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green new deal
Climate Experts Urge Democrats to Embrace 'Green Economic Populism' for 2028
"We must replace the Prius economy with one focused on affordable green housing, higher wages, cheap clean energy, lower commuting costs, and expanded mass transit. States, cities, and towns can get the ball rolling."
Jan 07, 2025
Amid reflections on Democrats' November losses and fears of what the Republican-controlled federal government will mean for economic justice and climate chaos, a pair of professors on Tuesday published a New York Timesopinion piece connecting future U.S. elections, the transition away from fossil fuels, and working people's priorities.
"If Democrats want to win voters with policies that avert catastrophic climate change, they need to bring immediate, material benefits to the working class," Daniel Aldana Cohen and Thea Riofrancos wrote in the Times. "That means folding climate policies into an agenda that tackles the cost-of-living crisis. This is green economic populism."
Cohen, an assistant professor of sociology and director of the Socio-Spatial Climate Collaborative at the University of California, Berkeley, explained on social media that the piece with Riofrancos, an associate professor of political science at Providence College, emerged from a project with Climate & Community Institute "articulating the links between climate crisis, economic struggles, and the imperative to end genocide and forever wars."
If we're going to secure a livable future, cities and states need to tether the green economy to changes that everyone can see and touch, not just the 1%. Thanks @aldasky.bsky.social and @triofrancos.bsky.social for making the case and getting it out on a big platform
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— Alex Miller ( @notamiller.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 1:19 PM
Their essay followed Republicans taking control of both chambers of Congress on Friday and came less than two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House. Cohen and Riofrancos made the case that "even under Mr. Trump, progressives can build momentum around this agenda" at the local level while planning for the future.
Biden campaigned as a "climate president" during the 2020 cycle. His major legislative achievements on that front—the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—were watered down due to narrow congressional majorities and obstructionist right-wing Democrats who later left the party.
"The problem with the Inflation Reduction Act was that it was an awkward compromise between neoliberal, market-based policy and government intervention. By mobilizing public investment through tax credits and other incentives, it effectively asked companies and affluent consumers to lead the transition," Cohen and Riofrancos wrote, citing statistics on electric vehicle purchases, job creation, and rooftop solar.
Gustavo Gordillo of the Democratic Socialist of America's New York City chapter called that an "excellent description of the IRA, and by extension current Democratic Party orthodoxy."
The professors continued:
The law's all-of-the-above approach also supports oil and gas extraction. Under Mr. Biden, the United States cemented its status as the world's largest oil producer.
All told, this looks less like an equitable green transition than what we call a Prius economy—a hybrid model of green energy and fossil fuels, wedged together side by side. Like hybrid cars, which can't run on electricity alone, the Prius economy yields some climate progress while holding back more ambitious change. And it puts the burden of transforming sprawling energy infrastructures onto companies' balance sheets and consumers' bank accounts.
While acknowledging the long-term benefits of the IRA's investments, Cohen and Riofrancos stressed that securing the political support needed to achieve the swift, sweeping reforms that scientists say are necessary for a livable future will require "a green economic populism that helps voters more easily get from one paycheck to the next."
Working people, held back by limited wage growth, face high prices for food, housing, transportation, and utilities—and fossil fuel-driven climate breakdown exacerbates those costs. According to the professors: "We must replace the Prius economy with one focused on affordable green housing, higher wages, cheap clean energy, lower commuting costs, and expanded mass transit. States, cities, and towns can get the ball rolling."
The pair highlighted recent examples at the local and state level, including: tribe-owned companies' development of renewable energy; New York City's rezoning policy and rent regulations; New York state's Build Public Renewables Act; Pennsylvania's Whole Homes Repair program; Illinois' restrictions on utility shutoffs during extreme heat; and California's funding for electric vehicle chargers.
"To be sure, local governments' role is relatively limited. Some of their best policies depend on federal funds, which may be cut under the Trump administration," they noted. "Still, local governments can help fold green economic populism into a broader agenda for economic security—from a $17 minimum wage floor to universal health insurance to universal prekindergarten and affordable childcare. Ideally, governments would coordinate countrywide, as some have done around protecting undocumented migrants and abortion access. If progressives win a national governing coalition for these ideas in 2028, they can hit the ground running."
Tying the climate emergency to the economic concerns of working people is not new—for example, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) first introduced a Green New Deal resolution in Congress in 2019 and the Green Party was campaigning on the concept years earlier—but there is an urgency in the current moment, in the wake of the hottest year on record and the November victory of Big Oil-backed Trump.
The essay came as political observers as well as critics and members of the Democratic Party—including Ocasio-Cortez—are urging leadership to learn from losses in the last cycle. Based on dozens of national surveys of likely voters, the left-leaning think tank Data for Progress concluded in December that "by branding itself as an active party of economic populism that fights for needed changes for the working class the Democratic Party can put itself in a position to regain the support of the voters it lost in 2024."
