This story is part of The Next New Deal, a series examining the coronavirus economic recovery.
Part 1: The original New Deal
Part 2: The worker
Part 3: The environment
Curtis Shuck spends a lot of time driving around the West, looking to fix century-old environmental mistakes. Last year, he started the Well Done Foundation, a nonprofit that plugs abandoned oil and gas wells. These sites, most of which finished producing oil decades ago, leak methane, a greenhouse gas with a warming effect at least 25 times that of carbon dioxide. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, in 2018, abandoned wells released 281 kilotons of methane. You’d have to burn 7.74 billion pounds of coal to produce equivalent emissions.
Well Done has a pilot project underway in Montana, where Shuck expects to plug 20 abandoned wells this year. There’s plenty more work to be done; the EPA estimates about 2 million wells across the country need plugged. “And there are more coming, because of all the bankruptcies in the oil and gas industry,” Shuck told me.
Shuck is no bleeding heart environmentalist. He spent decades working in the oil and gas industry; at the Port of Vancouver in Washington, he sought to establish an oil-by-rail terminal. But he recognizes the threat climate change poses, and sees the millions of unplugged wells as a concrete way to reduce our emissions — and create jobs.
“It’s a multifaceted benefit,” Shuck said. “You’re not only putting people to work, you’re enhancing the environment.” Former oilfield workers, geologists, data scientists, landscape restoration experts — Shuck said he has work for all of them. “And it’s trainable work — you don’t need a Ph.D to do this.”
Providing jobs and reducing emissions is a valuable combination as we face an acute crisis — the coronavirus pandemic — and the long-term threats of climate change. With unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression and millions of businesses at risk of closure, a federal jobs program akin to those deployed during the New Deal could be the best way for our country to change the trajectory of an already unstable economy decimated by the coronavirus pandemic.
A Green New Deal that prioritizes climate change and environmental justice would yield numerous benefits if crafted carefully. For one, it would avert disaster. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that greenhouse gas emissions need to hit zero by 2050 (we have 36.8 billion metric tons to go) to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius; warm up beyond that threshold, and Earth’s systems would change to an extent that threatens millions of lives. So jobs created under a climate lens would put the U.S. at the forefront of much-needed global innovation. This new economy would reduce poverty and disproportionately benefit low-income areas that suffer most from air pollution, heat islands, and other adverse effects of climate change.
Economists and environmental justice groups have ideas about how to do this. Most plans would require long-term federal assistance at a steep price, but one comparable with coronavirus relief to date and certainly less expensive than climate inaction. One estimate says an environment-oriented jobs program could put more than 9 million people to work over the next decade and meet the IPCC’s emissions reduction targets.
The most famous Green New Deal proposal came from New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February 2019. Her resolution catapulted the idea of a climate-focused economic renewal into the mainstream, but one Western academic has been studying and crafting such a plan for as long as Ocasio-Cortez has been alive. And he actually has a way to pay for it.
In 1989, economist Edward Barbier co-authored Blueprint for a Green Economy, a widely hailed guide for promoting environmental justice through economic renewal. Twenty years later, when Barbier was at the University of Wyoming, the United Nations Environment Programme tasked him with crafting a Global Green New Deal to guide a sustainable recovery from the Great Recession.
Barbier argued then, as now, that a successful Green New Deal must accomplish three things. First, it needs to goose the economy and create jobs — we are talking about economic recovery, after all. Point number two: That economic activity must reduce our carbon footprint and the degradation of ecosystems. If we create a bunch of jobs but deplete biodiversity in the process, then we’re just laying the foundation for another economic collapse (not to mention another pandemic). Finally, poverty must be eliminated. After all, poor folks — often ethnic or racial minorities — suffer the brunt of both climate change and economic declines.
“The same principles apply today,” Barbier, now a professor at Colorado State University, told me. “The good news is, I’m not the only one talking about these things, and there’s starting to be some momentum. My concern is time.”
Barbier’s plan for a post-COVID-19 recovery calls on rich countries to devote 1 percent of their GDP — about $205 billion for the U.S. — to environmentally sustainable programs for a 5 to 10-year period. Funding should be directed to a few major buckets, one of which being support for private research and development. Because competitors can reverse-engineer their ideas, companies chronically underfund R&D, so government assistance is necessary in the development of climate-friendly technology.
“If you look at the history of innovation in this country, it doesn’t just come from somebody sitting in a garage,” Barbier said. Personal computers, the internet — all of it was built on the back of federally subsidized research. “Our whole fossil fuel industry came about because of the U.S. Geological Survey, because of a huge amount of energy R&D by the public sector,” Barbier said. The plummeting cost of solar power is thanks in part to federal R&D — in China.
In addition to R&D, public-sector investment should build an infrastructure that primes the nation for a greener industrial future. Developing smart, decentralized grids that can better incorporate solar, wind, and other intermittent energy sources is critical to developing utility-scale renewable energy and would hasten a decline in air pollution. Transportation, the world’s fastest-growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, also needs remade. Barbier is big on building charging stations, an infrastructure investment that could dramatically speed the adoption of electric cars. Though transit may be a terrifying notion during the pandemic, it’s something cities — particularly Western ones — are in dire need of. Low-income neighborhoods are especially transit-poor, so big investments in buses and trains would bring both jobs and transportation options to neglected neighborhoods.
That segues into Barbier’s most sweeping target of Green New Deal funds — the need to rethink our cities. Everything from building efficiency to zoning codes and transportation systems is fair game. “You think of European cities, they’re built on a human scale — people walk a lot,” Barbier said. “We need to bring back urban planning in a big way in this country, and base it less on private car transport and this idea of spreading out.”
