At Last, a Climate Policy Platform that Can Unite the Left: The Factions of the Democratic Coalition Have Come into Alignment on Climate Change.

May 28, 2020

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by David Roberts (Vox) ... Robinson Meyer captured it well in a 2017 piece in the Atlantic: “Democrats Are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change.”

But something different has been happening lately, as groups across the left come together to hash out their differences on climate policy. It turns out they agree on quite a bit. In fact, for the first time in memory, there’s a broad alignment forming around a climate policy platform that is both ambitious enough to address the problem and politically potent enough to unite all the left’s various interest groups.

With the coronavirus raging and the economy facing a bleak near-term future, there is more appetite than ever for something big, a vision of a better post-virus economy and society. And such a vision is taking shape on the left.

If presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden were smart, he would embrace this vision, serve as its champion, and make a serious bid to unite the left behind him. And there are signs that he will try to do just that. It’s still a long shot, but there’s at least a chance that Democrats could go into the 2020 election with their act together on climate change. And who saw that coming?

In this post, I’ll offer an account of the new climate alignment: how it came to be, what kinds of climate policies it contains, what it leaves out, and its prospects moving forward. In a post coming soon, I’ll cover Biden’s climate strategy.

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Democrats in both the House and Senate drafted climate bills (the CLEAN Future Act and the Clean Economy Act, respectively), and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, which has been holding hearings all year, is expected to release its recommendations this summer.

Perhaps most notably, behind the scenes, nonprofits on the left began a flurry of climate policy conclaves and discussions — often across factional lines, involving mainstream groups, left groups, environmental justice groups, and unions — to try to determine where there was consensus and where disagreements remained.

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Though plenty of issues remain to be addressed, the broad left-of-center appears aligned around rapid decarbonization through stringent sector-specific standards, large-scale public investments, and a commitment to justice (“SIJ,” in my unwieldy acronym).

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Net-zero emissions by 2050 is the new baseline

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Though some activists might still wish for an earlier target, net zero by 2050 is incredibly ambitious. It will require a large-scale, rapid transition, driven by policy. Many of the people and groups endorsing it do not seem to fully comprehend this yet, but if you work backward from net zero by 2050, you arrive at policy radicalism. There’s no avoiding it.

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The second principle is that Republicans aren’t going to help. There are still some centrist groups that pursue bipartisan cooperation on climate, and groups of (retired, young, or otherwise not in power) conservatives that will talk to them. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and President Trump have convinced the vast majority of people on the left that there is simply nothing to be gained by pursuing Republican cooperation.

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Carbon pricing has been dethroned
The third principle, which falls out of the first two, is that carbon pricing — long treated as the sine qua non of serious climate policy — is no longer at the center of these discussions, or even particularly privileged in them. For one thing, there’s the political economy: Raising prices is unpopular, and raising prices enough, fast enough, to hit the 2050 target will be an almost insuperable political challenge. Cap and trade is still in the reputational toilet. Carbon taxes never saw the bipartisan support their backers always promised. The politics of carbon pricing just don’t seem to be going anywhere.

“The debate about whether a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax is the right solution for this crisis has completely gone out the window,” said Varshini Prakash, co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.

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There is still room for pricing in climate policy (if environmental justice concerns are taken into account), but the dream of having one simple plan that solves the climate problem is, at least on the left, dead. It is now clear, if only from the experience of states that have actually passed legislation, that something more pragmatic and targeted, something more like industrial policy, is needed.

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Standards: Electricity, cars, and buildings

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Together, those sectors make up close to two-thirds of US emissions. The core of any aggressive 10-year mobilization on climate must be to target them, not sideways through a carbon price, but directly, through sector-specific performance standards and incentives, to drive out the carbon as quickly as possible.

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The Evergreen platform would crank up fuel economy standards to ensure that all new vehicles sold in the US are zero-emission by 2030. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer proposed a plan to make all vehicles on US roads clean by 2040, combining trade-in incentives and grants for electric vehicle charging infrastructure.

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The ultimate vision is a carbon-free electricity sector powering an electrified, emission-free vehicle fleet and building stock.

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Justice: For unions, fossil fuel workers, and front-line communities
Unions, hard-hit fossil fuel communities, and vulnerable front-line communities have not always been prioritized in climate policy discussions, but this time around, in a break with past practice, they have been at the table from the beginning, helping to shape the policy platform.

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One of the reasons unions have traditionally been suspicious of climate campaigners is that, despite all the flowery talk about a “just transition,” in reality, the jobs being created by the clean energy economy pay less and are less likely to be unionized. Across the left, there is a shared recognition that public policy should aim to change that.

2. Fossil fuel communities

Similarly, communities dependent on fossil fuel jobs do not yet believe they will find equal or better livelihoods in a clean energy economy. They, too, have heard a lot of pretty talk, but the reality, from Appalachia to the shale fields of North Dakota to the coal mines of Wyoming, is that the loss of fossil fuel jobs tends to leave behind economic wreckage.

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Evergreen’s plan, for instance, contains a “G.I. Bill for impacted fossil fuel workers and communities” that would guarantee the retirement, pension, and health care benefits of all affected fossil fuel workers and provide them with ongoing income support and retraining opportunities. That’s the scale of intervention necessary to truly keep fossil fuel workers whole. And it’s probably much less expensive, economically and politically, than forever trying to overcome the opposition of fossil fuel communities.

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3. Front-line communities

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Rather than doing something for or about environmental justice communities, greens are making policy with them, around the same table. As Harper told me, “if you are down with equity, you’ve got to give us space.”

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One of the consequences of giving up on carbon pricing as a silver bullet is that you end up with silver buckshot — lots of smaller policies that add up to sufficiency.

The disaggregated nature of the policy has substantial political benefits, though. It was never easy to explain to industries or individuals how they would be affected by a complicated, indirect system of carbon credits, trading, and offsets — ask anyone involved in the 2009 Waxman-Markey fight. Because it is more sector-specific and investment-focused, the effects and benefits of SIJ for particular constituencies are easier to trace and explain.

It is likely to be more resilient than a single national program as well.

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“Through our stakeholder outreach and hearings,” said Castor, “we’ve found broad consensus for a climate plan that’s centered on building and rebuilding America’s infrastructure and creating a new generation of secure, middle-class jobs, all while enacting commonsense policies that support a clean energy economy and reinvigorate American manufacturing.”

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Accountability for fossil fuel companies

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Keep it in the ground

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Carbon pricing

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EJ advocates want polluting facilities shut down, not buying credits, and they want public investment in their communities.

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Nuclear power

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Carbon capture, use, and sequestration READ MORE