Rebuild the Dream (28 page)

Many politicians want us to lower our expectations about the economy. I say it is time to raise them. We should go beyond the shriveled thinking imposed upon us by today's mania for austerity. Even the Contract for the American Dream should be seen as just a springboard—and not a ceiling—for what Americans might dare to dream and do together.

The time has come to propose solutions at the scale of the problems we face. Below, I will offer my own thoughts on one way we might do so. We must revive the economy, but in a way that respects the people and the planet. After all, the last version of America's economy—the version that collapsed in 2008
—
was built up on three fundamental fallacies:

1. First of all,
the failed economy was based on consumption, rather than production
. Both political parties promoted the idea that our nation could have the biggest economy in the world, not by producing the most, but by consuming the most. The American consumer, not the American worker, became the driver for the entire world economy. Our country became the global economic engine, not because of what we were building (how productive we were), but because of what we were buying (how many products we consumed). The shopping mall replaced the factory as the symbol of America's economy.

2. Second,
the failed economy was based on credit, rather than on smart savings and thrift
, which our grandparents
believed in. We built the entire economy up on credit cards, which inundated our mailboxes every day, at practically 0 percent, no questions asked. Gone was the wisdom and discipline of needing to save money to make a down payment on a house or a car. People started using their homes as ATMs, borrowing against the equity in their houses to buy flat-screen televisions to cover the holes in their lives. When that house of credit cards came tumbling down, the whole nation was poorer.

3. Third,
the failed economy was based on ecological destruction, rather than on ecological restoration
. The final fallacy was the idea that humans exist in some separate bubble from the rest of the planet's ecology. We have acted as if we could continue turning beautiful, living things into dead products and then incinerating them or shoving them into landfills, without long-term consequences. We have treated the skies as an open sewer for carbon pollution. But the bills are coming due in the form of wacky weather, dying oceans, and mass extinctions—all of which threaten human health and undermine the basis of our prosperity.

All three of these fallacies contributed to the mess we are in today. To heal our finances and fix the flaws in our last economic model, we must bring our monetary world into alignment with a deeper wisdom.

That is why the next American economy must be the reverse of the economy that let us down.

• It must be driven by local production, rather than by global consumption.

• It must be based on thrift and conservation, rather than on credit and waste.

• It must be grounded in ecological restoration, rather than in environmental destruction.

If we honor all of these principles together—local production, thrift, conservation, and ecological restoration—the next U.S. economy will be more productive, more stable, and more sustainable. That is the very definition of a green economy.

And just as we have no choice but to change course economically, we have no choice but to change course ecologically. In this book, we have barely touched upon the environmental crisis. But since I wrote my last book,
The Green Collar Economy
, things have mostly gotten worse—in many cases, much worse. Our children face a future without sufficient resources to live on, given our levels of consumption, waste, and pollution—especially greenhouse gas pollution.

Catastrophic climate change, driven by human activity, is still the biggest threat to human societies, not to mention innumerable other species. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in late 2011 released its most recent reports on the unmistakable cause-effect relationship between CO
₂
emissions and extreme weather. As I write these words, our planet has reached 390.31 parts per million carbon in the atmosphere. That figure is well above the 350 mark experts agree is safe.

James Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued his own warning:

If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that
CO
₂
will need to be reduced to at most 350 ppm. That will be a hard task, but not impossible. We need to stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it into the air. Above all, that means we need to stop burning so much coal—and start using solar and wind energy and other such sources of renewable energy—while ensuring the Global South a fair chance to develop. If we do, then the earth's soils and forests will slowly cycle some of that extra carbon out of the atmosphere, and eventually CO
₂
concentrations will return to a safe level. By decreasing use of other fossil fuels, and improving agricultural and forestry practices around the world, scientists believe we could get back below 350 by mid-century. But the longer we remain in the danger zone—above 350—the more likely that we will see disastrous and irreversible climate impacts.

CO
₂
-driven climate change is a serious threat. It is killing our oceans. In June 2011, the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) warned that we are on the brink of the greatest extinction of marine species ever seen, unprecedented in known history. A lot of the CO
₂
gets sucked into the oceans, and as a result the seas are acidifying ten times faster than 55 million years ago, when a previous mass extinction of marine species occurred.

Mass extinction impacts the land as well, and not just because of climate change. According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), every hour that passes, four species (animals and plants) go extinct, and more than forty-five hundred acres of trees are lost. The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources' most recent “Red List of Threatened Species” shows that 21 percent of all known mammals, 30 percent of all known amphibians, 12 percent of all known birds, 28 percent of reptiles, 37 percent of freshwater fishes, 70 percent of plants, and 35 percent
of invertebrates assessed so far are under threat of extinction. The New Economics Foundation (NEF), based in London, calculates how much of the earth's resources and services humans use each year (we use natural resources to do everything from build cities and roads, to provide food and create products, and to absorb CO
₂
), and then compares that to how much the earth can make, or replenish, that year. Their calculations project that we are using 1.3 to 1.5 planet's worth of resources in 2011. Another way of saying that is humans are using 135 percent of the resources that the earth can generate this year. For the rest of the year, we are accumulating debt by depleting our natural capital and letting waste accumulate. The NEF projects that even with modest United Nations projections for population growth, consumption, and climate change, by 2030 humanity will need the capacity of two planets. Last time I checked, we had only one.

