It’s heartening to watch the Green New Deal spread across America, Europe, and the world. To this degree, ideas do indeed have consequences. We are a storytelling species. We live by our narratives and the stories we share, and by doing so, come to know ourselves as a collective social being. The Green New Deal is a “story line” that has evolved and matured over the years, taking on ever more sophisticated and nuanced meanings. And now humanity finds itself in the throes of either a potential endgame or, hopefully, a new beginning. The Green New Deal gives us our collective voice and a shared sense of our common mission. What we so desperately need now is to turn the story line into a powerful narrative that can take us forward.
To this end, America’s entrance into the conversation is crucial. While the “can-do” attitude is in our cultural DNA, it’s the “American spirit” that unleashes it. That spirit has always been hopeful of a better future, with successive generations willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to noble tasks, even at times to the point of reckless disregard for the practicalities and obstacles along the way. We see this time and again in the unleashing of the entrepreneurial spirit, not just in the marketplace but also in civil society. Americans’ most unique quality is not fearing failure, be it pecuniary or social in nature. Often when I visit friends and colleagues in other countries, their conversation slips to America’s risk-taking attitude and willingness to fail and start over, to learn from defeat, to never quit.
This is exactly the attitude humanity needs now to weather the climate storm that’s coming—a fearless resilience in the face of the unknown, willingness to meet it head-on, and, when pushed down, to stand up again. But this time around, the tomorrows are not going to be like those we experienced in the past. Anyone who tells you that the Green New Deal is going to preserve the way of life we know, sugarcoating the greening of society, is kidding you. Our tomorrows are going to be fraught with escalating climate events that are going to take an immense toll on our communities, our ecosystems, and our common biosphere.
We are entering into a frontier of a new kind. Nature is rewilding, and we have to learn how to live with the uncertainty while adapting moment to moment to its surprises. We are going to need to cast aside any notion previously entertained about pacifying nature and molding and shaping it to serve humanity. Now we will need to regroup, gather our collective strength, learn to live by our wits, and find within ourselves the deep resilience that will allow us to survive and carry on into an unknown future that awaits our species and fellow creatures here on this little blue oasis in the universe. The sudden willingness of a younger generation of Americans and young people all over the world to do battle on climate change is a welcome turn of events, and long overdue.
Mindful of the powerful Green New Deal clarion call sounded at the beginning of 2019 by a younger generation of activists and newly elected officials at the local, state, and national levels here in the United States, I’d like to bring my fellow Americans up to date on the most recent developments around the Green New Deal in Europe, announced just months before this writing by the European Commission, so that European and American activists can share notes on the great mobilization ahead.
On November 28, 2018, the European Union unveiled the next stage of its journey to decarbonize the continent and bring on a more sustainable future. The European Commission is calling for a climate-neutral Europe by 2050, a zero-emission ecological society stretching across the entire expanse of the European continent.1 The twenty-eight member states are all coming along, some more enthusiastically, others with a grumble, but everyone realizing that this is not the time to retreat but, rather, to redouble our efforts.
Here is a brief run-up to the EU climate-neutral 2050 game plan. We began in August 2016 by getting the EU member states comfortable with the new climate targets that would be proposed by the end of 2018. I joined EU Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič in Slovakia on July 9, 2016, during Slovakia’s presidency of the Council of the European Union. Šefčovič introduced the outline of the new directives and goals of the EU Energy Union, tying the new renewable energy targets, energy efficiency targets, and CO2 reduction targets for 2030 and 2050 to the smart Europe rollout. I was asked to present the case for a smart infrastructure transformation that could bring the EU into a postcarbon era before midcentury.2
We followed up the next year, on January 31, 2017. I delivered a similar message cued to the financial community in a presentation at the European Central Bank with the theme “A History of the Future—The World in 2025.”3
A week later, on February 7, Vice President Šefčovič and I joined Markku Markkula, the president of the Committee of the Regions, in a high-level conference hosted by that committee titled “Investing in Europe: Building a Coalition of Smart Cities & Regions.”4 It was important to bring the EU’s powerful but often overlooked 350 governing regions into the fold, given that the ultimate success of the plan to decarbonize Europe and transition to a green era by 2050 would lie with the scale-up of a smart green infrastructure customized to each region. Šefčovič emphasized that a sustainable future “relies on regions and cities to deliver” on the EU’s targets for increasing renewable energy, accelerating energy efficiency, and reducing the carbon footprint. We briefed the representatives of the regions on the progress being made in the three green lighthouse regions we were working with in Hauts-de-France, the twenty-three cities from Rotterdam to The Hague in the Netherlands, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
With the Council of the European Union, the EU’s Central Bank, and the Committee of the Regions briefed and enthusiastic, Šefčovič and his team spent the next twenty-two months working on the much-anticipated EU Commission 2050 report, which was delivered on November 28, 2018, by Šefčovič, Miguel Arias Cañete, the commissioner for climate action and energy, and Violeta Bulc, the commissioner for transport.
Vice President Šefčovič informed the EU member states that “our strategy now shows that by 2050, it is realistic to make Europe both climate-neutral and prosperous.” Commissioner Cañete made note of the historic importance of this EU milestone, saying that “today, we are stepping up our efforts as we propose a strategy for Europe to become the world’s first major economy to go climate neutral by 2050.”5 According to the report, renewable energy consumption had spiked from 9 percent in 2005 to 17 percent in 2018 and was on schedule to meet the 20-20-20 target of 20 percent renewable energy consumption across the 28 member states along with the other two targets of a 20 percent increase in energy efficiency and a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, by the 2020 deadline.6
Going forward, the plan requires joint action earmarked in seven strategic areas: energy efficiency; deployment of renewables; clean, safe, and connected mobility; competitive industries and a circular economy; infrastructure and interconnections; bioeconomy and natural carbon sinks; and carbon capture and storage to address remaining emissions.
With 2020 targets in reach, the EU has set still even more aggressive new targets of 32 percent renewable energy, a 32.5 percent increase in energy efficiency, and a 45 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, all by 2030, and a target to be nearly carbon-free by 2050.7 But the report acknowledged that although the EU was leading the world into a zero-emission postcarbon era, efforts were still far too slow, given the newly released IPCC report warning that the world’s nations only have twelve years left to transform their economies out of a carbon culture or risk sliding over the 1.5°C rise in Earth’s temperature and into an inevitable free fall, taking us deeply into the sixth mass extinction.
