-up policy design and implementation, community engagement through collaborative processes, and policy instrument choice. In addition, these commentaries examine how to encourage behavioral changes and pursue decarbonization while remaining responsive to equity and justice. Finally, they highlight the need for GND supporters to build political coalitions to ensure GND’s political survival, and the vital role of job creation and framing in this regard.
International Experiences with Climate Transition
For the last two decades, countries across the world have worked hard to design and implement climate policies. These efforts received a significant push in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 recession. But, as Edward Barbier notes, while countries devoted nearly 16% of their fiscal stimulus to climate policies, this green stimulus eventually lost steam. To maintain policy momentum, Barbier suggests that fiscal stimulus needs to be supported by additional policy measures. He favors carbon pricing because it creates economic incentives for behavioral changes and also pays for the stimulus (also see Patnaik and Lenferna).
Drawing on the experiences of South Korea’s and Japan’s carbon transitions, Mary Alice Haddad recommends that GND supporters craft policies that can create bipartisan coalitions. For Haddad, coalition building is essential for both policy adoption and policy survival. This is where the GND confronts the “jobs versus environment” debate. Given the high levels of economic anxiety in the country, the GND’s survival depends on its job-creating potential. This is the secret of the survival of green energy in Germany. As Sebastian Sewerin and the ETH Zurich Energy Policy group point out in their commentary, Germany’s feed-in-tariff policy has survived political upheavals because it has created a coalition of policy beneficiaries: 350,000 local jobs and a multi-billion-euro renewable energy industry.
In contrast to Germany, India offers a cautionary story. Siddharth Sareen notes that while India mobilized stakeholders by establishing clear renewable energy targets, it failed to create the domestic industrial capacity to supply solar panels and wind turbines. Hence, the employment gains from the energy transition leaked overseas, notably to China. Consequently, in India, energy transition remains an elite-driven process without substantial support from any grassroots political coalition. This makes policy vulnerable; indeed, the manifestos of India’s major political parties barely talked about climate issues in the recently concluded federal elections.
Does then the GND require a new industrial policy? Donal Brown, Stephen Hall, Benjamin Sovacool, and Tom Bailey reflect on the effort of the British Labour Party to enact its version of the GND. The Labour plan is filled with sectoral targets from retrofitting buildings to transportation and electricity generation. Importantly, this plan calls for nationalization of the electricity grid and a drastic restructuring of energy markets. Could this work in the U.S.? Probably not. For example, see the deep divisions even within the Democratic party to proposals such as Medicare for All. This suggests that lessons from abroad must be understood in terms of the political and institutional context in which specific policies are enacted.
Many suggest that the GND must have a plan for pricing carbon, either through carbon taxes or through measures such as cap and trade. Sanjay Patnaik’s commentary emphasizes administrative challenges in creating a cap and trade system. This sort of a detailed blueprint is absent from the GND. In addition to establishing comprehensive mechanisms to measure emissions and monitor compliance, Patnaik notes the need for administrative capacity to deal with issues such as cyberattacks against the online emissions permit registry (also see Dimand).
The Subnational Dimension of the Green New Deal
In the absence of federal leadership (or in the face of federal hostility), U.S. cities and states play an important role in the ongoing energy transition. The GND should build on this momentum, but carefully and systematically. Cities and states are laboratories for policy experimentation. GND supporters should evaluate what sort of experiments might be scaled up to the national level. Sara Hughes outlines how New York City has sought to reduce energy consumption by employing a system of benchmarking. This informs both city officials as well as property owners about their carbon footprint, triggering behavioral changes (also see Stern et al. and Nicholas and Wynes). These sorts of “information-based” policy approaches are well established and are amenable to upscaling.
We often think of governments as policymakers and regulators. But governments are also major buyers of goods and services. Ana-Maria Dimand notes the substantial buying power at the disposal of U.S. states and cities and how it can be leveraged to promote climate-friendly products. However, green procurement needs a robust administrative infrastructure because public procurement takes place through a tendering system. Cities need trained personnel to write tenders and evaluate bids. Thus, the GND needs to be more than a fiscal stimulus; it needs to invest in building administrative capacities.
But capacities also may not suffice because climate change remains a partisan issue. Even when U.S. cities in conservative states talk about climate policies that create local benefits (as opposed to a global public good), they face partisan backlash. GND-type policies are particularly susceptible because the GND is viewed as promoting socialism. Rebecca Romsdahl suggests that cities should adopt GND-type policies but not call them so. Policies should be framed in terms of their local benefits, such as energy savings and flood management, and not climate change (also see Lenferna).