That potential path has some right-wingers scared. Victoria Coates, a former Trump adviser who is now a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, shared Cohen and Riofrancos' essay on social media Tuesday and said, "Thank heavens the hands of the radical environmentalists have been removed from the levers of power but this should serve as a cautionary tale of what they intend to do if reelected."
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To Confront Trump and the Climate Crisis, Democrats Must Stand Up for Working People
Taking on corporate power and putting workers at the center of the party's agenda is the best defense against the divide-and-conquer strategy of the populist right. That means backing policies like Medicare for All, creating green union jobs, and raising the minimum wage.
Dec 11, 2024
The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. To defeat Trump and those who back him, the Democratic Party must change course and fight for working-class people. With the climate crisis bearing down, this task is incredibly urgent and important. The cost of failure is planetary catastrophe.
For the first time in years, Democrats won with voters who made over $100,000 and lost those making less than that. The Republican Party made huge gains among working-class people of color and those without a college degree. Youth turnout dropped eight points from 2020. Harris won only 54% of the youth vote and was the first Democratic nominee since 2004 not to win young voters by at least 60%.
The Democratic Party urgently needs to take the right lessons away from this election, or they risk handing elections to Trump-like candidates for years to come, and burning away any chance of stopping catastrophic climate change. In the first days after the election, I had a lot of hope this would be a turning point when the Democratic Party shifted to embrace populist, people-centered policies that took on corporate power and addressed voters’ economic pain. News coverage focused on how swing voters didn’t trust Democrats on the economy and how Senate candidates like Ruben Gallego and Sherrod Brown who ran on an anti-corporate message outperformed Harris. Mainstream politicians like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy were echoing this argument.
The Democratic Party must loudly and vocally fight for populist, people-centered policies and take on corporate power in our democracy.
But, then the spin from corporate consultants and pundits began. They have flooded the opinion pages and podcasts with a medley of reasons why Democrats lost the election. They have argued that “woke politics” and groups like Sunrise pushed Democrats too far left on social issues. They have argued that the campaign was poorly run, or that Biden should have dropped sooner. Conveniently, this analysis often leaves out the economy and doesn’t challenge the corporate donors that bankroll many of the candidates and consultants.
This is an incredibly dangerous interpretation that misses the forest for the trees. If Democrats’ takeaway is: “be less woke,” they will continue to fracture their coalition and set the GOP on the path to electoral majorities for years to come.
For the sake of our democracy and our planet, Democrats must tackle the underlying reasons they are losing working-class voters, young voters, and voters of color. They need to proudly take on corporate interests and fight for an economy and politics that works for all of us.
That starts with listening to what voters are saying. This year, Sunrise made over four million voter contacts. Again and again, we heard young people saying they were struggling to afford groceries and rent, anxious about job prospects, and grappling with the economic uncertainty that has made the American Dream feel out of reach.
In 2024, simply being "Not Trump" wasn't enough to win, especially among young voters. If you turned 18 this year, you were just 9 years old when Trump first descended the golden escalator to launch his campaign. Trump in politics is all they know. So, Harris’ closing message of “I’m not Trump” didn’t hold up against Trump’s message about remaking the economy and upending business as usual.
Seeing this, we dug in with people, talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and capping of insulin prices. We pointed out Trump’s allegiance to his fellow billionaires. But, those conversations often only got so far — people didn’t trust that Democrats actually understood their struggles. They had seen Biden and Harris on TV for years celebrating how the economy was good, but that wasn’t how it felt to them in the day-to-day. If people don’t feel understood and respected by a political party, it’s hard to get them to believe that party will actually do something to help them.
For the sake of our democracy and our planet, Democrats must tackle the underlying reasons they are losing working-class voters, young voters, and voters of color. They need to proudly take on corporate interests and fight for an economy and politics that works for all of us.
Trump, on the other hand, hardly went a minute without talking about how prices were rising and the economy wasn’t fair. He managed to convince people he understood their pain and would act on it — despite being a billionaire championing regressive economic policies.
This isn’t to say that social issues were irrelevant in this election. However, Harris’ inability to gain the trust of voters on the economy made these attacks from the right more potent. When people can't afford rent or food, they look for people to blame. Trump and far-right politicians have told people to blame immigrants or trans people or people of color. That was a core part of Trump's closing message: “Kamala Harris is for they/them. Trump is for you.” Pundits are spending a lot of time talking about the first half and missing the 2nd half. If Democrats can’t convince working-class voters and young voters that they will fight for them, it’s going to continue to be hard to fight back against these attacks.