I’d like to share the first few lines of the EU Commission report, which I think will resonate with the Green New Deal activist message moving across America:
The Strategy therefore outlines a vision of the economic and societal transformations required, engaging all sectors of the economy and society, to achieve the transition to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. It seeks to ensure that this transition is socially fair—not leaving any EU citizen or region behind—and enhances the competitiveness of the EU economy and industry on global markets, securing high quality jobs and sustainable growth in Europe.8
These lines are particularly moving. The EU has transitioned from having a laundry list of projects to articulating “a vision of the economic and societal transformations” that will usher in a new era in the European Union. This is Europe’s key message to America’s Green New Deal activists and activists around the world. The vast majority of cities, regions, and nations are still mired in siloed green projects and initiatives tucked inside the body of an outdated twentieth-century fossil fuel economic paradigm and its accompanying business model and form of governance.
Many of the Green New Deal declarations, manifestos, reports, and studies being scrutinized in the public debate read more like a story line at best, or a shopping list at worst. Each of these items alone seems so very technical and scanty. They fall short of steering the kind of shift in consciousness that can take us on the journey before us.
At this critical juncture in history, the Green New Deal story lines need to be put together in a coherent economic and philosophic narrative that can create a sense of our collective identity as a species and bring humanity into a new worldview, giving us a glocal heartbeat. Absent the story, all the ideas get lost in a jumble of items, none of which connect to the others. Every idea becomes a fought-over non sequitur, sapping us of the strength for the imaginative leap needed to take us into the next era of history.
All of which takes us back to chapter 1, “It’s the Infrastructure, Stupid!” The great paradigm changes in human history are infrastructure revolutions that change our temporal/spatial orientation, our economic models, our forms of governance, our cognition, and our very worldview. The convergence of new communication technologies, new sources of energy, and new modes of mobility and logistics to manage, power, and move the economy and society changes the way we think about the world around us.
Forager/hunter primitive infrastructures, which dominated most of our 200,000-year history, were remarkably similar in their narratives, each exhibiting what anthropologists call a “mythological consciousness” and tribal governance. The advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago and the subsequent emergence of the great hydraulic agricultural infrastructures in Sumer in the Middle East, the Indus Valley in India, and the Yangtze River Valley in China gave rise to “theological consciousness” and centralized governing empires. The First Industrial Revolution infrastructure in the nineteenth century gave rise to “ideological consciousness” and the birth of national markets and nation-state governance. The Second Industrial Revolution global infrastructure in the twentieth century gave rise to “psychological consciousness” and the beginnings of global markets and global governing bodies. The Third Industrial Revolution glocal infrastructure emerging in the twenty-first century is giving birth to “biosphere consciousness” and peer assembly governance. The biosphere, stretching up into the atmosphere and down through the lithosphere and into the oceans, is where all the creatures on Earth live, interact, and flourish.
Each of these great paradigm shifts was accompanied by the evolution of our empathic impulse to larger collectivities and worldviews. In forager/hunter societies, empathy extended only to blood ties and kinship and the sharing of a common ancestral worldview. In the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations, empathy extended to those who shared a common religious affiliation. The great religions formed during this era, giving rise to non-blood-related “figurative families” based on religious ties. All converts to Judaism began to empathize with fellow Jews as their extended figurative family. The same with Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims. In the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, empathy extended to figurative families based on a collective sense of national loyalty to the Motherland or Fatherland. Citizens began to empathize with each other based on their nation-state identity. In the Second Industrial Revolution in the twentieth century, empathy extended to like-minded cosmopolitan and professional ties in an increasingly borderless world. In the emerging Third Industrial Revolution, a generation of digital natives Skyping in global classrooms, interacting on Facebook and Instagram, gaming in virtual worlds, and obsessively traveling the physical world are beginning to see themselves as a planetary cohort inhabiting a common biosphere. They are extending empathy in a more expansive way, coming to think of themselves as members of a threatened species and empathizing with their common plight on a destabilizing Earth. And a growing number of young people are beginning to take a final step beyond, empathizing with all the other creatures with whom we share an evolutionary heritage.9
A younger generation beset by climate change is waking up to a reality that is both unnerving and revelatory at the same time. We are beginning to understand that the Earth is embedded in an untold number of interacting agencies—the conjoined movements of the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and magnetosphere; the temporal sequencing of the Earth’s circadian, lunar, and circannual rhythms and the changing of the seasons; and the ebbs and flows of nature brought on by the continuous interactions of the Earth’s myriad creatures—all bumping up against each other in an array of feedbacks so subtle that we can barely begin to take in how each encounter changes the dynamics of the system as a whole. Yet, somehow the Earth seems to continually evolve, readjust, adapt, and maintain its equilibrium, much like a planetary organism. At least up until now!
We have suddenly been sensitized to the consequences of disturbing the burial grounds of a previous geological era. We dug up the remains of earlier life that once existed on the planet and that was transformed into coal, oil, and natural gas. We have been living off this stored “body” of energy for the past two hundred years while casting off the waste in the form of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. The great disruption triggered positive feedback across the Earth’s agencies, bringing us to the sixth extinction event in our planet’s history.
We now know that every piece of coal, every drop of oil, and every cubic foot of natural gas that twelve generations of human beings have used to create our carbon-based industrial civilization have had consequences that are now reshaping the dynamics of the Earth. What we are learning from climate change is that everything we do affects the workings of everything else on Earth and has consequences for the well-being of all the creatures with whom we cohabit this planet.
Awareness of the planetary agencies that affect our very existence is a humbling experience and the central lesson that climate change is teaching us. Learning to live among rather than rule over these agencies that traverse the Earth is what takes us from dominion to stewardship and from human-centric detachment to deep participation with the living Earth. This is the great shift in temporal-spatial orientation that gives us a biosphere perspective.
This fundamental transformation in human consciousness is the silver lining—the imaginative breakthrough—that, if truly internalized and harnessed, is what will give us a fighting chance of riding out the great climate disruption and surviving and maybe even flourishing in new ways over eons to come in a world very different than the one we all know today.
