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inclusion, as well as just economic uplift. 14 Pension investment In keeping with the aims of our Green New Deal, we want pension funds to divest from fossil fuels. That is easier if we give pension fund managers something else to invest in. As we demonstrate in Chapter 6 , the example of PFI shows that as taxpayers we have been vulnerable to exploitative investments with apparently low
since 2017 although the centrality of the issue had become more vividly apparent by 2022 as the interconnection between the environment and other policy areas intensified. The salience of environmental policy as a ‘standalone’ phenomenon reached widespread acceptance that the climate crisis is a threat to the planet (Hunter, 2020 ). The need for a Green New Deal moved from being a fringe to a mainstream policy. The chapter discusses this process and the role that the MCAs played in strengthening this appreciation before
instance, on both sides of the Atlantic, Green New Deal proposals continue to meet with ridicule and obstinate resistance couched in the terms of their expansionary fiscal proposals – in other words, commitment to a massive mobilisation of public investment, ownership and capacity. Coupled with proposals such as a return of industries like transport and energy to public control, wealth taxation, or a jobs guarantee, certain more ambitious or justice-oriented Green New Deal programmes also take direct aim at private assets and the
mainststream feminist ideas, particularly in the US. However, even here Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has managed to put his more egalitarian economic ideas on the mainstream political table. In practice, many left-wing men have a bad track record on ‘women’s issues’ and a decidedly patriarchal view of gender roles and ‘appropriate’ behaviour. However, Sanders’s proposals for a green new deal, greater workplace and union rights and a higher minimum wage would have disproportionately benefited poor women. He also has a long track record of
the 2020 primaries have adopted more watered-down versions of left programs like the Green New Deal or Medicare for All. More surprising is the rebirth of socialism, or at least social democracy, in the United States partly in the form of Bernie Sanders’s two runs for the Democratic presidential nomination—both drawing millions of votes, many from working-class voters. Alongside this has come the rise of the Democratic Socialists of America from a moribund group of a few thousand to an active and high-profile organization of 55,000 or more members, with two
informed much “green new deal” thinking as well as other forms of state protectionism being adopted by the right. How to identify essential needs and how best to satisfy or prioritise these in public policy is part of the “wellbeing” approach, and is of course the prime concern of the FEC. But where does culture sit with respect to essential needs? While some aspects might be conceded – parks and libraries
flows in a way that binds together evidence denialism and a more subtle (and warranted) scepticism towards the policy responses greasing a neoliberal capitalist machine. In other words, evidence scepticism conditions both process and response variants, accentuating the importance of ‘spectral’ understanding of this phenomenon, where the positions may easily shift from one imagined analytical container to another. In the three cases, process and response scepticism were particularly visible in the extensive critique of the Green New Deal, being
most openly as a ‘radical eco-socialist critique of capitalism’ as found in the work of Naomi Klein. 8 Extinction Rebellion don’t simply make this argument in writing; they take to the streets to demand a structural shift to a new social order, which puts people and the planet before corporate profits. As a narrative of protest, it is powerful and appealing, though the story is stronger on critique than it is on articulating a feasible alternative. The more radical proposals for a Green New Deal align with this perspective
constrain the ability of an incoming Labour government to fund a large-scale Green New Deal of what Roosevelt and Keynes would have called public works. Projects like large-scale home insulation and retrofit are overdue and can create short-term jobs. But the longer-term effects of accelerating green transition are uncertain. Structural change of this kind destroys as well as creates
energies which would for accounting purposes register as an increased GDP for that period. See: Robert Pollin , ‘ De-growth vs a green new deal ’. New Left Review 112 ( 2018 ), 22 . 92 Peter Doran, ‘Climate change and the