Editor’s note: This commentary is by Paul Fleckenstein, a socialist and environmental activist from Burlington.
There will be a new round of climate legislation in the Vermont Legislature this January.
The 80-member Climate Solutions Caucus has a plan for addressing Vermont’s increasing greenhouse gas emissions. There are four priorities — apparently chosen because they may have wide support among majority Democrats committed to a business as usual response to the climate emergency.
The priorities do not reflect scientific conclusions that radical change of unprecedented pace, scale, and scope are urgently needed to avoid civilizational collapse. Many climate activists criticized the tepid goals at public forums in recent weeks.
Some caucus supporters, however, argue that even though the priorities are inadequate for now in decarbonizing Vermont’s economy, they provide a foundation for steps in the future. That is half plausible. A small state has limited capacity to transform to a zero-carbon economy without national action. There is no problem per se with taking partial steps in the right direction. But which steps are actually in the right direction? And, how can the Vermont climate justice movement effectively contribute to the needed larger national and international fight to address the climate crisis?
Here are the caucus priorities:
- The Global Solutions Accountability Act — which hopes that Vermont’s unmet greenhouse gas reduction goals can be achieved through administrative rules and regulations using courts to enforce mandates on the government.
- Participation in a multi-state greenhouse gas cap and trade market system called the Transportation Carbon Initiative to decarbonize transportation.
- Promoting building weatherization through various measures including cross-training building professionals, incentivizing weatherization, and workforce development.
- Promoting more in-state renewable energy production.
Details are not necessarily fleshed out yet, but general points can be made about the approach.
None of these are commitments to concrete steps, with funding mechanisms, regulating laws, and near term goals. The priorities mostly embrace or don’t challenge corporate friendly measures that rely on capitalist (market and for-profit) solutions — that is, they accommodate the very system that generates global warming by prioritizing profits over the planet.
According to research by Trade Unions for Energy Democracy, for instance, cap and trade market systems show marginal if any capacity to reduce carbon emissions over time. Markets are simply too shaped by profit and competition, too weak and slow for what is needed. Everything can be done better and more quickly by direct government regulation and investment.
And similar to the way that carbon markets will fail to deliver, is it realistic to think that rules, courts and legal processes — that typically hew closely to protecting the status quo — would be substantial mechanisms for, rather than a brake on, rapid change?
Transformation of fossil fuel capitalism in the unprecedented manner required to win a zero-carbon society quickly cannot be about tweaking the status-quo and accommodating business, the wealthy and the politicians that prioritize their interests.
The Green New Deal transformation we need depends on public, democratic priorities put into motion that advance immediate carbon reductions and social justice — because these are emergency needs, not because they are profitable or palatable to business.
Some key elements are these: Public ownership of utilities, wealth redistribution and unconditional job, health, housing and educational access for workers, large investments in green infrastructure, and immediate cuts to destructive and wasteful sectors (the military, ruling class luxuries, and fossil fuel extraction would be good places to start).
If the Climate Caucus remains committed to gradualism, and pragmatic considerations around winning small or dubious measures that align with Democratic Party priorities, the climate movement should not follow.
There are legislative objectives, methods, and initial steps that could place Vermont and its climate movement in a leadership position.
1. We need immediate implementation. For starters, progressive income and wealth taxes, making up for the hundreds of millions in lost revenues due to decades of state income tax cuts for the wealthy, to support funding and bonds for efficiency and conservation programs, and developing green infrastructure.
2. There are also immediate worker security measures to assist the economic shifts needed: $15/hour now, paid family leave, funding single payer health care, free college and technical training — demands supported by the Vermont AFL-CIO. A just transition to an ecological society requires protecting working class livelihoods — whether from the government, or unions directly from employers, to generate and maintain majority working class support for a just transition to a zero-carbon economy.
3. A ban on new fossil fuel infrastructure.
4. Creation of an agency, fully funded and staffed, that is tasked with responding to the climate emergency — guiding programs and scientific monitoring of short-term goals.
The Democratic Party, not to mention the Republicans and free market ideologues that troll the internet, is, unfortunately, largely hostile to this alternative list of priorities, and it is more sympathetic to measures that delay concrete action to the indeterminate future.
The task of climate justice movement is to demand and require government action. The student and worker climate strikes this year point in the right direction. The recent national teachers’ strike wave shows how strikes and protests can win increased resources for schools and communities, expand popular support, and convince politicians to do things they previously refused to do. The same can happen around climate. Strikes and disruption, and the broad and active popular support these generate, are our only real source of power, and have been the engine of all major progressive gains that influenced economic priorities in the United States.