The EU, with its 512 million citizens, has, until recently, led the charge into a zero-emission green economy. The People’s Republic of China, with its nearly 1.4 billion people, has roared onto the field in recent years with its plan to transition into a postcarbon era. And now the United States, with its 325 million citizens, is poised to join the herd. Without all three elephants marching in sync, sharing best practices, establishing common codes, regulations, standards, and incentives, and reaching out together to bring the rest of humanity into the fold, the race to a zero-carbon civilization in less than twenty years will be lost.
In working with the leadership in both the European Union and China, I’ve come to see that both governments are on the same path to address climate change. They both understand that the mission is the quick decoupling of every sector and industry from the Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure and their recoupling in the emerging Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure. The EU calls the Third Industrial Revolution “Smart Europe,” and China calls the Third Industrial Revolution “China Internet Plus.” They are similar plans, and, despite the two governments’ squabbles, disagreements, and occasional suspicions of each other, they share common ground.
First, recall that the EU is China’s largest trading partner, and China is the EU’s second-largest trading partner and relatively soon will likely be its largest, binding the two governing giants in a common commercial domain.10 Second, both the EU and China share a common Eurasian landmass stretching from Shanghai to the Port of Rotterdam, binding them together across the largest contiguous geographical space in the world. Third, both the EU and China are clear about their role at this moment in world history: to address climate change and preserve life on Earth. Fourth, both the EU and China are reaching out beyond their borders to assist other regions in making the transition to a postcarbon civilization. On this last point, China has taken a commanding lead with its Belt and Road Initiative. The initiative was announced by President Xi Jinping in 2013 and takes its inspiration from the ancient Silk Road, the trade route that connected China, Asia, and the West.11
The vision is to build out a twenty-first-century smart digital infrastructure that can connect all of Eurasia, creating the largest integrated commercial space in history. The Belt and Road Initiative is more than just a new global trade initiative combined with conventional infrastructure investment to ensure adequate transport and logistics corridors and speed commerce across Eurasian supply chains and markets. Rather, it is part of a bigger philosophical agenda on the part of China to establish what it calls an “ecological civilization.”12
In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party signaled an extraordinary shift in its governance and worldview by embedding the term “ecological civilization” into the heart of its constitution and making it the theme of its twelfth Five-Year Plan, and all Five-Year Plans thereafter. In practice, the Chinese government has stipulated that all future economic planning and development in China must adhere to and harmonize with the guiding principles of nature and the Earth’s operating systems.
The ecological civilization is the core not only of China’s domestic policy but also of its Belt and Road Initiative. The vision takes China from a geopolitical worldview that dominated the politics of nations through the First and Second Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in a fossil fuel civilization to a biosphere worldview that will increasingly guide international affairs in the Third Industrial Revolution of the twenty-first century at the dawn of an ecological era.
This is not to suggest that traditional geopolitics suddenly disappears with the Belt and Road Initiative. The struggle between geopolitics and biosphere politics among China, the European Union, the United States, and, for that matter, the rest of the nations of the world will be protracted over the remaining course of the twenty-first century. But what is sure is that the geopolitical worldview wedded to a fossil fuel civilization is dying, and the biosphere worldview of an ecological civilization is emergent and represents the next stage of the human journey. This is the larger picture in which a green vision, narrative, and transition are emerging, not only in China, but also in the European Union and now just getting off the ground in America and throughout the world.
In September 2018, the European Commission and the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy published a joint communication, “Connecting Europe and Asia Strategy,” outlining the EU’s approach to creating a seamless Eurasian smart infrastructure. The EU made it clear that its efforts to assist communities and countries across Eurasia, like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, will focus on the building out of smart digital networks that bring together telecom and internet connectivity, the revving up of renewable energy generation, the decarbonization of transport and the digitization of mobility, the prioritization of energy efficiencies across the building stock, and all of the other infrastructure components of the Third Industrial Revolution.13
The EU joint communication notes that indispensable to the success of a digitally connected smart Eurasia infrastructure will be developing universally accepted codes, regulations, standards, incentives, and penalties, agreed upon by all the participating nations, in a spirit of “transparency,” that would enable the deployment of an integrated smart commercial space across the world’s largest landmass.
The EU-China collaboration is vital to divesting from the fossil fuel civilization and reinvesting in the ecological civilization. Both superpowers are already far along in the transformation. While critics can rightfully argue that China is still pouring investment dollars into fossil-fuel-related infrastructure across the Belt and Road Initiative, it is quickly pivoting to renewable energy, smart electricity grids, and electric transport networks that make up a Third Industrial Revolution paradigm.
In May 2017, the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the National Development and Reform Commission, and the Ministry of Commerce issued an unprecedented “Guidance on Promoting the Green Belt and Road” as the very foundation of the Belt and Road Initiative, with the goal of bringing nations, regions, and localities into a global collaboration to build an ecological civilization. China is putting its money where its mouth is, with scaled green infrastructure projects being launched across all of Asia. I encourage readers to download the “Guidance” and judge for themselves both the intent and the merit of the protocol.14
I took part in several of the early discussions on advancing the green Belt and Road Initiative at the National Development and Reform Commission, the State Council, China’s National Academy of Sciences, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and shared with the Chinese leadership our efforts and initiatives at the European Commission and in the EU member states and regions in transitioning into a green Third Industrial Revolution. In 2017, at the request of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, I wrote an introduction to its publication of Digital Silk Road: The Opportunities and Challenges to Develop a Digital Economy Along the Belt and Road, the government’s plan to invest over $1 trillion to assist nations and regions across Eurasia in transitioning into a green zero-emission digitally connected infrastructure.15
The Belt and Road Initiative is just the beginning of the great transformation that will connect the human race across the globe over the course of the next half century. Feasibility studies and deployment plans on laying out smart, digitally enhanced high-voltage power grids across entire continents to share renewable energies are already in play. A 2019 feasibility study on a proposed Pan-American interregional power grid that will stretch from Alaska to Chile and potentially be in place by 2030 has sparked a conversation across the Americas on how this intercontinental technological alignment will likely affect the economy, social life, and governance of nation-states in this region of the world.16 Another report published in 2019 details plans to lay a submarine power cable between Europe and North America to trade solar- and wind-generated green electricity across the Atlantic Ocean.17 Similar feasibility and deployment plans to establish an Africa-wide power grid and a European–African power grid are afoot.
We are in the early stages of creating a global interconnected electricity power grid—a digital Pangaea—that is likely to come online in bits and pieces between now and the late 2030s, connecting the human race for the first time in history. Individuals, families, communities, and entire countries will be freed from the geopolitics of the oil era, characterized by conflict and war in a zero-sum game, and become increasingly engaged in a biosphere politics of deep collaboration in sharing the free sun and wind that bathe the Earth.