One of Barbier’s key tenets is even more relevant now than it was after the Great Recession: the need for these policies to pay for themselves. Barbier’s no champion of deficit spending; an environmentally sustainable policy must be fiscally sustainable, too. But there are key sources of revenue the U.S. has neglected to tap into that could finance a Green New Deal.
The first is a tax or fee on carbon. Per Resources for the Future’s carbon pricing calculator, a $60-per-ton tax on emissions would immediately generate $233.5 billion in revenue — more than the 1 percent of GDP Barbier calls for.
An even larger source of revenue could be removing subsidies for fossil fuels. In the U.S., direct public subsidies to fossil fuels account for about $34 billion per year — a big sum, but one dwarfed by all of the indirect expenditures that prop up our use of coal, oil, and gas. The International Monetary Fund estimates “post-tax” fossil fuel subsidies by factoring in the costs of climate change, pollution, congestion, traffic accidents, etc. It’s a wide net, but when you consider how ingrained fossil fuels are in our everyday lives, the approach makes more sense. The IMF estimates the U.S. post-tax subsidy for fossil fuels is 3.6 percent of GDP. In a roundabout way, taxpayers are cutting a $736 billion check to the fossil fuel industry each year.
Repealing every subsidy for fossil fuels won’t happen any time soon, but starting down that path would re-orient the market in favor of renewable energy and spur innovations to drive our future economy.
“You can think of all these policies as a burden, as a tax, but you should think of them as also creating the market and private incentives to innovate and become highly productive, to do that leap … that allows your economy to become better for your citizens,” Barbier said. “We’ve lost that in the United States.”
This week, a House committee on climate change released a plan to achieve some of Barbier’s goals. It’s a sweeping legislative agenda — one unlikely to advance beyond the Republican-led Senate or President Donald Trump’s veto pen — with 12 pillars Congress should address, including clean energy infrastructure and manufacturing, shifting agriculture practices, and habitat restoration.
Bills dovetailing with those recommendations are emerging. One piece of legislation mentioned in the report was introduced this month by Democratic Representative Joe Neguse of Colorado, a member of the climate committee. Neguse’s bill would spend $40 billion on public lands projects and a modern Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal program famous for planting 3 billion trees and building numerous parks, wildlife refuges, and trails around the U.S., particularly in the West.
More than $5.5 billion would be distributed to the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to thin trees and brush in areas susceptible to severe wildfires. Maintenance projects in national forests and national parks would get $12 billion, and $5.5 billion would be earmarked for watershed restoration. The Bureau of Reclamation’s $4.5 billion allotment would have to be spent on projects that improve drought resiliency or benefit native fish. The Labor Department would get $9 billion to establish the new CCC workforce.
“There are underlying structural issues that relate to our outdoor recreation economy and management of our public lands,” Neguse told The Colorado Sun. “This bill certainly seeks to address those challenges in an innovative way. It’s important in this moment to go big and be bold with a comprehensive approach that addresses the confluence of all these different issues coming to the surface.”
This bill falls in the short-term stimulus camp; most of the programs, including the CCC redux, would sunset in 2022. There are guidelines emerging for longer-term solutions, though. The House this week passed a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package that would pour money into transit, housing, and energy grid improvements. The bill is likely to die in the Senate, though; Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called it “absurd.”
Such legislation could put millions back to work, though. The Sierra Club recently released a plan calling on Congress to spend $5.8 trillion over 10 years on infrastructure improvements, clean energy, and environmental restoration. Economists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst project the Sierra Club proposal would support 9.1 million jobs — both direct and induced — each year, and cut carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030, in line with the IPCC target.
A $580 billion annual price tag is comparable to projections for a federal jobs guarantee, and doesn’t factor in revenue from a carbon tax, the elimination of fossil fuel subsidies, or an increase in tax revenue from the boost in incomes and consumption. In its proposal, the Sierra Club said all jobs should meet requirements for prevailing wages and prioritize domestically produced materials. Further, at least 40 percent of infrastructure spending should be funneled to disadvantaged communities, many of which have been hardest hit by the pandemic.
“We can support climate action, public health, job creation, and greater racial and economic justice simultaneously,” said Ben Beachy, director of the Sierra Club’s A Living Economy program. “This crisis has laid bare that [the pre-coronavirus economy] was unjust, unhealthy, and unstable. … We have to do better than normal. We need a bold plan for economic renewal.”
That renewal would include 213,000 jobs supported by greater investment in public transit. Building more public housing might bring 230,000 jobs, and retrofitting low-income homes to be more energy efficient would put another 214,000 people to work. If Congress were to dedicate $60 billion to Curtis Shuck’s wheelhouse — closing abandoned oil wells — another 190,000 jobs would be supported.
Shuck’s not expecting a congressional windfall, but said closing up old wells should engender bipartisan support.
“I know right now, oh my gosh, it seems so overwhelming to agree on these things,” Shuck said. “But if we can come together around plugging a few orphaned wells, maybe you can take that experience and apply it somewhere else, where it’s a bit more complicated.”
The policies Barbier has been pushing for 30 years are, indeed, complicated, and he believes proposals such as Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal miss the nuance — particularly on the fiscal side. But after watching politicians fail for decades to implement policies that address our carbon-intensive economy, Barbier said any advance of sustainable ideas is important.
“Sure, I’ve criticized the Green New Deal proposal — but, my god, that was a breath of fresh air,” Barbier said. “It changed the debate, and that’s what we need. Usually it takes a crisis to change our thinking, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, We have a climate crisis — let’s get real. We have a social crisis — let’s get real. Now I disagree with her methods, but she’s right. … We have to transform our economy and society.”
