Two weeks ago, in Policy for the Opposition, I suggested the Democratic Party adopt official policy in opposition to policy the coming administration will pursue. We need people officially speaking for the party (proposed by Timothy Snyder as I covered in Timothy Snyder and Shadow Government). And those people should promote solid policy based on progressive values.
In Policy for the Opposition, I proposed three policies that I think should be adopted by the party in the following areas:
- The Economy
- Immigration
- Foreign Policy
I proposed specific policies. Those who don’t like these policies need to put up something better. This eliminates fatuous criticism.
I’ve also shown that we can compete with Republicans on policy. All of my policy proposals are better than Republican policy. The values and goals are better than right-wing values and goals.
So, we can skip right over those obstacles.
Climate Change Policy Hits Home
Today, I’m going to extend that discussion to the area of climate change policy. While I put three policy areas in Policy for the Opposition, I don’t want to cover that much territory today. It’s been a trying week, and we all deserve a bit of a rest.
So, let’s stick to a limited topic, just the topic of climate change.
(I hope you are laughing along with me, not laughing at me. Ha. Ha. Just the topic of climate change. That’s all.)
Long ago (June 2017) I wrote A Progressive Response to Global Warming. A lot has happened since then, but I don’t think anything is fundamentally changed about the issue itself. The climate is warming. The right wing (and their front-men, the Republicans) still claim this is a hoax.
But it isn’t.
Let me revisit what I said in that article:
The effects of global warming are alarming and well-documented. Not long ago, Meteor Blades pointed us to Senators discussing climate change near Mar-a-Lago.
As I read his article, I noted with wry humor I lived in a house on Riverside Drive under the dot on the Florida map where it said “Cape Coral”. Gulf American Land Corporation constructed Cape Coral by floating barges through a swamp to scoop out canals and create building sites. Cape Coral has a mean elevation of 5 feet. Virtually all Cape Coral and its nearly 80,000 homes would disappear under a six-foot sea level rise, which is what Republicans plan for the not-too-distant future.
On September 28th, 2022, Hurricane Ian hit southwest Florida. According to Fox 4 News (WFTX-TV in Cape Coral), the storm surge in South Cape Coral (near the river, probably at the Yacht Club) was 7.25 feet.
Wikipedia reports that “the cities of Fort Myers, Cape Coral, and Naples were particularly hard hit”.
Much of the damage was from flooding brought about by a storm surge of 10–15 ft (3.0–4.6 m).
(From Hurricane Ian)
The one-story house I lived in was at 6 feet above mean sea level and within a stone’s throw of the Caloosahatchee River, which suggests the water was above roof level.
This is a foretaste of sea level rise. But with hurricanes becoming stronger and more common, it is also a weather forecast.
Continuing from my article:
People in Mar-a-Lago can expect pretty much the same experience. Palm Beach has a mean elevation of 7 feet. Bye bye!
In response to this dire threat, Trump unilaterally decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. A progressive policy obviously would include a re-commitment to the agreement’s goal “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels”. A strong progressive policy would go beyond re-upping. It would set concrete objectives that stop climate change.
Campaign on Clear Policy
I suggested the following plan:
- Companies will be prohibited from counting as assets most proven reserves of fossil fuel.
- The fossil fuel industry receives around $40 billion of annual subsidies in the U.S. These will be eliminated over four years.
- We will institute a carbon tax to recover the externalities of the industry and rebate the revenue to consumers to use on renewable energy.
- Subsidies now given to the fossil fuel industry will be directed to renewables to (1) increase funding for research, (2) help fund deployment, (3) build infrastructure to transmit electricity.
- A new urban corridor stretching from Youngstown, OH, to Des Moines, IA, will be developed, based on high-speed rail and high-capacity electrical transfer, to absorb up to 45 million of the estimated 135 million new U.S. residents expected between now and 2050.
- Current communities will be supported with programs like one to add energy retrofits in poor areas. This will use a catch-and-release program that acquired housing as it went on the market, upgraded the energy use profile, and returned those homes to the market.
- Brownfield areas will be rehabilitated for expanded manufacturing, consistent with manufacturing jobs being returned to the U.S. through better trade policy.
- The military will be substantially reduced in size and ordered to become carbon neutral by 2040. Congress will be induced to reduce funding over ten years to the 5X level.
(Note: Greenpeace recently estimated subsidies for the fossil fuel industry as closer to $20 billion a year, but the point is to eliminate all of them and subsidize renewable energy with that money.)
Get Rid of Fossil Fuels
The primary goal here is to transform our energy industry from fossil fuels to renewables. As I put it in this article:
Let me put that as bluntly as possible. I want to stamp out fossil fuels. Part of the problem convincing people to take on climate change is that proponents don’t want to offend anyone or ask people to do anything that might inconvenience them. Fixing global warming will inconvenience people and require significant change to society. Get used to the idea that what we are doing is transformative.