Connecting the human family on a glocal scale across a smart digital infrastructure is a singular event in the way humanity conducts its economic affairs, social life, and governance. Still, there is growing concern and even fear that China might seize this moment in history to fund and build out the smart infrastructure and use it for leverage in the form of surveillance and intervention, allowing it to exercise control over the lives of much of the human race. From my own experience in China, I don’t think this is the intent. Even if it were, any such effort would fail if localities, regions, and countries along the Belt and Road were to exercise caution at the get-go and ensure that the build-out of the infrastructure and its subsequent ownership and management within their jurisdictions were under their various governments’ strict control.
Then, too, we need to remember that the very nature of the Third Industrial Revolution digital infrastructure favors distributed rather than centralized control, and, to achieve network effects, it works best if the networks are open and transparent rather than closed and proprietary, and scale laterally rather than vertically to optimize aggregate efficiencies and circularity. The engineered platforms favor flexibility and redundancy, the two key elements in establishing regional resilience in a climate change world.
Were the intention of any nation-state or renegade group to surveil, control, cripple, or take down the networks, cheap, simple technology components built into the system at the end user’s door will allow families, neighborhoods, communities, businesses, and local and regional governments to go off-grid at a moment’s notice and decentralize and reaggregate their operations. There is no conceivable path by which a superpower could hold hostage several billion people in millions of communities if they chose to simply go off a Eurasian power grid, or for that matter a global power grid, and go it alone in harvesting their solar and wind energy in their neighborhoods and surrounding communities.
Humanity is moving toward a glocal, digitally interconnected green world. The EU and China are currently leading the way. The United States needs to come to the table. These three elephants in the room need to begin to cooperate and help build in the safeguards and assurances that will enable this transition into a Green New Deal. The politics of the biosphere era will inevitably cluster around the codes, regulations, and standards of operation that allow for transparency across this emergent digital infrastructure and accompanying networks, always with the focus on the freedom of every locality and region to govern its infrastructure as a public commons.
A last word on this matter. If the three elephants can’t put geopolitics behind them and begin to collaborate along a biosphere gradient, recognizing that we are an imperiled species on an imperiled Earth, we are doomed. While our respective loyalties and commitments are diverse, climate change is forcing us to think of ourselves as an “endangered species” for the first time. Living with that new reality brings the human race together in a common bond that we’ve never before experienced.
The younger generation gets it. They are staring down into a potential environmental chasm. They don’t want to hear their practical-minded, hardened, and even cynical elders say that a Green New Deal is unrealistic or a fantasy and that life is a zero-sum game. At this moment in history, we need to trust each other, all of us, beyond political boundaries, and begin to think as a species.
What does all this mean for the excitement building around a Green New Deal for America and other countries not yet fully engaged in either the narrative or the process? What lessons can we learn? First and foremost, the climate crisis is here and the transition to a zero-carbon society must be fast, because we’re running out of time. But second, we need to realize that there is a gaping difference between 1932 and the present. This may be hard to hear for activists who want to repeat the New Deal agenda of the 1930s. It isn’t going to happen the same way this time. Today, market forces are deconstructing the fossil fuel civilization. The speed and scope of the disruption are without parallel. The old fossil fuel energies are creating a carbon bubble that is unlike any economic disruption in human history. The key sectors of the economy—ICT/telecommunications/internet, electricity, transport, and buildings—are quickly decoupling from fossil fuels and recoupling with renewable energies, establishing the pathway to a Third Industrial Revolution.
This decoupling of sector after sector from fossil fuels and recoupling to cleaner renewable energies and green technologies is speeding us out of the fossil fuel culture. Some studies project that tipping point as early as 2023 and others as late as 2035. Balancing the various scenarios and projections, the inflection point is likely going to occur somewhere down the middle with a collapse of the fossil fuel civilization coming at or around 2028.
The thing to bear in mind is that the collapse of the fossil fuel civilization is inevitable, despite any efforts by the fossil fuel industries to forestall it. Market forces are far more powerful than whatever lobbying maneuvers the fossil fuel industry might entertain. This, too, might be difficult to hear for those activists still wedded to the idea that the market is never on the side of the people. I am certainly aware that this is often the case, and for a lifetime I have been critical of various aspects of market capitalism. This time, however, and with this disruption, the market is a guardian angel looking over humanity.
But the invisible hand alone will not steer us into the Age of Resilience. Building a new ecological civilization from the ashes will require a far more collective response that marshals our public capital, market capital, and social capital at every level of governance and engages the deep participation of the entire body politic.
In the Age of Progress, we could each aspire to go it alone in the marketplace, or at least that’s what the powers that be wanted us to believe. In the climate change world that is now here, we already know that the Age of Progress is history and our future lies in an Age of Resilience that will require a collective effort in every community on a scale never before experienced in our short history on Earth.
From here on out, the name of the game is “thoughtful speed.” We need to expedite the transition into the green era brought on by the sectorial decoupling from fossil fuels and accelerate the build-out of a Green New Deal zero-carbon infrastructure across America and around the world.
A consensus has been emerging around twenty-three key themes and initiatives that need to be enjoined simultaneously to begin the Green New Deal journey. Here they are.
First, the federal government should impose an immediate across-the-board aggressive rising carbon tax, with a significant portion of the revenues returned to US citizens through lump-sum rebates so that families, especially the most vulnerable, will receive more in carbon dividends than they pay in higher energy prices, and the remainder of the revenue used by the federal government and the states to help finance the Green New Deal infrastructure.
Second, the federal government should establish a quick phasedown and elimination of the $15 billion in annual fossil fuel subsidies.
Third, the federal government, in tandem with the fifty states, should prepare and deploy a seamless national smart power grid across the United States to provide sufficient green electricity capacity to power a nationwide smart distributed Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure. The federal government should finance a significant portion of the build-out of the national smart grid, while the states pick up the remaining financing. A juvenile bare-bones national smart grid infrastructure should be operational by 2030, and a fully mature operational power grid should be online before 2040.
