Conscious Choice: Fighting for a Global Green Deal

September 2000 | News of the Earth

Fighting for a Global Green Deal

by Dave Aftandilian

In his book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, Vice-President Al Gore wrote: "...if we cannot embrace the preservation of the Earth as our new organizing principle, the very survival of our civilization will be in doubt." But how do we get there from here? How can we preserve and restore our environment, while at the same time addressing the terrible poverty that afflicts the vast majority of people on Earth? Can we have a safe, clean environment without sacrificing economic prosperity?

Journalist Mark Hertsgaard traveled around the world looking for answers to questions like these, and wrote about his journey in the book Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future. In a recent phone conversation, the author told me that his travels led him to two major conclusions. First, there’s no time to waste. Certain environmental indicators in the United States have indeed improved in the last couple of decades — the air and water are cleaner in most parts of the country, though they should be made cleaner still — but the news is not so good in other areas. Unless we reverse the course immediately on global warming, for instance, we risk permanently altering Earth’s climate, with potentially disastrous consequences. Second, Hertsgaard found that "people will not starve today to protect the environment for tomorrow," which means that we cannot achieve environmental restoration without also addressing poverty.

Hertsgaard realized, too, that it’s not enough to foretell gloom and doom to get people to change their ways. The environmental movement must put forward a positive vision that will inspire people to get together to push from the grassroots level. We need to stop fighting against, and start fighting for something. But what?

The Global Green Deal

Hertsgaard’s answer is "The Global Green Deal," which he describes in the last two chapters of Earth Odyssey and on the Web at www.globalgreendeal.org. The plan models itself after the race to the moon in the 1960s and the New Deal that President Franklin D. Roosevelt developed and applied in the 1930s to pull this nation out of the Depression. Learning from the race to the moon, Hertsgaard hopes the Global Green Deal can offer a clear mission and deadline to focus resources and fire public enthusiasm for a common goal. And like the New Deal, the Global Green Deal would shift a portion of surplus wealth away from the rich and toward the poor and working classes to help reverse the global economy’s destructive course.

The basic idea of the Global Green Deal is "to renovate human civilization from top to bottom in environmentally sustainable ways," according to Hertsgaard. Relying on market mechanisms to the maximum extent possible, the program would also require governments to establish new "rules of the road" that would compel markets to respect rather than rape the environment. Under the Global Green Deal, we would wean ourselves quickly from reliance on heavily polluting fossil fuels through increased energy-efficiency measures and government "pump priming" to make renewable energy technologies affordable. Hertsgaard lays out a ground plan that would avert the looming global water crisis through drip irrigation, and would halt the epidemic of species extinction and the forest destruction that drives it. Mass transit would become the darling rather than the stepchild of government transportation spending, which would build transportation systems of such excellence that people would want to use them every day. The grinding poverty in the South would be alleviated by debt relief from the North, such as the Jubilee 2000 proposal discussed in "News of the Earth" last December.

Redirecting economic activity toward more efficient and renewable technologies would create jobs, both at home and in the developing world, to which we would transfer the new environmentally appropriate technologies either free of charge or very cheaply to encourage their adoption. As Hertsgaard wrote in an article in the April 2000 issue of News on Earth, "increasing efficiency produces far more jobs than environmentally damaging behavior does." For example, building railroad tracks generates 50 percent more jobs than building highways; incinerating a million tons of solid waste takes 80 workers, putting it in a landfill takes 600, but recycling that ton of waste requires 1,600 workers. Imagine how many jobs would be created if we adopted environmentally responsible measures such as recycling in all sectors of the economy.

Hertsgaard told me that the Global Green Deal would start "by redirecting public money in an environmentally helpful way, and in so doing, provoke and leverage changes in marketplace behavior that would self-replicate." The U.S. government, for instance, buys seven million vehicles each year. If the government required that those vehicles be powered by fuel cells or hybrid engines rather than gasoline, an instant market would be created; this, in turn, would jump-start automobile manufacturers into moving the more efficient technologies they have already developed from the drawing board onto the streets. And once those more efficient cars were being mass produced so that folks could afford to buy them, folks would buy them, which would generate more demand for the greener vehicles.

