November 16, 2016 | Ted Nordhaus
This
is the space where I am supposed to write about what a Trump Presidency
might portend for climate, energy and the environment. At present, I
don’t believe I can in good faith do so.
Our view at Breakthrough remains that macro-economic conditions, technological change, and public investment in innovation and infrastructure are
the primary determinants of global emissions. At least insofar as
climate change is concerned, a Trump Presidency may not be much worse
than a Clinton Presidency would have been, for the simple reason that
explicit climate policy has had little impact upon the trajectory of
emissions pretty much anywhere in the world.
But
all of that at the moment seems largely beside the point. The problem
with all such speculation is that it normalizes the Trump Presidency at a
moment when it is not at all clear that Trump and many of his
supporters are fully committed to basic democratic norms.
These
concerns are separate and distinct from the various policies that Trump
has proposed. Trump campaigned and won the election fair and square.
He has every right to pursue his agenda and vision for the country. When
and if it becomes clear that democratic norms will prevail in the new
Administration, that Trump does not intend to prosecute his political
opponents, squelch dissent, and harass the free press, I will happily
praise the Administration when it takes actions that I believe to be
consistent with health, prosperity, equity, and environmental
protection, and criticize it when it does not.
But
the signals have thus far been mixed and that presents complicated
decisions for those of us in think tanks, advocacy organizations, and
the media. Most of our professional incentives are to act as if some
version of normal democratic discourse and policy-making will prevail.
There is not much for us to do, at least in the normal way that
advocates advocate and analysts analyze, in the event that those norms
do not prevail. The risk for all of us is that in our haste to get back
to normal politics and advocacy, we normalize a dangerous turn toward
authoritarianism.
Already,
the siren song of collaboration is strong. Trump could be good for
nuclear energy. He plans to make big investments in infrastructure. He
appears to be backpedalling on many of his most outrageous promises.
I
can understand the appeal, especially for those of us who strongly
believe that nuclear energy must be a core technology in any plausible
path to climate mitigation, Democrats have been at best fickle allies
and environmental groups have been committed opponents.
But I, for one, would counsel caution.
Back in 2004, when Michael Shellenberger and I wrote “The Death of Environmentalism,”
we argued that environmentalism was failing because it had become a
special interest. Environmentalists had constructed an interest called
“the environment” and then advocated for it in the same way that the
insurance industry or the auto industry or the labor movement advocated
for its interests.
That
insight is all the more important today. Trump may build better roads
and airports and the trains, as the old saw goes, might run on time. He
might even lead a nuclear renaissance. But no amount of clean energy or
infrastructure is worth forfeiting what remains of our civic and
democratic culture.
Further,
it is difficult to imagine a democratic path toward an ecomodern future
that does not successfully address the twin challenges of immigration
and multiculturalism on the one hand and deindustrialization on the
other. These challenges are bedeviling advanced developed economies all
over the world and represent the underlying crisis of the
post-industrial economy and polity. Democracy, civil society, and the
environment all demand that we not retreat back to our silos to advocate
for the narrow technical, regulatory, and bureaucratic solutions in
which we have become expert.
The Fire This Time
“The
Death of Environmentalism,” was published just a few weeks before the
reelection of George W. Bush and helped provoke a rare moment of
introspection on the Left. It was read by some to be a call to create a
broader coalition on the progressive Left of environmental, labor, and
social justice groups to fight climate change and by others as a call to
reframe the traditional environmental agenda as one that would create
jobs and economic opportunity. Actually, what we had in mind was a more
fundamental reimagining of liberal and progressive politics for a
post-industrial globalized economy in which both the scale and nature of
ecological challenges would be fundamentally different.
In
any event, the introspection didn’t last long. In 2006, Democrats swept
away Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. In 2008, Barack
Obama won the presidency, supported by a multicultural majority that
appeared to have remade the American political landscape, one that
included many of the working class white voters who eight years later
would swing the presidency to Donald Trump. There was nothing wrong
with American progressivism, it seemed to many, that an emerging
democratic majority of Latinos, African-Americans, millennials, and
college educated liberals couldn’t fix.
The
triumphalism blotted out a much more basic reality. With the Great
Recession gathering, Americans deeply disenchanted with the Bush
administration and convinced that the country was headed in the wrong
direction simply wanted change. Obama proved able in 2008 and 2012 to
turn out a larger and more diverse electorate that tilted the national
election toward Democrats. But the Obama effect wasn’t transferable to
other Democrats or progressives and it didn’t change voters’ general
disenchantment with government or the direction of the country. Without
him at the top of the ticket, Democrats suffered crippling losses in
2010, 2014, and 2016.
