Noam Chomsky: A Green New Deal Can Create Jobs and Livelihoods
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I really wish the "Green New Deal" wasn't mentioned in these pushes for the future. I don't think there was ever agreement on what the "general idea" of it was, and I don't think it deserves any credit for the few good ideas that it did contain. Sure, it's recognizable, but not necessarily in a good way.
The 1937 recession almost cost FDR the election. The unemployment rate didn’t reach normal levels again until the US entered the war.
Nobody will care that you didn't want to jump through hoops if you've lost the ideological argument in the court of public opinion.
If you look at the numbers in detail, you would see that when the US left the Gold Standard, growth immediately came back, industrialist production skes back up. This is pretty clear pattern with all the nations who were under deflationary pressure. Leaving the gold standard (or adjusting the exchange rate) was the fundamental thing that restarted the economy.
It is pretty clear that the NIRA actually stopped the ongoing recovery and indsutrial production only outpaced the pre-NIRA level again when NIRA was declared unconstitutional. Why anybody would declare the total madness of this program a success is just unbelievable to me. Massive destruction of food, mass slaughter of life-stock to increase prices. Blue Eagle program to 'keep prices high' were exactly the wrong things after a deflation.
Contrary to popular history, New Deal was not some brilliantly executed Keynesian program. In fact it does not fit any economics logic at all.
The US had one of the globally worst recovery path from 1931 to 1939 of all industrialized nations. Specially consider how well the came into the situation compared to everybody else. Why this period is hailed as a great success, is because it was an incredible political success as FDR managed to totally rebuild the democratic coalition. That coalition remains to this day. Of course the left and specially democrats hail it as the biggest success in centuries, because it was politically successful.
And the claimed that it 'prepared' to US is mostly wrong. Roosevelt to his credit was smart enough to kick most of the New Deal idiots out of his administration going into WW2 and worked with actually sensible people and during WW2 and after the US actually removed the majority of these terrible polices and that allowed the US to recover far better then most other countries.
Again, the Gold standard is what mattered the most and the New Deal got credit for a lot of that. This is pretty much the opinion of the waste majority of economics study on the this subject and fits in with global story of the Depression. Rather then a incredibly narrow US focused explanation political history wants to tell you. FDR got credit because he took over the administration right on the global back-swing and he used the opportunity to politically redefine the country. That is why it is remembered so well, much more then actual experience reports from back then.
Why mass destruction of food, stopping the recovery and being declared unconstitutional does not count as a failure is beyond me.
Yes, and what do you personally prefer to see instead?
> I don't think it deserves any credit for the few good ideas that it did contain
Why would something not deserve credit for any good ideas it contained?
> Sure, it's recognizable, but not necessarily in a good way.
I'm really not trying to nitpick, but it seems like you're overgeneralizing. To whom would it be recognizable but not necessarily in a good way?
That's nowhere near as useful as
"What do you think we can reasonably expect at least 180 million (geographically distributed) Americans to accept?"
It is time that tech people looked themselves in the mirror and said, "Nobody gives a damn what I want, and I should stop acting like they do." There is no point system. We get nothing for 'being right' but not getting any traction. There is no gold star waiting for you at the end (and we aren't 6).
You can't solve policy problems thinking the same way you do about convincing more than half of a room of people to upgrade that library you use. That's four people, possibly including yourself. While success may make my life a lot easier, that barely ranks as an accomplishment. Large groups of people are so much harder to manage than small groups that it's not even funny.
"Politics is the Art of the Possible"
Since you seem to agree, I'll give this privilege to you.
> Why would something not deserve credit for any good ideas it contained?
It was a packaging of some ideas, not the source.
> I'm really not trying to nitpick, but it seems like you're overgeneralizing. To whom would it be recognizable but not necessarily in a good way?
It had no regards for feasibility, and most people noticed. I don't think using the name of something infeasible is good when you're proposing something that you want to be considered feasible. It also contained very significant social programs that are usually unrelated.
I don't think that people realize how much this pandemic is a walk in the park compared to whats coming down the road. I don't think people want to think. I think they want to stick their head in the sand and ignore the fact that there have been many calamities in human history. Perhaps they never heard of the 10s of millions of people who starved to death in Asia less than a century ago. That was a walk in the park by comparison.
Finally, I think that people don't realize how many of the technologies that they so happily embrace (without understanding how they work or where they came from) are the result of the same scientific process that has led 11,000 scientists to tell us that our time to act is growing very short.
