There is no mandate in the Green New Deal to keep fossil fuel in the ground. Instead, the Green New Deal proposes "to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions." This means that companies can pollute the atmosphere with carbon but "zero out" those emissions by, let's say, creating carbon-absorbing tree plantations in the Third World. This "net-zero" escape clause also opens the prospects for questionable technology to capture and store carbon. The major oil companies are salivating over these technology investments because that enables them to keep pumping oil while appearing to be "going green."
The Green New Deal places no limits on the activities of energy corporations or the banks that finance fossil-fuels. And let's not dance around reality. To truly reverse climate change, the oil industry would have to be put out of business.
3. The Green New Deal Gives the U.S. Military a PassThe genocidal U.S. military machine with its tanks, naval ships, warplanes that rain death and destruction, and its 800 military bases that girdle the globe, relies on fossil fuel. In fact, the U.S. military is the single largest institutional consumer of oil in the world. 4 Can you solve the problem of global warming while keeping that military machine in place? The Green New Deal doesn't say a word!
But it does declare, echoing Pentagon-think, that "climate change constitutes a direct threat to the national security of the United States."5 That is code for the criminal enforcement of the interests of the U.S Empire. In fact, Ocasio-Cortez in a recent video evoked the U.S. military during World War 2 as part of the glorious past of this country, when in fact this was a ruthless imperialist war culminating in nuclear holocaust committed by the U.S. against Japan.
The Green New Deal takes the New Deal of the 1930s and war mobilization of the 1940s as its model and people need to wake up to how FDR's New Deal served the American empire.
4. The Green New Deal Aims to Secure U.S. Dominance Under the Cloak of Green EnergyThe Green New Deal draft document says that "adopting [its] goals would make 'green' technology, industry, expertise, products, and services a major U.S. export. As a result, America could become an international leader in helping other countries transition to completely carbon-neutral economies." To some, this may sound positive and encouraging: America "will take the lead" in new, clean technologies and "help other countries." But don't get played: this is a green-chauvinist version of "Make America Great Again"...and it's dangerous.
U.S. imperialism has historically used technological advantage to out-compete dependent countries and to penetrate and dominate them. The so-called "green revolution"6 involving hybrid seeds, pesticides, and infrastructure investment was packaged to raise agricultural productivity in order to "help" poor countries. But these and other "cutting-edge" technologies serve profit. Imperialism exports and deploys them in ways that create and increase dependency on imperialism, whether as loans to be paid back, parts replacement, intellectual-property rights, and so on. For example, the global seed market is increasingly monopolized by major U.S. agro-business leading to harmful effects on biodiversity and financial dependency and ruin on the farmers who harness crops off them.
As for "climate-friendly" technologies, like solar and wind, the imperial mission set out in the Green New Deal to "help other countries" is a recipe for a kind of "climate colonialism." Western Europe is aiming to meet its renewable energy targets in part by investing heavily in solar and wind generation in North Africathat is, by grabbing land and renewable resources. 7 Energy-guzzling California is importing wind power from Mexico. The Green New Deal incentivizes this to a whole new level. Something else: some of the raw materials required in the manufacture of this green-energy technology will be extracted from the Third Worldby plundering land and super-exploiting workers.
5. A Sustainable Economy Without Comprehensive and Integrated Planning Is a DelusionTo truly confront and act on the environmental emergency, we need a whole different kind of economy--a genuinely socialist economy in which the means of production become the common property of society through public-state ownership, an economy in which resources are allocated according to a conscious plan to meet social need and protect and repair the environment.
The Green New Deal is the opposite of this. It relies on the imperialist market, on tax breaks and government incentives for the large corporations to invest in green technology, and making green profitable, all within and reinforcing the very system of capitalism-imperialism. Capitalism-imperialism is driven by competition to relentlessly expand production for profit and more profit, a system in which the major imperialist powers contend for control of regions, markets, and vital resources of the planet, and in which the natural world is treated as just so many "free" inputs to be seized and poured into production for profit.
The Green New Deal is not about the radical transformation of a profit-based capitalist economy. It's not about shattering a global network of exploitation. It's not about consciously regulating growth for the betterment of world humanity. The Green New Deal is an agenda to harness a less fossil-fuel-based infrastructure to the existing imperialist economy and to keep the U.S. at the top of the imperialist world system.
The Green New Deal is one part bullshit fantasy (an easy transition to sustainability) and one part a better business plan for a green American empire.
The Green New Deal is not a "something is better than nothing" proposition. Why is it harmful? It aims to mobilize resources and know-how to secure U.S. imperial hegemony with a green face. It corrals and channels people's outrage and concern, initiatives and energy, back into reinforcing the system that is the cause of the problem in the first place--an ACTUAL obstacle to what IS needed, which is to break out of the confines and framework of this system as part of getting rid of it. The Green New Deal does NOT get us or move us from "here" (the environmental emergency) to "there" (an economy and society that interact with nature in a sustainable way). It is a deceptive and harmful dead end.
THE ONE REAL SOLUTIONWe return to the two choices: let the planet hurtle uncontrollably towards environmental disaster; or make an ACTUAL revolution to overthrow this system and transform the entire economic, social, and political framework of society, to bring about a genuine socialist society.
The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian, sets forth how a genuine socialist society would be constituted and function; how it would be meeting the basic needs of people in a way that did not plunder either the nations of the Third World or the environment; its role in the world process of getting to a world free of exploitation, oppression, and antagonistic social divides; and how such a society would be able to address and tackle the environmental crisis. (Read the section of the Constitution on the environment here.)
On the basis of OVERTHROWING the old order and establishing a new revolutionary state power, it becomes possible to put an end to private production for profit, to socialize the means of production, and create a planned socialist economy that can allocate resources and consciously regulate economic growth for the betterment of world humanity and protection of the planet. One of the first acts of the new socialist state would be to totally dismantle the global network of U.S. military bases.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