During those years, we at Breakthrough dabbled a
bit in national security, economic policy, and a brief effort to
rethink the social contract. But there wasn’t much appetite for it, at
least coming from us. “What,” we were frequently asked, “does any of
this have to do with the environment?” And so, over the years, we
acceded to the same “policy literalism” that we had criticized in “Death
of Environmentalism.” By the time “An Ecomodernist Manifesto”
was published in 2015, social and economic progress were simply
assumed. The focus, rather, was how to reconcile it with environmental
protection.
But while it is all fine and well to remind people how much progress human societies have made in recent centuries, about three quarters of our countrymen are
not feeling so good about it these days, at least judging by what they
tell pollsters. Absolute poverty may be a thing of the past. But
relative poverty, the gap between those at the bottom of the income
distribution and the average American, and between the average American
and those at the very top, is as large as it has ever been. With that
have come new problems – obesity, drug addiction, depression, and
declining economic and social mobility.
As
we have transitioned from industrial to post-industrial economy, the
middle class has shrunk. This is not because most of us have become
poorer. From bottom to top, Americans are materially as rich as they’ve
ever been. Goods and services that were once luxuries – air
conditioning, high-definition television, mobile telephony – are now
accessible to virtually all Americans. Food is so cheap that Americans
struggle with obesity instead of hunger.
Rather
global supply chains, rising productivity, and the information and
communications technology revolution have brought stagnant wages along
with the falling cost of goods. Meanwhile, the economy is increasingly
bifurcated between those in the skilled knowledge economy and those in
the unskilled service economy. Americans have been simultaneously
falling out of the middle class and graduating from it economically.
For
poorly educated workers, manufacturing once provided access to middle
class incomes. Unskilled workers could find high productivity work in
factories and with that high wages. But the old manufacturing economy is
not coming back. America today actually manufactures more than it ever
has. But long-term productivity improvements mean that America’s
manufacturing sector employs many fewer workers than it once did.
The
knowledge and service economy are different. Education, skilled labor,
and social capital are rewarded and the income gap between those who are
poorly educated and those who are well educated is magnified
inter-generationally. The child of a PhD is enormously advantaged over
the child of a high school dropout, even if they live in the same
communities and attend the same schools and classes.
The
progressive Left, from the Occupy movement onwards, has railed against
the 1%. And while it is true that the very richest among us have reaped
far more than anyone else in recent decades, the focus on the 1% allowed
many liberal minded people to avoid less comfortable truths. But the
economic divide that has sundered America is not the one between the
super rich and everyone else, but between the rising creative class of
knowledge workers and those stuck in the low-wage service economy. That
split is mirrored in the divide between red and blue, urban and rural,
the so-called flyover states and America’s prosperous coastal enclaves.
Those
with education, knowledge, skills, and cultural capital migrate to
cities, to the coasts, to blue America. Those left behind seethe at
their social and economic marginalization, their loss of status, and the
sense that liberal, cosmopolitan America looks down on them, which it
does.
Standard
liberal remedies, such as redistributing income and spending more on
schools and social services, can reduce income disparities to some
degree. And by some analyses, they already have. Once taxes and income
transfers are accounted for, economic inequality has grown little in recent decades. But even if that is so, those measures can’t close the enormous gaps in social capital, social mobility, and social status.
Perhaps
a more robust social welfare state, not just income transfers, might
result in more equitable social outcomes. But the welfare state is
bedeviled by the challenges of maintaining social solidarity in an
increasingly multi-ethnic society. The success of the social welfare
state in Scandinavia and other parts of the developed world has been
made possible in no small part by a relatively homogenous population. In
the United States by contrast, the dream that working class white,
Latino, and African-American voters might find common cause demanding a
more generous social welfare state has foundered upon mistrust and
inter-group competition for what are perceived to be limited public
resources.
Those
challenges, of course, go well beyond working class voters. Two decades
of gridlock and broken promises have soured voters of all incomes on
politics and government altogether. Racial resentments, a continual
ratcheting up of extreme rhetoric from both sides of the political
spectrum, identity politics and its twenty-first-century handmaiden,
techno-narcissism, have further contributed to American politics, and
perhaps democracy, coming apart.