That's the general idea of it. And I feel sorry as hell for today's wonderful kids who will have to pay with a miserable life (those who survive) for the willful ignorance of their parents and grandparents.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...
It's too early to tell if we can "fix" climate change (we might only mitigate the worst of it depending on the atmospheric CO2 PPM high water mark we land at) but if we're going to implement extraordinary socioeconomic policy, we should head in the right direction and adjust as needed along the way. Many can be trained to install solar panels and wind turbines, to upgrade electrical infrastructure, to install EV charging stations, or rooftop solar. These are all jobs that you cannot outsource to a developing country, jobs that have traditionally paid a reasonable wage.
We're going to spend the money we're printing [2] anyway, we might as well give success an honest shot. There are much worse ways we've spent trillions of dollars our economy has produced, or that we've borrowed from a future that couldn't consent to said borrowing [3]. We're already on the right path [4], it’s time we deliberately choose to succeed.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too." -- JFK
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Relief
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL (St Louis Fed: Federal Reserve Total Assets)
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on... (America has spent $6.4 trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001, a new study says)
[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0... (NPR: Pandemic Shutdown Is Speeding Up The Collapse Of Coal)
Instead, it's probably better for the government to be the salary provider of last resort, via some basic income (universal or otherwise) or a negative income tax, and then imposing steep taxes on externalities.
Keep in mind that we already have a negative income tax in the US: the Earned Income Tax Credit. We're really just talking about expanding that.
I think that modifying the Earned Income Tax Credit (which was introduced by Nixon, then expanded by Reagan) by further expanding it, and then removing the employment requirement is a way easier sell to Americans than fundamentally shifting towards central planning.
If we’re talking about climate, it’s probably far easier and far more effective to institute steep carbon taxes. It should be very easy to do that especially now, oil is the cheapest that it’s ever been.
Regardless, we know there's a flame there. Let's at least try to move it away a few cm, if possible, since that's the only thing we have control of.
If human beings had any sense at all, we'd accept that we cannot control the climate and we'd do well to prepare for either a warmer or cooler climate. In other words, we should be adaptable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyapunov_time
We understand weather far better than we understand climate. And we cannot predict it more than 10 days into the future.
At any rate of you want to hear it from true experts here are a few:
Richard Lindzen, PhD Atmospheric Sciences, MIT https://youtu.be/X2q9BT2LIUA
Patrick Moore, UBC https://youtu.be/kHZKo13HV2A
Henrik Svensmark, Danish Space Institute https://youtu.be/wU1qg8HceGI
Freeman Dyson, Cornell https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BiKfWdXXfIs
NASA admitting they have no model for clouds: https://youtu.be/ra9AFNco3lI
Let's play a coin game. We'll throw a fair coin 100,000 times. Beforehand, I predict the number of heads +-0.5%. If I'm right, 1,000$ for me, if I'm wrong, 1000$ for you.
The probability that my prediction is correct is more than 99.8%. Nevertheless, I can predict a single coin flip only with a 50% chance.
A single coin flip represents a weather forecast. Climate, however, is the long term average, represented by the total number of heads. Even if I cannot predict the individual events (like tomorrows weather), I can say something about the averages with high probability.
Humans can control human behavior. Just because other, uncontrollable risks exist does not mean we should just give up.
While there are large error margins due to that non-linearity, literally all of our evidence (including causative models, e.g. grade school greenhouse science experiments) indicates bad things. Those may not come to pass, or they may not be human related -- nothing is certain -- but there's precious little evidence in the other direction.
Outcomes may vary, you are right. Yet nearly all available evidence suggests we should accept AGW as the most likely situation, while accepting there may be other, more accurate predictions. We should change our behavior only once new evidence comes in indicating a different conclusion.
> everything is expected to change: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the landscapes we see, the oceans, the seasons, the daily routine, the quality of life. Our children will have to adapt or become extinct. They will have to dress differently, behave differently, live differently.
Sounds bad! I'm open to ideas on how to prevent such radical disruptions. But the author suggests that we need to end fossil fuel consumption, reconfigure our economic system, reconsider what it means to have a decent life, and eliminate our desire to consume lots of goods and services. Shouldn't we expect a comparable amount of disruption from these huge changes?
I think our children will experience both scenarios anyway (they already do in poorer countries).
You're going to have a hard time fixing the climate if you also attach with it a completely unrelated laundry list of desired left-wing policy (not even trying to knock left-wing policy).