The best thing about the Global Green Deal is that we don’t have to wait for the right time to come along; we can get started now. Hertsgaard told me about a group called Destination Conservation that has environmentally retrofitted 2,700 schools in Canada in recent years. The installation of environmentally friendly common sense technologies such as low-flow shower heads and high-efficiency lighting reduced the utility bills of the average participating school by 30 percent. The money saved could then be used to buy more books, hire more teachers, or whatever else the school needed, all while adhering to an environmentally conscientious plan. Destination Conservation is now expanding into the United States, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t be applied to hospitals and government buildings in addition to schools. And, although Hertsgaard doesn’t mention this, Destination Conservation in the schools would also offer a golden opportunity to teach kids about energy efficiency and greener technologies.

On the international level, the Global Green Deal would alter the World Bank’s policies so that they no longer favor multinational corporations over people and the environment. In an article posted to www.tompaine.com this April, Hertsgaard wrote that the World Bank, whose mission is supposedly to alleviate poverty and promote sustainable development, is trying to fund a vast oil field and pipeline that would extend from Chad to Cameroon and the Atlantic Ocean, ravaging the ecosystems and human settlements in one of Africa’s largest remaining rain forests. The bank would loan or guarantee some $540 million of the project’s estimated $3.5 billion total cost, but all the profits would go to the private partners — Exxon-Mobil and Chevron — and the governments of Chad and Cameroon. (Both of these governments have histories of corruption and are unlikely to use such profits to benefit their people.) Nor is this an isolated slip-up; according to the Institute for Policy Studies, between mid-1992 and 1998, nine out of ten World Bank energy projects subsidized such giant corporations as Exxon, Chevron, and British Petroleum. And it’s estimated the fossil-fueled projects the World Bank funded over this period will produce 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide over the next thirty to fifty years — more than the 24 billion tons the entire world emits annually today.

Is that any way for a government-sponsored agency to discharge its public responsibilities? Hertsgaard doesn’t think so. He wonders why the World Bank couldn’t put the $540 million slated for the heavily polluting oil project in Chad and Cameroon to better use. A recent study, led by experts from British Petroleum, found that photovoltaic solar power could be competitive with coal and oil almost immediately if only someone provided the funding needed to bring industrial-scale solar power to the market. Strangely enough, the projected cost to build a factory to do just that is about $540 million.

Finally, we need to think about how the Global Green Deal would be funded. In the examples above, the money for doing the environmentally responsible thing either paid for itself (energy efficiency in the schools) or could simply be redirected from already existing government purchasing programs (fuel cell or hybrid cars for U.S. government fleets and World Bank-sponsored renewable energy technology programs). In other cases, Hertsgaard follows Herman Daly in suggesting that we "tax bads, not goods"; pollution and resource use should be taxed instead of income and investment. Furthermore, subsidies for environmentally destructive behavior such as fossil fuel extraction should be reinvested in developing environmentally appropriate technologies. "If even half of the estimated $500-$900 billion in environmentally destructive subsidies now being doled out by the world’s governments were pointed in the opposite direction," Hertsgaard writes, "the Global Green Deal would be off to a roaring start."

Problems and Prospects

Like many good ideas, the Global Green Deal is long on vision but rather short on concrete policies to make that vision come true. When I asked Hertsgaard to describe the Global Green Deal’s political program, he told me about Destination Conservation and the World Bank, but he couldn’t give me the "ten-point program" I had asked for. This is partly because he hasn’t worked out such detailed policy recommendations yet, and partly because he feels it is more effective to give environmental groups a broad framework into which they can fit their agendas, rather than asking them to do something entirely different.