Fourth, the federal, state, municipal, and county governments should provide tax credits and other incentives to encourage the accelerated installation of solar and wind technologies, where viable, across the built environment and landscape to transition the nation into zero-emission green energies generated at near-zero marginal cost. The mix of solar and wind installations should prioritize neighborhood and community microgrids to build flexibility and resilience into the infrastructure. Microgrid cooperatives should be able to easily disconnect from the main power grid during or after a climate event or cyberterrorist attack and share locally generated solar and wind power in their neighborhoods. The federal government should also reprioritize the use of public lands and immediately phase out all fossil fuel concessions and phase in a vast increase in solar and wind installations.
Fifth, the federal, state, municipal, and county governments should provide tax credits and other incentives for the installation of energy storage technology in homes, commercial buildings, and industrial and institutional facilities to provide backup power both to manage intermittent energy across the power grid and to provide the on-site supply of emergency power should the power grid be compromised because of a climate disaster or a cyberterrorist attack.
Sixth, the federal, state, municipal, and county governments should introduce broadband and the Internet of Things, conditional on the potential health and environmental impacts of wireless versus cable connection. The states should prioritize broadband installation in rural communities and disadvantaged communities.
Seventh, all industries using data centers should receive federal tax credits for installing 100 percent renewable energies on and around their data center facilities by 2030, allowing them to run totally off-grid to ensure the security of data if the power grid is crippled or goes down due to climate-related events or cyberterrorism.
Eighth, federal and state tax credits should be granted for the purchase of electric vehicles, and graduated tax hikes should be imposed on the purchase of internal combustion vehicles. To speed the process, vouchers to be used to purchase electric vehicles should be offered for trading in clunkers (internal combustion vehicles). The vouchers should exceed the trade-in value of the internal combustion vehicles. The federal government should immediately set a date of 2030 for eliminating the sale and registration of all new internal combustion vehicles—cars, trucks, and buses.
Ninth, the federal government and state, municipal, and county governments should provide tax credits for installing electric charging stations in and around residential, commercial, and industrial building sites to power electric vehicles. Real estate companies and landlords owning dwellings with multiple occupants should be encouraged to install sufficient charging stations and should receive a tax credit for doing so and an escalating tax hike over time for not providing the service.
Tenth, the federal government should mandate and finance the transition of all federal property to green zero-emission assets and infrastructure by 2030, using procurement to boost green businesses. The federal government and state, municipal, and county governments should also immediately introduce an across-the-board set of generous tax credits and deductions, grants, and low-interest loans to encourage the retrofitting of the nation’s residential, commercial, industrial, and institutional building stock and the conversion from gas and oil heating to electric heating by renewable energy from the grid, with the goal of increasing energy efficiency, reducing global warming emissions, and bolstening resilience to climate-related disruptions. Additional supplementary tax credits, deductions, grants, and low-interest loans should be extended to low- and middle-income rental properties and homeowners to encourage retrofits. All federal tax credits should be contingent on the states immediately mandating targets requiring that all existing residential and commercial buildings reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 and be zero net energy before 2040, and that all new residential buildings be zero net energy by 2025 and new commercial buildings be zero net energy by 2030.
Eleventh, the federal government and state governments should establish and deploy plans to phase out petrochemical agriculture and introduce organic and ecological agricultural practices and boost regional agricultural production for local markets over a twenty-year period, with the goal of moving toward 100 percent organic certification by 2040. The federal government and state governments should provide deep subsidies and robust incentives to encourage a speedy transformation.
Twelfth, the federal government and state governments should provide tax credits and other incentives to encourage farmers to utilize carbon-farming techniques and to reforest and rewild marginal land to capture and sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and serve as carbon capture sinks. The federal government should also reprioritize the use of public lands by reforesting, where applicable, to capture and sequester CO2 emissions.
Thirteenth, the federal government, states, municipalities, and counties should prioritize and finance the upgrading of all water systems, sewage systems, and stormwater drains by 2040 to be resilient to the climate change–induced hurricanes, storms, and floods that are a growing threat to public health. In drought-prone areas of the country, measures will need to be taken to install water storage via cisterns across the built environment to provide emergency backup access to water if the power grid were to go down because of a climate event or a cyberattack. Where applicable, cities should re-municipalize all water-related systems that have been privatized over the years to ensure public oversight and control of water.
Fourteenth, the federal government and state, municipal, and county governments should mandate the embedding of circularity processes into every supply chain and across every industry by 2030 to dramatically reduce carbon emissions and build resilience against climate change into all aspects of the economy, civil society, and governance, and provide appropriate incentives and penalties.
Fifteenth, the federal government, in tandem with the states, should redeploy an increasing percentage of military expenditures, without compromising national or state security, to pay for federal troops and state National Guards to manage climate-related disaster response and relief missions, from first responders to long-term restoration initiatives.
Sixteenth, the federal government should enact legislation to establish a national green bank that can provide funds to state, county, and municipal green banks that, in turn, can leverage those funds in securing sufficient financing and, especially, public and private pension funds and other investment capital for scaled green infrastructure build-outs. The national green bank’s provisioning of funds to state, municipal, and county green banks should be contingent on state and local governing jurisdictions mandating a target of 50 percent of their electricity generation coming from solar, wind, and other appropriate renewable energies by 2030 and 100 percent of their electricity coming from renewable energy before 2040.
Seventeenth, the use of union pension fund capital to finance federal, state, municipal, and county Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure projects should be conditional on ensuring that unionized workforces are employed wherever possible. Since only 11 percent of the American workforce is unionized, all Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure projects must also protect the right of workers to organize and safeguard collective bargaining rights. The state, municipal, and county governments should also provide “just transition” funds for communities that are economically dependent on the extracting, refining, and distributing of fossil fuels and should prioritize the transition from these stranded industries into the new green businesses and employment opportunities of a Third Industrial Revolution.
Eighteenth, the student generation will need to learn the skills and develop the talents that will enable them to create new businesses and become gainfully employed in a Green New Deal economy. The federal government and state governments should establish service programs patterned after the Peace Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps. These federal- and state-financed programs—Green Corps, Climate Corps, Conservation Corps, Infrastructure Corps—will provide a living wage to high school and college graduates apprenticing with industries in communities across the country to learn the skills that will be needed to mobilize a smart twenty-first-century workforce. These new federal- and state-administered youth apprenticeship organizations will also train a younger generation to use these newly acquired skills in disaster response and relief missions, serving as first responders and in recovery efforts in local communities, working alongside federal government troops and state National Guards.