The GND’s political appeal can be facilitated by the active involvement of local stakeholders as well. Carmen Sirianni notes that collaborative processes uncover policy preferences and allow for appropriate policy design. He draws on the experience of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, the Chesapeake Bay Program, and the National Estuary Program. Thus, while there might be a temptation to impose the GND mandate in a top-down fashion, mimicking the federal environmental approach of the 1970s, without local buy-in the GND’s implementation will face enormous pushback from local stakeholders.
Cities and states often operate in the shadow of the federal government. While the U.S. federal government acted as an impediment to climate action, the Canadian experience is different. Brett Cease, Mark Purdon, and Ross Astoria note how the Canadian federal government has enacted a revenue-neutral federal carbon tax. While it faces a pushback from provinces such as Alberta and Ontario, it is supported in Quebec and British Columbia. Canada’s flexible federal approach allows considerable autonomy to provinces as long as they meet the minimum federal standards.
Climate Equity and Justice
The benefits and costs of climate action are often perceived as asymmetrically distributed across communities, sectors, and countries. The issues of justice and equity are crucial to climate change because typically the poor and minority communities bear the costs of climate action while the elites capture the benefits. Angela Adrar, Olivia Burlingame, Anthony Rogers-White, and Fernando Tormos-Aponte argue that governments must, therefore, co-produce climate policies with frontline communities that disproportionately bear climate costs. In addition to the moral dimension, there is a political necessity for policy co-production. Communities feel ownership over policies when they are actively involved in designing and implementing them. Thus, when policies are sought to be overturned, these communities rise in protest. The saga of the (failed) 2009 American Clean Energy and Security Act reminds us that policies based on elite consensus without input from frontline communities have a short shelf life.
But stakeholder engagement alone does not guarantee that climate justice issues will be addressed. Jill Lindsey Harrison notes that the current environmental justice framework provides the authority and resources to regulatory agencies to implement climate policy reforms. Yet, regulators do not adequately exercise these powers. In addition to political meddling and organizational lethargy, Harrison points to the issue of administrative culture: some staff believe that environmental justice issues offend their notions of fairness and undermine policy implementation. Here again, the GND has an important administrative component. Enacting GND policies alone will not suffice; its successful implementation will require a cultural change in administrative agencies.
The climate transition will impose disproportionate costs on some communities and sectors. Domestically, blue-collar unions have been lukewarm towards the GND because they fear that it will kill jobs. Some social justice groups feel that climate policies such as carbon taxes will increase energy costs. There are several initiatives already in place to address such concerns. These initiatives enhance access to clean energy, encourage community participation in energy-related decision-making, and help communities cope with the decline of fossil-fuel jobs. Sanya Carley, Caroline Engle, David Konisky, and Savannah Sullivan identify 185 national, regional, and local programs in this regard. The challenge for the GND is to expand such programs to both serve the goals of equity and generate political support for the transition to a low carbon economy.
Unions will play an essential role in the design of a “just transition.” J. Mijin Cha points to the successful collaboration between unions and environmental groups that lead the state of New York to launch the Clean Climate Careers Initiative. This initiative has focused on investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the installation of solar panels on public buildings. Consequently, it is expected to create 40,000 climate jobs. Thus, labor unions might lose jobs in some sectors, but they will gain in other sectors, as long as initiatives are developed collaboratively.
Climate justice does not stop at a country’s borders; the GND will probably create unexpected international spillovers. Susan Park, Teresa Kramarz, Craig Johnson, and Stacy Van Deveer point out that many of the raw materials needed in the solar and wind energy sectors are procured from overseas. Thus, there is a danger that the US-focused GND will be based on an exploitive and environmentally destructive global economy where the costs of the energy transition are externalized to developing countries. Hence, the GND must carefully assess the resource requirements of the energy transition and outline a workable plan to address the international impacts of this transition.
Policy Lessons from Past Experiences
The Green New Deal builds on the legacy of FDR’s New Deal. But some aspects of the New Deal have created enormous contemporary policy problems. Ritwick Ghosh notes that the New Deal sought to modernize agriculture by massively subsidizing fertilizer use. While this has increased production, it has created water pollution problems along with an energy-intensive agriculture system. Lennart Olsson documents another unpleasant New Deal legacy: a reliance on annual crops. Modern agriculture is unsustainable because it relies on an annual cropping approach that disrupts the ecological system. Given the large carbon footprint of the agriculture sector, along with the need to feed the growing global population, the GND must incorporate drastic measures to undo the harmful legacies of FDR’s New Deal for the agriculture sector.