While that may be true on the grassroots level, it doesn’t play as well in Congress. Politicians don’t tend to act unless they see a well-articulated problem or plan on which they can write solid legislation. The Global Green Deal, while a great idea, is still pretty fuzzy on the details, which may explain why the only politician who has been talking much about it so far is Ralph Nader.

Another problem some have seen with the Global Green Deal is that it is "just another top-down techno-fix." When I asked Hertsgaard about this, he said this criticism doesn’t bother him. "The world is a complex place," he responded, "and both top-down and bottom-up have to be part of the solution." The point is that governments are already out there every day making decisions about what kinds of cars to buy for their fleets and what kinds of economic activity to encourage; if we don’t fight to reroute those decisions in an environmentally responsible direction, we won’t be able to turn things around fast enough to prevent environmental catastrophe.

On a more general level, I found the Global Green Deal frustrating not just because it doesn’t have a specific set of policies to advocate, but also because as currently formulated it doesn’t say much about how we can craft environmentally responsible policies on the international level. This is pretty much the exact opposite of the "Global Marshall Plan," which Vice-President Gore discusses in the penultimate chapter of his book Earth in the Balance. Three of Gore’s five "strategic goals" for the Global Marshall Plan involve international issues: stabilization of world population (another issue touched on only in passing in the Global Green Deal), new "green" international trade agreements, and a cooperative plan for educating the world’s citizens about our global environment.

There are a number of attractive aspects to Gore’s plan. For one thing, he offers specific policies designed to achieve each goal (though Hertsgaard is correct in his criticism that Gore spends very little time discussing how to pay for the plan). Gore’s list of how to redraw more environmentally friendly economic rules is especially impressive, ranging from the redefinition of Gross National Product to include environmental costs and benefits to the requirement of full disclosure of corporate responsibility for environmental damage. Also promising is the fact that Gore calls for periodic assessments of world progress toward the goals of the Global Marshall Plan, perhaps under the auspices of a newly created UN Stewardship Council on the Environment. And he is absolutely correct in realizing that education is the key to developing a new way of thinking about the Earth. As Gore writes, "...if a new way of thinking about the natural world emerges, all of the other necessary actions will become instantly more feasible."

Hertsgaard realizes this too of course, but he thinks the crucial changes in our belief that "as much as we want is what we can consume" will not come overnight. Also not immediately forthcoming will be a moral or spiritual realization of the fact that, as Hertsgaard puts it, "it is not right for a very small minority to have so much more than they need when the vast majority has so much less than they need." Fixing this basic problem is not something the Global Green Deal can do; it’s a choice each of us must make on an individual level, in concert with our families and our religious communities.

What the Global Green Deal can do, though, is buy us time to make the necessary long-term changes to reverse the current trends toward widening inequality and environmental destruction. But this won’t happen without a fight. Too many rich people and corporations have too much to lose. That’s why we all need to push the Global Green Deal, or a similar plan, from the grassroots level. And for that I offer you a four-step plan.

First, learn more about the Global Green Deal. Reading this column is a start, and the resources listed below will help you go further. Second, become politically active; it’s an election year, so pressure candidates to get with the (green) program. Third, as Hertsgaard writes on the Global Green Deal Web site, "saving the planet is not a spectator sport"; get out there and spread the word, think about ways to improve energy efficiency or develop more appropriate technologies in your own part of the world. Then tell others. And if you have a ten-point plan for saving the Earth, send it in to the folks at the Global Green Deal Web site. The world needs your help.

Resources

You will find the most detailed statement of the Global Green Deal in Mark Hertsgaard’s book Earth Odyssey. For information on Vice-President Al Gore’s Global Marshall Plan, see his book Earth in the Balance. Two recent books on environmentally sound and economically valuable measures to increase energy efficiency are Factor Four by Ernst von Weizsacker, Amory B. Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins; and Cool Companies by Joseph J. Romm. You can also contact the Global Green Deal directly:

Global Green Deal, 415-561-6227

E-mail: info@globalgreendeal.org

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