Nineteenth, the federal government, states, municipalities, and counties should prioritize Green New Deal business opportunities in the most disadvantaged communities and provide appropriate training for the new employment opportunities that come with the scale-up of the green infrastructure. Generous tax credits, grants, low-interest loans, and other incentives to upgrade all public health services should be prioritized to the poorest communities facing public health risks brought on by climate change.
Twentieth, to ensure a more fair and just society, more equitable tax laws should be enacted at the federal, state, and local levels that reduce the vast disparity between the super-rich and the rest of the population, with the revenues accrued being used to advance the transition categories that make up the Green New Deal.
Twenty-first, the various departments and agencies of the federal and state governments should reprioritize their funding and substantially increase research and development in all of the areas that accompany the transformation into green technologies and Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure deployment. Every level of government should give particular attention to funding research, development, and deployment in the hard-to-abate sectors to accelerate the transition from fossil fuel–based to biological-based processes and products. Governments should harness the best expertise and talent in public and private universities and research institutes in joint R&D collaborations to advance the transition into the green energies and sustainable technologies of a Green New Deal Third Industrial Revolution.
Twenty-second, the various departments and agencies of the federal government, in tandem with state governments, should establish an accelerated time frame for creating the regulations, codes, and standards to facilitate a seamless integration of broadband, renewable energy power generation and distribution, autonomous electric and fuel-cell vehicle transport, zero-emission Internet of Things nodal buildings, and all of the other regulations, codes, and standards necessary to ensure an interconnected and uninterrupted smart IoT Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure functioning across America.
Twenty-third, the US government should join with the European Union, the People’s Republic of China, and all other willing nations in a formal ongoing collaboration to identify, support, and implement the universal codes, regulations, standards, and incentives and penalties that need to be put in place to enable both global interconnectivity and transparency in the deployment and operation of a smart green glocal infrastructure.
In the first six months of the new presidency and US Congress in 2021, Congress should enact Green New Deal laws, signed by the president, covering all of these twenty-three initiatives needed to jump-start a twenty-year emergency build-out of a green zero-emission Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure across America.
We noted earlier that the design and engineering of infrastructures both enable and constrain the types of business models and forms of governance that accompany them. Recall that in the case of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the infrastructures were engineered to be centralized, enclosed in intellectual property, and vertically integrated to create economies of scale in order to return sufficient profits to investors because of the huge up-front costs of locating, extracting, shipping, refining, and delivering coal, oil, natural gas, and petrochemicals to end users. All other sectors, in turn, had to organize their supply chains and value chains and the production of their goods and services in a similar fashion because of their total dependence on the same energy sources and infrastructure dynamics. The temporal/spatial reach of the First Industrial Revolution infrastructure gave rise to national markets and nation-state governance to oversee them. The Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure gave rise to global markets and international organizations like the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, and the World Trade Organization to comanage governance alongside nation-states.
As described early on, the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure comes with a different design and engineering construction. The platform is weighted toward being distributed in operation rather than centralized, and the system itself is optimized if it remains open and transparent to create the network effect rather than being closed off in intellectual property. Last, the distributed open and transparent nature of the system is most efficient and productive if its operations are laterally scaled rather than vertically integrated.
Giant internet companies, early on, seized hold of many of the platforms in vertically scaled global monopolies, but that is not likely to last, because they ultimately cannot compete with the millions of high-tech small- and medium-sized enterprises blockchained across competencies and operating in cooperatives overseen by commons governance. The latter’s organizational style is far more agile and functions with far less overhead, while ensuring that the revenue generated stays within the cooperative enterprises and the communities where they reside, rather than much of it being siphoned off in the form of profits to outside investors.
To ensure a fair playing field, however, the federal government should vigorously enforce antitrust laws, applying the same standards in regulating the activity of ICT companies, electricity companies, and transport and logistics companies that have been used in the past to secure an open commercial space for enterprises to thrive.
The distributed, open-sourced, and laterally scaled design and engineering principles built into the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure favor an accompanying distributed, open, transparent, and laterally scaled regulatory regime to facilitate and coordinate this new approach to commerce. Our twenty years of experience in the European Union suggest that the codes, regulations, and standards that need to be put in place to operate a green infrastructure across the continent will remain the responsibility of the member states and the European Commission. However, the build-out and scale-up of the Green New Deal economy will ultimately be the responsibility of the 350 governing regions and cities of Europe, with each customizing the infrastructure to its own goals, deliverables, and aspirations within the confines of the EU-wide codes, regulations, and standards, allowing them to interconnect across borders in a coherent continental smart infrastructure.
This is not FDR’s New Deal, with the federal government building and operating gigantic dams to generate and distribute cheap hydroelectricity across America but, rather, a distributed Green New Deal for the twenty-first century centered around locally harvested renewable energies and managed by regional infrastructures that connect across borders like Wi-Fi. In the twenty-first century, every state, city, and county in America, and indeed every locality around the world, can be relatively self-sufficient in its green power generation and resilience. The sun shines everywhere, and the wind blows everywhere. While some regions will be more blessed with ample amounts of solar and wind at any given time of the day, week, month, or season of the year, the surplus electricity can be stored and later shared with other regions experiencing lulls, guaranteeing more than enough energy to power society across continental landmasses.
The Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure works most effectively and efficiently if it’s laterally scaled and connects a multitude of small players. This is not a theoretical conjecture. As mentioned in chapter 2, the four giant power and electricity companies in Germany learned this lesson the hard way and were left with billions of dollars in stranded assets in less than twelve years from the time that solar and wind energy came online. Recall that in Germany, small players—farmers, SMEs, and neighborhood associations—established electricity cooperatives, secured bank loans, and installed solar- and wind-energy-generating technologies on-site, using some of the green electricity off-grid and selling the surplus back to the grid. Today, nearly 25 percent of all the electricity powering Germany comes from solar and wind, and much of that green energy is generated by small cooperatives.18 The Big Four power and electricity companies are generating less than 5 percent of the green energies of the twenty-first century and have, for the most part, been eliminated from renewable power generation.19
Distributed energy in every region goes hand in hand with distributed governance. This is what we mean by “power to the people”—fifty state economies made up of smart high-tech SMEs organized into laterally scaled cooperatives, all connected to a smart green Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure, managing, powering, and moving their goods and services across value chains at low fixed costs, near-zero marginal costs, and with a near-zero carbon footprint. While each state will be charged with the task of building out and scaling up a Third Industrial Revolution, the goals and deliverables in each jurisdiction will be customized to the specific needs of that state. But to be effective, all the states will need to connect across their borders and collaborate on a smart national power grid to create lateral economies of scale and network effects.