The Democratic Party must loudly and vocally fight for populist, people-centered policies and take on corporate power in our democracy. It’s the way to win back the trust of young voters, working-class voters, and disillusioned voters. And it’s the best defense against the divide-and-conquer strategy of the populist right. That means backing policies like Medicare for All, creating green union jobs, and raising the minimum wage. And, it means challenging Trump for the populist mantle by pledging to shake up the status quo and make it work better for everyday people.
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Defeating Trumpism With a People's Agenda
We should raise walls of resistance as much as we can. More important, though, we should demand from the democratic forces to adopt a socio-economic agenda that puts people’s needs above corporate interests.
Nov 27, 2024
A clear consensus has emerged that the economy was the key factor behind Trump’s stunning victory. However, that may not be a very accurate description about what led a disaffected electorate wanting to see Trump back in the White House as the U.S. economy had been in a rather good shape from the second quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2024 and was in fact outperforming all other advanced economies by a wide margin. Indeed, surveys had consistently shown that the majority of voters had negative views on the economy at large, thus revealing a disconnect between economic numbers and public sentiment. Unemployment was the lowest it had been in decades, consumer spending was up, and inflation had cooled off. Yet voters still thought the economy was trash.
The U.S economic system does stink, no matter what the numbers show, and the political system is totally dysfunctional, which explains why so many voters were not fazed by Democrats’ core message that Trump posed a threat to democracy. They were probably wondering where democracy was to be found when economic elites run the show. Forty-five years of neoliberal economics have exacerbated capitalism’s inherent tendencies toward economic inequality, created a permanent state of economic insecurity, and led to the rise of an oligarchy.
It is the disastrous socio-economic and political consequences of neoliberalism that produce feelings of neglect, powerlessness and anger and lead voters in turn to cast their ballots for demagogues like Donald Trump...
The United States is the most unequal society in the developed world. The rich are growing richer with every passing year while the middle class shrinks, and the poor are left to their own fate for survival. Massive social inequalities and economic disparities destroy trust and confidence in government and leave people thinking that the future is unavoidably grim. This is the primary reason for the rise of ethno-nationalism and authoritarian populism in the developed world, including of course Trumpism in the United States. It is the disastrous socio-economic and political consequences of neoliberalism that produce feelings of neglect, powerlessness and anger and lead voters in turn to cast their ballots for demagogues like Donald Trump who promise a return to a golden era.
The irony is that while Trump is an authoritarian bully who wishes to use the iron fist of the state to rollback immigration and crush social agendas and even those who oppose him, his economic views are overall staunchly pro-market and outrageously neoliberal. In that regard, there is nothing fascistic about Trump when it comes to the economy. Statism lies at the heart of fascist ideology. The state is the all-powerful entity for fascists. The question of state-controlled planning of the economy is of paramount importance to fascism. For fascists, the state should not control all the means of production, as is the case with traditional socialism, but should dominate them.
The irony is that while Trump is an authoritarian bully who wishes to use the iron fist of the state to rollback immigration and crush social agendas and even those who oppose him, his economic views are overall staunchly pro-market and outrageously neoliberal.
Trump’s proposals for the economy are seen as a mixed bag. That’s because while he has proclaimed himself a champion for deregulation, he is in favor of protectionist trade policies. But Trump’s trade policy should not fool people that he is not a neoliberal. With protectionist trade policies, Trump, as with the way he runs his own business, only sees the short-term advantages in economic policy. Moreover, protectionist trade policy does not depart from neoliberalism. As has been acutely pointed out by British political economist Tom Wraight, Trump simply uses “the coercive power of the state to force other nations to conform to market-based economic logic.”
Trump has promised an anti-regulation blitz from Day One upon his return to the White House on virtually all aspects of the economy, including environmental and public health regulations. After spending months lying to voters about his knowledge of Project 2025, Trump has picked scores of people who worked on this ultra-reactionary policy manifesto for top posts in his administration. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the economy, if fully implemented, would create a far more unequal and harsher society as it entails policies that will lead to massive cuts on all social programs, including Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and food assistance, and calls for massive disinvestment in public services and a host of new tax cuts for wealthy households and corporations.
Project 2025 is the ultra-right wing game plan for the full completion of the neoliberal economic vision and political nightmare that started nearly half a century ago. It will produce far greater social dislocation and greater economic anxiety than any other time since the onset of the neoliberal counterrevolution. Most of those who voted for Trump on the basis of their perceptions about the direction of the economy and their belief that the country is on the wrong track will be deeply disturbed by the new economic and social realities that will emerge in the United States during the second Trump reign and will hopefully rethink their support for Trumpism. The problem is that the Democratic Party is either incapable or unwilling to offer citizens a new vision for the United States, one that will end the rule of oligarchy, restore democracy, and put people and the planet above profit.
