A Centuries-Old Idea Could Revolutionize Climate Policy [View all]

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A Centuries-Old Idea Could Revolutionize Climate Policy

The Green New Deal’s mastermind is a precocious New Yorker with big ambitions. Sound familiar?

ROBINSON MEYER at the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/green-new-deal-economic-principles/582943/

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Above all, the Green New Deal is a leftist resurrection of federal industrial policy. It is not an attempt to control the private sector, according to its authors; it is a bid to collaborate with it. And it draws on a set of ideas with a rich American history, extending long before the great World War II mobilization to which the Green New Deal is regularly compared.

“This goes back to Hamilton, the daddy of it all,” says Stephen Cohen, a professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. He argues that industrial policy has birthed the transcontinental railroad, the cookie-cutter suburb, the home appliance, and the computer—nearly every major American economic transition since 1776.

In short, the Green New Deal’s supporters hope that industrial policy can now bring forth another transition—to cheaper energy, faster trains, and an altogether more climate-friendly economy. “The core of the Green New Deal, if you just look at the projects, is just like industrial policy, industrial policy, industrial policy,” says Rhiana Gunn-Wright, a policy researcher at the think tank New Consensus who helped draft Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal. “It’s very, very, very central. The Green New Deal is one of the largest interventions in U.S. industrial policy in a long time.”

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Drummer says that the books lay out a new and coherent view of “how economic progress really happens.” Many of the books argue that wealthy countries became wealthy in the first place by supporting, protecting, and investing in strategic industries. A nation’s other policies—around trade, infrastructure, even education—were ultimately designed to serve these chosen industries. “A nation must deliberately and constantly invest in its means of making a living,” Drummer writes. “Nations that ‘[let] the free market decide’ what they should do for a living decline to the bottom of the economic food chain.”


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