It's functionally equivalent to adding a corporate-gender-diversity quota to the Coronavirus stimulus.
I would like to see a demonstration that ecological collapse cannot happen exponentially in response to a linear change in the environment. I am no ecologist, but I don't believe it.
I am not very confident about America's ability to handle global warming disasters in ten years.
Because there is a lot of subtlety in the way we contrast subsidies with normal tax deferrals, it may be clarifying to consult this fact sheet from EESI, which is a successor of the Environmental Study Conference caucus originally in the US Congress:
https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...
>Well, what’s the difference between the Green New Deal of today and the New Deal from the 1930s? Several things. One thing that’s different is large-scale labor action.
It wouldn't be a Chomsky essay without a paean to the labor movement.
I think that the "Green New Deal" is the wrong name. The "New Deal" was a principally economic initiative. Climate change affects the economy, but climate change is really about physics. The appropriate analogy would be to the Manhattan Project, not the New Deal. (Nuclear technology has also had a massive effect on the economy!)
One unfortunate consequence of the naming trend "Green New Deal" has been an excessive focus on economic remedies which overshadows the most important scientific advances. Recently the most important advances have been in the production and price of lithium batteries.
There are approximately 500 trillion pounds of lithium in the ocean, as well as many cheaper sources on land. The lithium iron-phosphate chemistry is not dense enough for use in cars or portable electronics, but on a cost basis it is quickly eclipsing all other forms of energy storage. At present, the development of this technology is limited mostly by low demand, which is utterly ridiculous when you consider that the widespread adoption of grid-scale energy storage is absolutely essential to there ever being a near-zero-carbon electricity market.
The other key technology that needs to be developed further is the heat pump. Heating buildings with gas accounts for a large fraction of our carbon emissions and can't be easily replaced by Joule heating because the electricity requirements are so large. Therefore the near-zero-carbon replacement for gas heating must be some variety of heat pump, be it vapor-compression, magnetocaloric or otherwise. The current commercially available air-source heat pumps are limited to a minimum outdoor air temperature of about -20 C, which means that they are not viable for year-round heating in many large global cities, including e.g. Chicago, Moscow, Harbin, et cetera. Ground-source heat pumps by contrast have high installation costs which increase with the desired power output. Improvements in one or the other are needed to reach the necessary endpoint where nearly all of the human population can stop relying on gas heating.
He's making his own, obvious contradictory conclusions, can't blame the messenger.
This was inevitable under capitalism. As a system that requires constant growth, it is incredibly brittle and does not lend itself well to long-term, sustainable planning. The only question for me now is: how do we best prepare ourselves for the upcoming crisis, such that we might be able to construct an equitable, sustainable society out of it? Crisis doesn’t guarantee revolutionary change — but it can if we're organized properly.
You can pin-point the start of the recovery to the leaving of the gold standard (literally in the month by month producing you see it jumping). It was actually the New Deal that stopped the bounce back.
The politicians behind the new deal saw the Great Depression as an opportunity for social revolution, not as an economic recovery program. It is no secret that many of the primary architects behind the New Deal were strongly inspired by early socialism and fascism.
Further I would say Noam Chomsky has absolutely zero credibly in any topic related to economics. He is a weirdo socialist and we could go down 3 levels deep of what type of socialist exactly he is, but needless to economics and political science would agree that his ideas are not practical. So why take a advice from him on this.
You don't need a 'New Deal' you need to apply your budget and countries strategy with the long run goals you have and make good investments. The New Deal was the exact opposite, it was the embodiment of 'lets throw shit on the wall and hope for the best' often doing massive damage in the process. Mass slaughtering of pigs and destruction of other foods being the most absurd examples of such idiocy. The Blue Eagle program might be the worst regulation ever passed in American history. The list goes on.
Depending on what exactly you want to achieve, their are far, far better solutions then having the government bureaucrats blow billions of 100s of billions on politicians pet projects. Its totally contrary to how good government contract is done.
Just as with the original New Deal this Green New Deal is not about achieving results. Its is about achieving social and governmental revolution along the principles that the authors believe in.
The “job creation” benefit myth needs to die. Some jobs are bad jobs, some have little or no economic value. Green New Deal advocates need to focus on the economic benefits of these plans, such as a healthier population due to less pollution, saving economical important properties from flooding, maintaining healthy fish stocks, etc, etc.