Here are some policies that should be included in a socio-economic agenda for the specific needs of the people in the twentieth-first century United States of America:
1. Implementing Universal Health Coverage (UHC). That is, a publicly administered system that guarantees that all people have access to the full range of quality health services when and where they need them. Financing of UHC could come entirely from broad-based tax revenues. Coverage would be universal and automatic. Covered services would include inpatient, outpatient, dental, mental health, and long-term health, as well as prescription drugs. All three levels of the U.S. government (federal, state, and local) would be involved in the health care system.
2. Getting rid of all challenges and obstacles of union organizing, which include making illegal threats to close a plant if workers select a union to represent them and threatening workers with loss of jobs or benefits if they join a union. Current U.S. law makes it difficult for workers to join unions and even excludes certain categories of workers.
3. An industry-level approach to collective bargaining with active participation in social dialogue. An industry-level approach to collective bargaining will secure the best economic compensation possible for workers.
4. Undertaking a large-scale federal program of social housing construction. The United States faces a deep and persistent housing affordability crisis that demands active government intervention. It is beyond naïve belief to think that the market can fix the housing crisis. Repairing the house market with market-oriented solutions such as liberalizing zoning rules and other regulations have never worked. They do not lead to a major increase in housing supply or in more affordable housing. A strong housing safety net should also be introduced to address the problem of homelessness and ensure home security for the most vulnerable.
5. Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 or even $20 per hour. The current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour has been stagnant since 2009 and maintaining it is a scandal of grand proportions. No decent society, let alone the richest country in the world, should accept having such a thing as the “working poor.”
6.Fighting poverty and inequality. Poverty should not be defined one-dimensionally based on income alone. Poverty should be seen as access to a variety of resources, such as education, health, energy, jobs, rights and personal security. The task of eliminating poverty should include both short-term (cash handouts) and long-term approaches (delivering social services and addressing the structural causes of poverty with initiatives such as the guaranteed-jobs program).
7. Implementing the Green New Deal. Greening the economy is a vital and urgent task to save humanity and the planet from the impacts of global warming but also provides a macro-economic approach to sustainable economic growth. It’s a win-win situation and only vested interests (fossil fuel industry, banks, oil-producing nations) and lack of political stand on the way to transitioning to a green economy.
8. Cutting military spending. The United States spent $820 billion on national defense during the fiscal year 2023. It spends nearly 8.4 times as much on its military as Russia does and more than three times the amount of China. While the U.S. comprises just over 4 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for nearly 40 percent of global military spending. Between 2001 and 2022, the U.S. spent $8 trillion on war. The notion that such enormous defense spending is important for national security questions is utterly absurd. The U.S. homeland has never been invaded and no nation threatens U.S. national security. The obscene amount of money that the U.S. spends on defense, which different methodologies estimated to be above $1.5 trillion for the fiscal year 2022, is for the building and maintenance of the U.S. empire. The U.S has over 750 overseas military bases, which only provoke geopolitical tensions and harm the United States, as David Vine demonstrates in his book Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. Money saved from cuts in the defense budget can go towards supporting social programs and/or for reducing the national debt. Arguing for reforms in Social Security and Medicare when the country spends so much money on the military is morally indefensible and will become politically unacceptable if people realize how wasteful and harmful military sending is.
At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services. The neoliberal claim is that economies would perform more effectively, producing greater wealth and economic prosperity for all, if markets were allowed to perform their functions without government intervention. This claim is predicated on the idea that free markets are inherently just and can create effective low-cost ways to produce consumer goods and services. It is all rubbish, of course; nothing but an ideological pretext to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Neoliberalism is indeed not simply an economic doctrine but also a socio-political ideology that places individual self-interest before the common good, displays indifference to social inequalities and economic disparities and subsequently justifies plutocracy.
At the heart of the neoliberal vision is a societal order based on the prioritization of corporate power and free markets and the abandonment of public services.
Trump’s approach to government and corporate interests, which he will undertake with an extra heavy authoritarian twist, will magnify all aspects of the neoliberal nightmare that has engulfed the United States under both Republican and Democratic administrations for the past several decades. Unfortunately, a majority of the U.S. electorate refused to see what Trump really stands for and was duped into believing that their great leader is the one to take on the detestable liberal/neoliberal establishment and create in turn a system that works for the average citizens, not just the rich.
The next four years promise to be one of severe cruelty for the most vulnerable people in the United States and a nightmare for the environment. We should raise walls of resistance as much as we can. More important, though, we should demand from the democratic forces to adopt a socio-economic agenda that puts people’s needs above corporate interests and consigns neoliberal capitalism to the dustbin of history.Keep ReadingShow Less
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