The New Deal relied on a top-down administrative system to implement its various programs. Luke Fowler and Monica Hubbard’s commentary documents how the New Deal concentrated fiscal power in the federal government. In a reversal of the 1920s, the federal government began outspending all states combined. But even beyond the spending power, many federal programs required states to provide matching funds. Hence, the federal government’s actual control over policies extended well beyond its spending. The GND cannot and should not rely on such top-down policy models. For one, with the policy gridlock at the federal level and the resurgence of federalism, such models are simply unworkable. Hence, the GND requires a rethinking of how policies and programs will be designed and implemented at different levels, and how the federal government will work with states and cities in this regard.
Bad legacies can arise in different contexts as well: nuclear energy is a case in point. Since the Three Mile Island accident, the U.S. nuclear power industry has been in serious political trouble. However, as James Conca and Judith Wright point out, renewables alone cannot meet the goal of decarbonization. Nuclear energy will need to play a role, for several reasons. First, climate activists forget that solar and wind energy require massive amounts of material such as steel. In addition to the energy intensity of steel production, the world simply does not produce enough steel to support an energy transition based solely on renewables. Nuclear energy, in contrast, makes much more modest demands on materials. Furthermore, nuclear energy has another attractive dimension: it will create local jobs because it can draw on domestic manufacturing capacity (also see Sewerin et al., Sareen, and Conca and Wright). Thus, the challenge for GND supporters is to rebuild political support for nuclear energy based on scientific evidence about its true risks and benefits.
The Behavioral Dimensions of Carbon Transitions
Might the transition to a low-carbon economy require actors to change their behaviors? After all, as the voluminous literature on diffusion notes, suitable technologies do not always get adopted, even when they make economic sense. Drawing on past efforts to promote the adoption of green technologies and pro-environmental behaviors, Paul Stern, Kimberly Wolske, and Thomas Dietz outline design principles for the GND. Ideally, GND policies should take into account behavioral impediments to “virtuous” behaviors.
Transportation is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Given the rapid urbanization worldwide, how should the GND rethink urban transportation systems? Paul Steinberg makes a case for investing in cycling infrastructure. Because cycling benefits marginalized communities that often lack personal automobiles, Steinberg suggests that cycling infrastructure supports the dual goals of transportation equity and climate change.
The aviation sector, another component of the transportation system, is an important contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. Across many countries, social movements have emerged that urge people to fly less. Kimberly Nicholas and Seth Wynes make a case for behavioral interventions along with institutional changes to reduce flying. The GND should draw on lessons from, say, public anti-smoking campaigns that promoted behavioral changes through policies such as informing travelers about the climate impact of their trips (also see Hughes).
Generating Policy Support for the Green New Deal
GND supporters need to create a political coalition to support its adoption and its survival in the wake of political upheavals. Andreas Duit suggests learning from the welfare state experiment in this regard. He emphasizes the need to compensate actors who think they are losing from the economic transition. This requires climate policies to be incorporated in a new social compact, embedded environmentalism, that protects actors who will lose their jobs. Duit points to the political vulnerability of the GND because, unlike social democratic parties that supported the welfare state, the U.S. does not have a viable Green Party. This means the GND needs to look for other models of generating political support.
Will Holt’s commentary underlines an often forgotten fact: the progress on the New Deal was gradual. FDR carefully constructed a coalition of disparate groups that varied across policies. He also brokered the tension between labor unions and environmentalists. Thus, GND proponents need to create coalitions behind specific programs, as opposed to hoping for a broad political collation across all policies.
Of course, political support even from the long-time supporters can falter if they perceive policies to be hurting them. Alex Lenferna points to the “yellow vest” protests in France and the defeat of the two successive carbon tax referendums in the highly liberal and pro-environment Washington State. He argues that policy instruments such as the carbon tax can generate opposition even among pro-environment constituencies. He attributes the unpopularity of carbon taxes to the notion that citizens view taxes as punishments. Instead, climate policies can gain political traction if they promise jobs and prosperity instead, a point echoed in many commentaries.
In conclusion, this symposium offers ideas on the GND’s policy translation. Such a massive economic transformation will pose unanticipated problems and also create new opportunities. Policy and behavioral changes will be slow. Without the appropriate support structures, they might be reversible. This blog symposium distills the wisdom of the past and outlines an agenda for the future. Its cross-disciplinary and international scope captures the complexities in the structural transformation of the economy. We hope this symposium will be read widely by both academics and policy practitioners. We believe it can also serve as an excellent pedagogical tool to inform students of the policy pathways to a low-carbon economy.
Nives Dolsak is a Professor of Environmental Policy and the incoming Director of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs at University of Washington, Seattle.
Aseem Prakash is a Professor of Political Science, the Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Founding Director of the Center for Environmental Politics at University of Washington, Seattle.