A GREEN NEW DEAL?

With the Green New Deal, the talk of the town in the winter of 2018–2019, Democratic politicians in the United States were trying to link the fight against climate change with an agenda for economic justice and redistribution.

To take an example we encountered firsthand, at the end of 2018 the agitation of the “Yellow Vests” protesting a planned increase in the tax on gasoline closed down the streets of Paris every Saturday, putting the French government under severe strain. Eventually, the tax increase had to be postponed. The argument the Yellow Vest protesters were making was that the increase in the gasoline tax was a way for rich Parisians (who can take the subway to work) to buy themselves a conscience at the cost of people from the suburbs and countryside who had no choice but to drive their cars. They did have a point, given that the same government had removed the wealth tax. In the United States, the specter of a “war on coal” became the rallying cry against the liberal elite, a symbol of their lack of empathy for the poor. And, of course, politicians in the developing world routinely (and rightly) rail against having to pay for previous choices made by rich countries.

The Green New Deal is an attempt to bridge precisely this divide, by emphasizing the fact that building new green infrastructure (solar panels, high-speed railroads, etc.) will both create jobs and help in the fight against climate change. It de-emphasizes the idea of a carbon tax, viewed by many on the left as being too reliant on market mechanisms and, as in France, just another way to make the poor pay.

We understand that a carbon tax is not an easy sell (taxes that hit most people never are), but our view is that it should be possible to make it politically acceptable by making it absolutely explicit that the carbon tax is not a way to raise revenues.

More generally, we are quite aware that it will cost money to prevent climate change and to adapt to the part already on its way. There will have to be investments in infrastructure, and meaningful redistribution to those whose livelihoods are affected. In poor countries, money could help the average citizen achieve a higher quality of life in a way less threatening to the future of the world. (Think of the air-conditioning debate, for example; why doesn’t the world simply pay India to leapfrog to the better technology?) Given that the poor do not consume very much, it would not take a lot to help the world’s poor consume a bit more, but also get better air and produce less emissions. The richest countries in the world are so rich they can easily pay for it.

The question is to frame the debate in a way that does not pitch the poor in poor countries against the poor in rich countries. A combination of taxes and regulations to curb emissions in rich countries and pay for a clean transition in poor countries may well reduce economic growth in the rich country, though of course we don’t know for sure, since we don’t know what causes growth. But if much of the cost is borne by the richest in the rich countries and the planet benefits, we see no reason to shy away.

In Delhi and Washington and Beijing, it is in the name of growth that policy makers drag their feet when called upon to enact or enforce pollution regulations. Who benefits from this GDP growth remains an afterthought.

Economists deserve their fair share of the blame for stoking this rhetoric. Nothing in either our theory or the data proves the highest GDP per capita is generally desirable. Yet because we fundamentally believe resources can and will be redistributed, we fall into the trap of always trying to make the overall pie as big as possible. This flies directly in the face of what we have learned over the past decades. The evidence is clear—inequality has risen dramatically in recent years, with searing consequences for societies across the world.