One of the biggest problems the Democratic Party has, in my opinion, is it’s horror at actually taking on the Republicans and their right-wing funders. This is a losing strategy. You cannot get the American people to believe in you if you half-side with your opponents. The Republican Party learned this long ago. That’s why you don’t see any compromise on their positions. They want to throw us all in jail. They don’t apologize for that, despite the fact it is immoral and illegal.
I don’t suggest anything immoral or illegal. But I do suggest we put forward really aggressive policy solutions. We should not be reasonable in our proposals. We should be realistic. And with climate change, realistic simply isn’t reasonable, if by that you mean something Republicans will go along with.
Look. They are wrong. Don’t give them an inch.
Build Renewable Infrastructure
In my article, I suggested building out renewable energy infrastructure. More recently, I’ve suggested looking to the northern triangle in South America as an area where we could offer a real deal that would enormously change the economy for that area. But that would require a major change to foreign policy, where we stopped fighting the cold war and got on with the twenty-first century. (See Defeating Republicans on Immigration.)
In my proposal, we would help countries like Venezuela build capacity to produce renewable energy devices (such as solar panels and wind turbines) for distribution in the U.S. and around the Caribbean. We would refine and use oil from these areas as the energy source for producing renewable energy devices (REDs).
From an energy point of view this is the most efficient infrastructure. Each erg of energy extracted from the earth is immediately multiplied by turning it into a RED. Only those devices are shipped, so that the overall energy use is minimized and the overall energy production is maximized.
There are significant challenges in this proposal, but solving them also solves a lot of other issues. For example, it puts downward pressure on migration by making the home countries for many migrants more hospitable. It also would damp down on violence and terrorism.
Make Sustainable Areas
I also suggested developing new areas in the U.S. with sustainable habitat. Projected population growth for the U.S. is unsustainable, unless we are very careful about how we expand the habitable areas here.
This is why I suggested a new urban corridor from Youngstown, OH, to Des Moines, IA. I call this the Midwestern Expansion Corridor. This would create a high-speed rail line and transform what is now mostly farm land into a residential and business area with sustainable building and land use. A high-capacity electricity transport system (probably using high-voltages DC cables) would allow wind energy to be transmitted along the corridor from areas with good wind resources to the people living on or near that corridor (places like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland).
As I mentioned in an edit from 2023, another area we should consider for an Expansion Corridor is the land near I-75 between Atlanta and Tampa. This would be a good place to install solar power that could be delivered to those cities. And certainly, if this model worked, we could find other places to use it, such as the Central Valley in California.
This doesn’t mean we should ignore current communities. The federal government and state governments should look at ways to reduce energy use not just in new builds but by retrofitting buildings and creating more efficient transportation structures. We should discourage working in offices and favor working from home. And we should examine our public policies to eliminate any incentive for people to have more children than they want. All public policy should be child-neutral, so that individuals have the maximum flexibility to decide whether to have children or not.
Align All Policy With Climate Change Policy
And we need to look at agricultural policies, as I’ve previously written, to support more efficient food production and distribution, while helping small farms become more profitable and do a better job with soil conservation.
We need really good alternative policy, so that we can take on the coming fascist onslaught. Climate change is a great place for that policy. Republicans are fighting an uphill battled on this issue. Climate change is real, it is caused by humans, and it is an existential threat to our species and all the species we care about. The Republicans are completely wrong-footed on the issue. By signing up with climate deniers, they hitched their wagon to a train engine headed right over a cliff.
Go Big
As I put it before:
Progressives should adopt specific policies. A big reason we see Republicans taking over government is because progressives stopped talking about major goals and campaigning for them. We, especially politicians in the Democratic Party, have often adopted defensive goals. We want to “save Social Security” or stop Republicans from undermining Roe v. Wade.
That’s not good enough.
To win, we have to define the future and force conservatives and their Republican field workers to defend their policy. This article puts specific, doable, but aggressive goals on the table for fighting climate change.
Let them defend a bleak earth of harsh winters, dust bowls, and inundated cities.
That’s how we win and they lose.
I’m reviving an old proposal here. But I think it has a lot of currency.
This week, we saw a major urban area burn to the ground, displacing tens of thousands of people and destroying tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars of our built environment. This is a direct result of climate change. Much as our opponents want to blame it on Democrats, the root cause of this is too much greenhouse gas in our atmosphere.
You might think, “we’re all responsible for that.” But here’s what I think. No. I think the right wing and their paid servants in the Republican Party are responsible for that.
Time we hold them to account.