The struggle is on for control of the long-term Democratic climate agenda.
On Tuesday, close to 200 climate activists crowded into the Capitol Building offices of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who will re-assume the position of House speaker when the new Congress is sworn in come January.
The activists called on Pelosi to lead Democrats in developing an ambitious, comprehensive plan to address climate change — a Green New Deal. Halfway through the protest, rising Democratic star and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited to show her support, which drew a torrent of media coverage .
New Dem star protests speaker on first day of freshman orientation! The media loved it.
I’ll be honest, though. I’ve seen intra-left disputes on climate change reprise themselves over and over again, to no one’s benefit, and when I heard about this protest, I felt a twinge of dread. Why target Pelosi, who has always been a climate champion? And how is she supposed to have a comprehensive climate plan already when she hasn’t even taken the gavel? Aren’t there worse enemies of the climate to protest?
But I talked it out on Twitter, emailed with a few of the organizers, and now have a better handle on what’s going on. And it turns out to be quite a bit richer and more significant than what you might get from the headlines.
As I said in my Monday post on Democratic climate strategy in a polarized era, there are three basic prongs of a unilateral left strategy. The first is using House congressional committees to investigate and slow President Trump’s deregulatory agenda. The second is accelerating policy innovation in states that Democrats control.
And the third is defining a long-term, comprehensive federal climate agenda for when/if Democrats regain the power to implement one. That is why climate activists swarmed Pelosi’s office. The left is making an early bid to set the highest bar possible for the 2020 Democratic climate change agenda.
Here’s how it unfolded and what’s at stake.
Climate hawks received a few disconcerting signals in the wake of the midterm elections (which turned out to be a much bigger victory for Democrats than they appeared early on).
A piece in the Hill reported that House Democrats had no plans to move on climate change, which appeared nowhere in their list of priorities. Meanwhile, Pelosi, who is very much intent on keeping her speakership, started talking the day after the election about a “ bipartisan marketplace of ideas,” which is not exactly what you’d call reading the room.
Pelosi had signaled that she planned to revive the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming ( 2007-2011, RIP), but activists and the incoming class of social democrats wanted something much bolder. They needed something to rally around.
And here it is: AOC plans to introduce a draft resolution that would put parameters around the committee, its work, and its membership. It is… bold, to say the least.
The resolution — supported by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, two youth-led organizations pushing for a Green New Deal — has a number of interesting provisions, but two demands are central: that the committee be given a mandate to develop a Green New Deal that would decarbonize the US economy, and that no members be appointed who accept donations from the fossil fuel industry.
Specifically, the committee “shall have authority to develop a detailed, national, industrial, economic mobilization plan for the transition of the United States economy to become carbon neutral and to significantly draw down and capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans and to promote economic and environmental justice and equality.” It would be required to produce a draft plan by January 1,2020, and draft legislation by March 1,2020.
In other words, the committee must produce a package of legislation ready to move if Democrats take power in the 2020 elections.
Here are the goals the resolution sets for the Green New Deal:
That … pretty much covers it! It’s difficult to imagine how you could get any more ambitious than that.
Of course, every one of those bullet points represents dozens of policies and thousands of implementation challenges. Wonks like me look at this list and we wonder about the details. We wonder so hard, our hair tingles.
But that’s not really the point, at least for now. The point is this represents perhaps the first time in US history that a Democrat has proposed a plan for addressing climate change that actually scales to the problem and has some chance of influencing the party’s agenda.
But there’s more. The resolution is equally ambitious on the subject of equity. It says that the Green New Deal “is a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation.”
To that end, it instructs the committee to develop a plan that would include a job guarantee, measures to combat income inequality and racial injustice, and maybe a universal basic income (UBI) for good measure.
Here’s the full list of equity provisions:
As iv demonstrates, this is about much more than carbon. It doesn’t separate out the climate problem from society’s other ills, as climate wonks have so often advocated. It sees environmental, economic, and social problems as intertwined, with a common set of solutions.
It’s a full-spectrum vision of a sustainable social democracy — a level of progressive ambition that most US citizens have likely never encountered.
As for how to pay for this, all the resolution says is that funding will primarily come from the federal government, “using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”
So that’s AOC’s proposal: a committee on steroids, charged with developing the most ambitious national climate plan in history, with equity at its heart.
Political media desperately want the story of this protest, and AOC’s participation in it, to be another chapter of “Dems in Disarray.” But the truth is close to the opposite: This was a case of the Democratic base and leadership working together for mutual benefit. It was one big alley-oop.
Here’s how it went down.
Sunrise and Justice Democrats were planning a protest to push Pelosi on climate. AOC and her staff, who are in close touch with the activist left, suggested that protesters need something concrete to rally around, some specific demands; that’s why they wrote this draft resolution.
So protesters go to Pelosi’s office — where the cameras will be — as a show of force, to demand that Dems stop taking fossil fuel money and start planning for a real climate solution. AOC then comes to visit and support the protest, thus bringing more attention and more cameras.
Together, they help thrust climate change into the news cycle and get the term “Green New Deal” published in most of the nation’s newspapers, a fairly adroit bit of agenda-setting in a hostile media environment.
As for Pelosi? It would not surprise me at all to find out that she knew it was coming — was maybe even in on it. At the very least, she welcomed it and gave it further publicity:
Of course, this falls far short of accepting the protesters’ demands. (There will be much more intra-Dem negotiation before anything like that happens.)
But Pelosi is signaling to Democrats on her right that she is being pressured from the left on climate change, that this is where the energy and enthusiasm is among the party’s most active young supporters, that Dems will get hounded endlessly if they don’t act on this.