Empty Promises
Back in 2002, I moderated the first focus groups that tested what would become the Apollo Alliance with
white working class voters in Erie, Pennsylvania. The was that we might
create a broad coalition among environmentalists, organized labor, and
working class voters for action to address climate change and end our
dependence on fossil fuels. By investing in clean energy manufacturing,
we hoped, we could create economic opportunity and jobs for communities
left behind as America’s traditional manufacturing economy struggled
and shift the political ground upon which climate policy was being
debated.
The
participants were, to say the least, enthusiastic about the prospect
and during a break, I left the room to confer with my colleagues behind
the one-way mirror. As we shared our excitement about how well the idea
was being received, the participants on the other side of the mirror
started speculating about whether we might represent a company that was
planning to open a wind turbine factory in Erie. They were desperate and
hopeful. We were gleeful.
A
few months later, we hired a consultant to produce a fanciful study
purporting to show that a $300 billion investment in clean energy would
create 3 million new jobs. Armed with good polling and economic modeling
that nobody in our left-of-center bubble seemed too interested in
questioning, we set out to conquer the Democratic Party.
The
Apollo concept proved wildly successful politically. It ultimately
became Democratic orthodoxy. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama competed
in the 2008 Democratic primaries over who had the best plan to create
clean energy jobs. As President, Obama spent about $200 billion dollars
in green stimulus and many billions more in continuing subsidies for
renewable energy, electric cars, mass transit, and high-speed rail.
Fifteen years later,
there are few clean energy manufacturing jobs in Erie. Long a
stronghold for Democrats and organized labor, Erie County this year voted for a different kind of populist promising
to bring back manufacturing jobs by tearing up trade deals, deporting
immigrants, and ending the so-called “War on Coal.”
Sadly
for Erie, Trump will be no more capable of bringing back high wage jobs
for low-skilled and poorly educated voters than was Obama. The same
demand for change and dissatisfaction with the economy and government
that swept Trump into office may just as quickly sweep him out. But
however things unfold, the rage, resentment, and economic
disenfranchisement that made Trump’s ascension to the presidency
possible are not going away.
After Trump
A
decade ago, I came to these challenges as a self-identified
progressive. Today, I’m less comfortable with that identity, if only
because progressives have demonstrated themselves every bit as capable
of trading in arrogance, fantasy, and vitriol as conservatives. And I’ve
come to know many conservatives whom I know to be every bit as
committed to progress, equity, shared prosperity, and a beautiful world
as I am.
Trumpism,
in any event, is likely to redraw the fault lines of American politics
in ways that are difficult to anticipate. And so for ecomodernists, and
fellow travelers, this moment offers opportunity and peril. It is
possible that the Trump Administration will end up looking like a
souped-up version of the Bush administration with a more populist veneer
and less appetite for nation-building.
Under
these circumstances, there may be real possibilities to make headway on
emissions. A Trump administration prepared to invest in advanced
nuclear energy and next-generation solar panels and batteries, keep
America’s existing nuclear fleet online, and support the ongoing
transition from coal to gas - even as it withdraws from the Paris
Accord, repeals the Clean Power Plan, and continues to deny climate
science - could end up with more to show in terms of emissions reduction
than a Democratic Administration committed to a green agenda that has
failed to have much impact upon the trajectory of carbon emissions, in
the United States or globally, for almost three decades.
But
we should also keep in mind that there are far more problematic
outcomes. Should the new administration take a hard turn toward
authoritarianism, there will be important consequences for those who
align themselves with or in opposition to it. Short of that, should
Trump actually attempt to implement much of his agenda, he will engender
enormous civil society opposition. The street protests in cities around
the nation in recent days may provide just a taste of what is to come.
With civil society, including the environmental movement, in the
streets, a quick and politically convenient embrace of Trump initiatives
that align with our technological preferences risks delegitimizing
ecomodernism as a credible civil society voice.
In
the end, each of us will need to make these assessments for ourselves.
Are we taking pragmatic actions to encourage the best impulses of the
new administration or are we legitimizing something much darker? The
choice is not one that will be presented to us all at once or that we
will make only once. Rather, we will be presented with it over and over
again.
However
we make those choices, it will be incumbent upon us all to do
everything that we can to strengthen civil society, to fight for
democratic norms and resist their erosion while simultaneously finding
ways to turn down the rhetoric that has rendered so much of our civic
life increasingly contentious and irreconcilable. We will also need to
ask some hard questions of our own agendas and political commitments.
Here
is hoping that we all make those choices well and that together, we can
find new possibilities for social, economic, and environmental progress
in this moment of fear and uncertainty.
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