Today we find only about one barrel's worth of oil for every four barrels the planet consumes. Back in 1993 the Worldwatch Institute warned us

At some point, the economic costs of deteriorating forests, dying lakes, damaged crops, respiratory illnesses, increasing temperatures, rising sea levels, and other destructive effects of fossil fuel use become unacceptably high. Basic economics argues for a switch to solar energy. Rather than wondering if we can afford to respond to these threats, policymakers should consider the costs of not responding.

The message is clear: we need to move on from burning carbon-based fuel. There's a reason we call them fossil fuels: because they are dead. They are made of material that has been without life for eons. In the case of petroleum, it is material that has
been dead for 60 million years; in the case of coal, for 300 million years. Right now, our nation powers itself by burning dead stuff it pulls out of the ground. Any shaman will tell you a society that powers itself with death should not then be surprised to find death everywhere—in its children's lungs in the form of asthma, in its oceans in the form of oil spills, and coming from the skies in the form of climate change. It's time to evolve. It is time to power civilization with living energy from the sun, the wind, our crops, our labor, and our own creativity.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to this suicidal, gray economy that is killing jobs and the planet. A cleaner, greener economy has the potential to increase the work, wealth, and health of ordinary Americans in a way that respects the Earth. The cornerstone of the new economy must be clean technologies and manufacturing, especially in the energy sector.

For too long, we have acted as if we had to choose between strong economic performance and strong environmental performance. We have been torn between our children's need for a robust economy today and our grandchildren's need for a healthy planet tomorrow. We have been trapped in the “jobs versus the environment” dilemma.

The time has come to create “jobs FOR the environment.” We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Houses don't retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don't plant themselves. Community
gardens don't tend themselves. Farmers' markets don't run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.

We have our own “Saudi Arabia” of clean, renewable energy in America. In the plains states, off our coasts, and in the Great Lakes area, we have abundant wind energy. With American-made wind turbines and wind farms, we could tap those wind resources and create jobs doing it. We also have abundant solar resources—not just in the Sunbelt and in our deserts, but on rooftops across America. With American-made solar panels and solar farms, we could tap the energy of the sun to create electricity. Then we could build a national, smart grid—an Internet for energy—to connect our clean energy power centers to our population centers. That would create jobs and let us begin to run America increasingly on safe, homegrown energy.

When we do this, we won't be starting from scratch. According to the Brookings Institute, the United States already has 2.4 million green jobs. A bigger national commitment to building a green economy can create many millions more.

Some on the far right reject this agenda, saying, “But we don't want the government getting involved in our energy system.” That is similar to the sentiment that says, “Get your government hands off my Medicare!” Just as Medicare is already a government program, the public sector is already deeply involved with the energy system—through regulation, subsidies, and taxation—in every country in the world. What needs to change is this: the world's governments need to stop partnering with the problem-makers in
our energy sector—the big carbon polluters—and do a better job of partnering with the problem solvers—the pioneers of renewable energy.

Desperate defenders of the status quo accuse champions of the green agenda of being reds in disguise, using the environmental crisis to pursue a communistic agenda. This is nonsense. The Soviet Union's environmental record was atrocious. “Red” China is surpassing the United States as the world's biggest polluter. Europe's socialist governments are often just as guilty as her capitalist ones of trading short-term economic gain for long-term environmental pain. The last century produced a destructive industrial model on both sides of the Iron Curtain; the Earth didn't care whether capitalists or communists were in charge of the smokestacks. Going to some kind of totalitarian, Soviet model would do nothing to avert the looming ecological catastrophe. That is one of the many reasons that no significant environmental leader or organization favors such an approach.

We must upgrade the industrial model itself, bringing forward the cleanest technologies and wisest practices, as fast as possible. To do that, we don't need to go backward to communism. We need to advance toward a better capitalism. To solve our problems, we don't need authoritarianism. We need a more robust democracy, with less power for the polluters and more power for the people.

That's why every kind of American can and should adopt the clean energy agenda: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians; farmers, ranchers, and urban property owners; struggling youth and entrepreneurs; and every one of the casualty groups to be discussed in the Outside Game chapter.

Liberals should embrace the questions that clean energy advocates are raising: how are we going to take care of future generations, avoid pollution today, and create jobs? At the same time, conservatives should love the answers. After all, clean energy advocates are not standing up for new entitlement programs; they are standing up for new enterprises. They are not seeking green welfare; they are seeking green work. Their agenda is not to redistribute wealth; it is to create opportunities for entrepreneurs of all backgrounds to create new wealth.