With this consideration in mind, the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the United States Conference of Mayors, and the National Association of Counties should pass resolutions calling on each state to voluntarily establish Green New Deal “peer assemblies” made up of elected officials of the cities and counties and representatives from local chambers of commerce, labor unions, economic development agencies, public and private universities, and civic organizations. These peer assemblies, overseen by state, municipal, and county governments, will be tasked with establishing Green New Deal roadmaps to transition their economies and communities into the green era. It’s not necessary for every state to sign on from the get-go, but at least to have a number of first-movers step forward in order to create a threshold effect. Other states will likely come onboard quickly as public pressure builds for a Green New Deal in their communities.
The powers that be in the nation’s capital might look askance at the states, municipalities, and counties grabbing hold of the planning and deployment of the smart green infrastructure transformation for the country, but that’s already begun. A quiet revolution has been occurring over the past several years below the national radar screen in states across the country. While the nation’s capital wasn’t looking, twenty-nine states and three territories adopted Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) requiring that a mandated percentage of the electricity sold by their utilities come from renewable energy sources.20 The states are backing up their RPS with renewable energy credits to encourage both wind and solar installations.
Even though the United States government has dropped out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, nineteen states and Puerto Rico have thus far agreed to comply with the protocol, and other states are expected to soon follow.21 A number of governors are currently developing plans to get 100 percent of their electricity from zero-carbon sources. California and Hawaii have already established a 2045 deadline to meet this mandate, and the governors of Colorado, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have pledged to follow suit.22 The states are on the move.
Here’s what the federal government can do to maintain the momentum. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill should agree to provide each state with a one-off $60 million grant to cover a three-year period, with agreement by each state to match it. These funds should be used exclusively by state governments to establish and staff an operational center whose sole purpose is to organize and coordinate peer assemblies across their cities and counties for the express purpose of preparing Green New Deal roadmaps customized to each locality’s goals, needs, and existing green sustainability programs and initiatives.
Again, while the federal government provides some infrastructure funding, states, municipalities, and counties are financially responsible for 75 percent of it. The infrastructure deployment in a federal republic like the United States is, for the most part, driven by each of the states. Anyone who is unaware of this and believes that the federal government is going to unilaterally orchestrate an infrastructure transition and impose it on the states will be in for a rude awakening.
The concept of state oversight provides the ideal governing framework for building out a distributed Third Industrial Revolution. From the very beginning of the United States of America, the states and their citizens have zealously guarded what they regard as their fundamental right to govern as they choose and have been wary of federal government encroachment on their freedoms. At the same time, states are always looking over their shoulders at their fellow states in a competitive race to be Best in Show, bringing new business opportunities, employment, and other benefits to their residents. Now that America’s Big Three states of New York, California, and Texas are in a race to a green economy and society, with all the attendant benefits, other states are likely to quickly jump into the game. They won’t need to be forced against their will.
We’ve come to realize in the European Union that the distributed nature of the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure makes its speedy adoption and scaling more likely if it is conceptualized and introduced by the communities and regions where it will be deployed. Still, the states will have to work with each other, and with the federal government, to determine the codes, regulations, and standards of operations that will need to be put in place to ensure that the distributed green infrastructure can be quickly installed and connected across governing jurisdictions.
The key to a distributed Green New Deal will be the scaling up of energy service companies—ESCOs—and financial mechanisms for their deployment in all fifty states. Toward this end, following the 2020 national elections, the National Governors Association, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the United States Conference of Mayors, and the National Association of Counties should convene a weeklong emergency conference bringing together the key industries and businesses—from SMEs to Fortune 500 companies—whose competencies will be necessary to build out and scale up a Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure. The competencies should include the ICT sector, the telecom sector, the electronics industry, electric power utilities, the transport and logistics industries, the real estate sector, the facilities management sector, the construction sector, the manufacturing industries, the agricultural and life sciences sectors, and the travel and tourism industry, alongside representatives from the national financial, banking, and insurance communities.
The purpose of the national emergency conference of states, municipalities, and counties, and industries across all of the sectors of the economy, is to establish the ESCO business model and to set up state and local green banks to finance the development of Third Industrial Revolution infrastructures.
As of 2017, the global ESCO market was approximately $15 billion. It is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.3 percent and amount to a $30.8 billion market by 2026.23 Although this is an estimable growth rate in normal times, it is inadequate to the task of transforming the US and global infrastructure into a zero-emission era, given the time constraints imposed by rapidly escalating climate change.
What’s needed is tenfold growth over a ten-year period, comparable to America’s World War II mobilization from a peacetime economy to a wartime economy. Now, as then, all the industries, sectors, and competencies that would need to come together—this time to form ESCOs operating within and across all fifty states—already exist. They merely need to regroup across their competencies under the umbrella of the new ESCO performance-contracting business model.
Generous tax credits and a thoughtful streamlining of codes, regulations, and standards to speed up the scale of the infrastructure build-out in municipalities, counties, and states will be essential to moving forward—on a wartime-like footing—in the shift to the new business model.
Those who would argue against extending generous tax credits should be reminded that each year billions of dollars in tax credits and other incentives are dished out by states and localities to subsidize sports stadiums and conference centers and to encourage companies to locate industrial plants and commercial complexes in their communities in exchange for a few thousand jobs here and there—with a much smaller return to the economy and tax base. States and localities would be far better served by issuing state and local tax credits to accelerate the transition into a smart green zero-emission economy, with the vast opportunities that would accrue to SMEs and a redeployment of the workforce in every community.
From our experience in the EU with establishing peer assemblies, the optimum is three hundred citizens within any given region participating ad hoc and providing input and feedback at every stage of engagement. Peer assemblies are not focus groups or stakeholder groups but rather a cross-section of the public who will be intimately involved in the ongoing deliberations and the preparation of the proposals and initiatives that will be incorporated into their jurisdiction’s Green New Deal roadmap.
The governor, mayors, and county executives become the facilitators and are responsible both for selecting the cross-section of participants and for overseeing the operations of the peer assemblies in their respective jurisdictions.
