[MCN] My take: Why All the Uproar Over the Green New Deal?

[Lance Olsen]

Counterpunch   APRIL 3, 2019

Why All the Uproar Over the Green New Deal? <https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/03/why-all-the-uproar-over-the-green-new-deal/>
Same ol’ same ol’ battle: The more things change, the more they stay the same

by LANCE OLSEN <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/lance-olsen/>
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/03/why-all-the-uproar-over-the-green-new-deal/ <https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/03/why-all-the-uproar-over-the-green-new-deal/>

Excerpts: In fact, an attack against renewables was kicked into gear years ago, and the current anti-Green New Deal brouhaha  is just a rehash of an old campaign to defend the capital and capitalists aligned around combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. 

For example, in 2013, a half dozen years before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez signaled her support of the Sunrise Movement’s Green New Deal, David Robert’s excellent analysis for Grist spelled out that rooftop solar panels could compete against the coal-burning utilities, and that utility execs were openly admitting the risk to their profits, even to their industry <https://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/>.

With solar thus seen as a threat to the fossil fuel order, an offense against solar began at once, and the attacks spread to state legislatures all across the American landscape. By July 2017, the New York Times was reporting that “Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/08/climate/rooftop-solar-panels-tax-credits-utility-companies-lobbying.html>”.  The Times described “a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners to install solar panels.”

These attacks on solar soon extended to all renewable energy, predated the Green New Deal, were early warnings of the broader attacks we see now on the Green New Deal itself. 

These same old attacks on renewables have continued for basically the same old reasons. As of February 19, 2019, the Energy and Policy Institute <https://www.energyandpolicy.org/attacks-renewable-energy/> reported on direct attacks being led by the “coal and gas industries that fear competition from the booming renewable energy industry.”

Capitalist v. Capitalist 
Big Money is clearly at stake, as always. But now it comes with an added intrigue in the form of Big Money endangering lots of other Big Money, leaving the world of business increasingly sharply divided between fossil fuel capitalists and the rest of the capitalist world. 

Big Fossil Fuel Money is fighting against necessity to keep fossil fuels in the ground, unsold, with potentially huge losses of income and profit for coal, oil, and natural gas. At the same time, other Big Money is at risk if fossil fuel doesn’t stay sequestered where it is. The biggest risk here is in damage that storms, floods, and fires can do to tangible physical assets like dams, power lines, factories, resorts, homes — even to power plants dependent on fossil fuels.

A striking example of the potent new capitalist v. capitalist battle came on strong when the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change <https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/10/business/climate-change-investors-cop24/index.html>, a group of 415 investment firms managing combined assets worth more than twice the size of the entire Chinese economy, told governments to 1- back away from reliance on thermal coal, and 2- to give up subsidizing all fossil fuels, and 3- to get on with putting a price on carbon.

The net effect is that this vast mountain of capital is pushing in much the same general direction as the Green New Deal. 

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 “We live amid a global wave of anthropogenically driven biodiversity loss: species and population extirpations and, critically, declines in local species abundance. Particularly, human impacts on animal biodiversity are an under-recognized form of global environmental change. Among terrestrial vertebrates, 322 species have become extinct since 1500, and populations of the remaining species show 25% average decline in abundance. Invertebrate patterns are equally dire: 67% of monitored populations show 45% mean abundance decline. Such animal declines will cascade onto ecosystem functioning and human well-being.”

Rodolfo Dirzo, Hillary S. Young et al. Defaunation in the Anthropocene 
Science 25 JULY 2014 
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“Human society has yet to appreciate the implications of unprecedented species redistribution for life on Earth ….
 Even if greenhouse gas emissions stopped today, the responses required in human systems to adapt to 
the most serious effects of climate-driven species redistribution would be massive.”
 
Pecl et al. 2017. Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being
Science. 31 March 2017



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