4. Reducing global carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050 is feasible. Pollin’s Global Green New Deal project aims to meet the targets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on global net carbon dioxide emissions, which amount to 45 percent reductions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050. For net zero emissions to be reached by 2050, Pollin has estimated that it would require committing something in the range of 2.5 percent of global GDP per year to investment spending in areas designed to improve energy efficiency standards across the board (buildings, automobiles, transportation systems, industrial production processes) and to massively expand the availability of clean energy sources.

With regards to clean energy transformation, Pollin estimates that it would require investments in the range of $2.6 trillion in the first year of the Global Green New Deal project. Assuming that the project gets under way in 2024, and lasting until 2050, average spending would be around $4.5 trillion per year. The total amount for the 27 year investment cycle would come to approximately $120 trillion, and this figure include investment spending on both the public and private sectors.

If the above figures sound overwhelming, no need to worry. Pollin says that the clean energy investment project which lies at the heart of the Green New Deal, will “pay for itself in full over time” by delivering “lower energy costs for energy consumers in all regions of the world,” and he has worked out the actual math behind this claim.

Even so, there undertakings need to be complemented other policy objectives, such as stopping deforestation and embarking on afforestation. The most recent data by IPCC reveals that deforestation alone is responsible for about 12 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, Pollin points out, upon review of the existing literature, that we cannot rely on geoengineering to get out of the climate crisis. Carbon capture technologies have yet to prove that they are realizable at a commercial level, and, according to some expert assessments highly unlikely that they can be adequately introduced before the second half of the century. As for the nuclear power option, which appears to be attractive by the mere fact that it does not generate carbon dioxide emissions, Pollin stresses out that there are too many risks associated with reliance on nuclear energy on a global scale, which range from the problem of radioactive wastes to nuclear reactor meltdowns and of course political security issues.

5. Financing the Global Green New Deal and Standards of Fairness. Financing the Global Green New Deal is not an especially challenging problem to solve, says Pollin, and shows how it can be done through primarily four large-scale funding sources: (1) a carbon tax, with 75 percent of the revenues going back to the public but 25 percent channeled into clean energy investment projects; (2) transfer funds out  of military budgets; (3( a Green Bond lending program introduced by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank; (4) the elimination of all fossil fuel subsidies and the transfer of 25 percent of those funds into clean energy investments. In Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal, Pollin spells out the details for each one of these funding sources for his Global Green New Deal, while ensuring at the same time that they mee basic standards of fairness by subjecting them to scrutiny.

6. Shifting to clean energy resources would create new jobs and encourage growth. Fear of job losses associated with the elimination of the fossil fuel industry keeps many people away from supporting the Green New Deal. Yet, Pollin shows that such fears are completely unwarranted and the only question is how many new jobs will be created through the creation of a green economy, and correspondingly, how many will be lost. Undoubtedly, there will be job losses and community impacts from the contraction of the fossil fuel industry, which is why just transition policies, spelled out by Pollin in a detailed fashion, are absolutely essential. But job creation and the implementation of just transition policies lie at the heart of the Global Green New Deal project. Based on research that Pollin has conducted with others on this question, involving countries with significant differences in levels of development, he says that all countries will experience significant gains in job creation. In India, for example, it’s estimated that “increasing clean energy investments by 2 percent of GDP every year for twenty years will generate an average net increase of about 13 million jobs per year.”

7. Actions to combat global warming by individual countries still matters. While a Global Green Deal is absolutely essential and critical for avoiding a climate change catastrophe, Pollin points out that every place matters in the struggle to secure the target of zero net global carbon emissions by 2050. For if we add up China, the United States, and the European Union (EU), the combined carbon dioxide emissions amount to only 52 percent of the global total. In other words, we are still only half way to global net zero emissions even if China, the United States, and the EU were to get to zero tomorrow. Thus, as Pollin forcefully makes the point, there can be no exception to the application of the Green New Deal. He brings this point home by mentioning India, which, if it is excluded from a Green New Deal, and continues to rely on the burning of oil, coal, and natural gas for its economic growth, its carbon dioxide emissions would have increased by 5,5 billion tons under a baseline scenario of 3 percent annual growth through 2050. With this scenario at work, the global economy will be nowhere close to hitting the target of zero net emissions by 2050.

8. Degrowth as a strategy to combat climate change leads to a dead end. Pollin takes issue with the proponents of degrowth by arguing that it does not provide “a viable stabilization framework.” As with practically everything else around his Global Green New Deal project, he makes the case against degrowth on the basis of economic data and analysis – and actually basic arithmetic. He points out that global carbon emission need to drop from their current 33 billion tons, according to estimates in the IPCC report, to zero within thirty years. Assuming that under a degrowth strategy for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions global GDP shrinks  by 10 percent over the next thirty years (a contraction four times larger than what we experienced during the global financial crisis of 2007-09), the effect on carbon dioxide emissions would be a reduction of 10 percent—in other words, from 33 to 30 billion tons.  In the meantime, the global economy would have faced massive job losses on account of the contraction and huge declines in the standard of living for average working people and the poor.

In sum, a growing global economy under the banner of a detailed Global Green New Deal project is the only viable way to combat climate emergency and to ensure a sustainable and more equitable economic future, argues Pollin ever so convincingly in his newly published co-authored book with Noam Chomsky.

As far as this commentator is concerned, who may be somewhat biased on account of having conducted the interviews with Pollin and Chomsky included in Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy to Save the Planet, the only question around Pollin’s Global Green New Deal project is how quickly can we get the international community to act on it before the die is cast.

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Previously published: https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/07/10/2020/global-green-new-deal-project

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His main research interests are in European economic integration, globalization, the political economy of the United States and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a regular contributor to Truthout as well as a member of Truthout’s Public Intellectual Project. He has published several books and his articles have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into several foreign languages, including Croatian, French, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. He is the author of Optimism Over Despair: Noam Chomsky On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change, an anthology of interviews with Chomsky originally published at Truthout and collected by Haymarket Books.