(Opinion) As the city struggles with scarce financial resources to address the great needs of city residents, now is the time to set our sights on achieving a Green New Deal.
Much of public life is now shut down.
Our schools, restaurants, small retail businesses, gyms, hair salons are not open, and most of their workers are furloughed or unemployed.
Airplanes are not flying. Oil, gasoline, and other petroleum products cannot be sold; there is no market for them, and oil companies must rent tankers to hold their excess supply.
Thankfully, the grocery stores are open, and there is food on the shelves. But many now lack the money to buy food, and many can no longer pay their rent or mortgages.
The shock and extent of this economic shutdown is reminiscent of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it is not clear how long it will last.
If the economy is opened too soon, the virus will spread again, and the economic damage will be more long lasting.
But the pandemic will end, and the economy in some form will return.
The question we should be asking now is: What do we want when we come back?
Now is the time we can begin to think deeply and clearly about the kind of economy we want, and what its priorities should be.
The economy that we now like to call “normal” was an economy based on extraction, speculation, and waste. The old “normal” economy extracted resources from the natural world – particularly its carbon-based fuels, as well as ores, minerals, lumber, and the flesh of animals. It also extracted labor from human beings, generally in exchange for insufficient pay, health care, education, pensions, and leisure time.
The old “normal” economy created enormous amounts of wealth through speculation, through betting on the “futures” of where the monetary value of stocks would go, through the creation of complex financial instruments involving the buying and selling of debt, of hedges and leveraging – of all manner of activities which do nothing but create more wealth for already wealthy investors.
In this way, our old “normal” economy created mind-boggling monetary rewards for people whose work was nothing but, quite literally, producing money; while forcing people who grow food, sell food, serve food, who care for the disabled and elderly, who keep our cities clean, who clean hotel rooms, who care for and teach young children… the “normal economy” forced all of these workers to live at or near poverty levels.
We might notice that now, during the pandemic, we hail all these workers as “essential”! How then will we treat these “essential” workers in the economy to come?
And finally, the old “normal” economy had a particular genius for producing waste. Our school-to-prison pathway guarantees that a sizeable portion of our population, especially young men of color, is deemed worthless and is locked away, unable to learn, to work, or to vote.
Our habits of consumption require goods that are overpackaged, then soon broken or made obsolete, our meat industry produces unimaginable amounts of waste that it is unable to process safely; likewise the chemical industry; likewise most industries.
We are destroying the forests that allow the earth to breathe. We are destroying oceans. We are extinguishing millions of species. And of course, our continued reliance on fossil fuels creates the emissions that are warming the planet, narrowing our corridors of habitation and food production, leading us toward a world that can no longer support human life.
Our normal economy is based on human and material waste.
So, what do we want as the economy makes ready to move toward some “new normal,” as the popular phrase goes?
Do we really want all those airplanes in the sky again? Do we really need to fly to Washington, to Pittsburgh, to Chicago? Why don’t we invest in high speed electric trains?
Do we really want all the meat packing plants to reopen? Why not invest in nutritious vegetable foods that do not damage the environment – and then pay decent wages to the people who produce and sell them?
Do we really want all those cars back on the roads? Why don’t we invest in real, effective mass transit systems using all electric vehicles, and accelerate the shift to private electric vehicles and the high speed charging stations needed to make electric vehicles practical?
Why don’t we invest in good housing with good insulation so that we use and waste less energy.
Why don’t we install solar panels on every roof that can maintain them?
And why would we allow the oil industry to come back to “normal” and continue to destroy our habitable world? Why not make that transition now, as we come out of our pandemic depression, to a wholly renewable energy economy of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, etc.?
Why don’t we train and hire local workers, especially from poor neighborhoods, to do these jobs?
Why don’t we honor and reward our Essential workers with good pay, health care, education for their children, real leisure time – and the right to join unions that will fight for these things?
Why don’t we make good education, which is the foundation of real democracy, a reality rather than just political lip-service?
Why don’t we take political power away from the extractors, speculators, and wasters who now run the show — and direct our resources to creating a new normal economy that is both just and sustainable?
It turns out that the struggles for economic-social-racial justice and the struggle for climate justice are actually the same struggle. That is the logic of the Green New Deal.
We must direct our energies toward making a Green New Deal our “new normal.”
Contributed photo
James Berger.
James Berger is on the steering committee of the New Haven Coalition for a Green New Deal. He teaches American Studies and English at Yale.