Each peer assembly will want to reach out and secure technical support. The states’ public universities might be tasked with bringing together professional and technical talent from both their own institutions and private universities, community colleges, trade and technical institutes, think tanks, research institutes, and local charitable foundations to provide valuable expertise from across the academic and professional disciplines.
Within six months of establishing Green New Deal peer assemblies, the governor and legislature of each state should convene their own weeklong emergency conference with several thousand city and county peer assembly representatives in attendance. The conference should cover all the various aspects of a Green New Deal mobilization, including the preparation of city and county roadmaps, deployment and financing, and best practices and expert technical assistance from across the state and beyond.
The Green New Deal begins with preparing a detailed Third Industrial Revolution roadmap, which typically takes ten months. City and county peer assemblies should each prepare their own roadmap, congruent with the state’s. The success or failure of a roadmap depends on whether the process itself is viewed from its inception as a truly collaborative, open, and cross-disciplinary exercise. It’s recommended that every peer selected by cities and counties sign a socially responsible ethics agreement to collaborate rather than compete and to act impartially rather than lobby for a special interest or cause. The peers need to come to the task with a civic-minded community spirit if they are to succeed. Roadmaps create a community esprit de corps—a feeling among the peers that they are engaged in something bigger than themselves that will deeply affect their families, communities, and generations yet to come.
The chairpersons of city and county government peer assemblies should meet periodically with the governor’s office and the state legislature to report on progress in their roadmap deliberations and receive feedback and assistance. After the ten-month process, each municipality and county peer assembly will publish an extensive roadmap detailing its customized Green New Deal plan and next steps for initiating financing and local deployment of green infrastructure megaprojects. They will also share their views on the codes, regulations, standards, incentives, and penalties that need to be forthcoming from the state legislature and governor’s office to expedite a statewide transition into the Green New Deal Third Industrial Revolution paradigm.
The roadmap mission is not just to create a grab bag of favorite green projects but rather to develop a comprehensive and systemic Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure plan that can be deployed across the state over a period of two decades. This integrative approach to scaling infrastructure is what’s been sorely missing in Green New Deal proposals to date. It’s important to visualize the build-out of a Third Industrial Revolution as a statewide multigenerational construction site that will evolve over time and branch out in many directions as circumstances dictate. Failure to understand the mission will lead to fragmentation and ultimately descend back to small, siloed favorite green projects without a transformational impact. The three Third Industrial Revolution roadmaps prepared and now being deployed in the industrial regions of Hauts-de-France, the twenty-three cities of the Metropolitan Region of Rotterdam and The Hague, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg are open-source and available to everyone.24
Many cities and counties across the United States have prepared green sustainability roadmaps, and a few have even involved some form of peer assembly in the deliberations; these localities will be an important source of expertise in sharing best practices. None of the already existing green development plans in play in municipalities, counties, and at the state level are discarded in the Third Industrial Revolution roadmap process and subsequent deployment; rather, they are embedded into the green infrastructure that connects these projects in a seamless new economic paradigm. Absent this unifying vision across each city, county, and state, we are back to thousands of well-meaning green programs that remain attached to the dying fossil fuel infrastructure of the twentieth century.
City, county, and state governments might want to establish websites to share their Green New Deal roadmap deliberations and deployments in real time across America. Engendering a nationwide dialogue on best practices and accompanying opportunities and challenges can spin off multiple collaborations across traditional political borders, creating a wholly new political dynamic beyond voting for representatives at election time. This is the very nature of peer assembly governance.
Peer assemblies continue to work beyond the roadmap stage through the entire scale-up of a zero-emissions green infrastructure transition, with peers rotating in and out of the process and across generations, ensuring continuity beyond the turnover of elected officials every two or four years, guaranteeing that the peer process itself is not held hostage by whatever political party or elected official is holding office.
The existential magnitude of the climate change crisis is of a kind humanity has never before confronted. It requires a multigenerational form of commons governance that can continue into the indefinite future. The fear of climate change is very real, and the conditions for living on Earth are going to deteriorate far into the future and beyond our current imagination. Cities, counties, states, and the federal government will all have to be engaged in a political process without a closure date.
We have found that in the seven regional roadmap processes and subsequent deployments we have been involved in, that although governments establish peer assemblies, cabinet ministries, government bureaucracies, and special interests are often uncomfortable with and hostile to sharing their turf. They may be reluctant to say so publicly (who, in principle, wants to say they are opposed to peer assemblies?) but they often find subtle ways to undermine the process, the recommendations, and the deployments. They are far more comfortable with focus groups and stakeholder groups that are often used and abused to help bolster their executive and legislative agendas.
On the other hand, it is the executive and legislative branches of municipal, county, and state governments that initiate and oversee peer assemblies who have the ultimate responsibility of converting their recommendations, projects, initiatives, and proposals into laws, protocols, and initiatives. Peer assemblies are informal bodies that bring the voice of the public into the process and encourage elected officials and government agencies to be more responsive and integrative in their missions and assignments and to be more systemic and attentive to the multiple perspectives rising up from their communities. Peer assemblies lateralize governance by bringing the public into continuous engagement with government to advance the commonweal. Their presence requires a new generation of elected officials and government employees who are comfortable with informal sharing of governance between elections rather than exercising an exclusive territorial reign.
Climate change is going to require the ongoing engagement of the entire body politic. No single elected official or head of a government agency is going to be able to go it alone. The model that comes to mind is disaster response and relief during emergencies. The entire community comes together in these moments—local organizations, NGOs, religious bodies, schools, neighborhood associations, and the business sector. While disaster preparedness and emergencies are overseen by elected and appointed officials, disasters are often so unexpected and all-consuming that they require the full and active engagement of everyone, sometimes for weeks, months, and even years. Between disasters, civil society organizations and the business community are in continuous collaboration with public authorities, learning from past emergencies; sharing best practices; integrating new ideas, programs, and response mechanisms into their planning; and preparing for emergencies yet to come in an ongoing conversation around the mission of securing the commonweal.
Climate change now puts every community in the world in harm’s way in a continuous disaster mode. This is the truth of the matter. Peer assemblies will soon become a necessity across the world if communities are to come to grips with a runaway climate. Former California governor Jerry Brown, in his last few days in office, got it right when he said that the wild changes in the weather are “the new abnormal.”25
A final observation. Without peer assemblies, citizens everywhere in America and around the world are going to feel less listened to, more abandoned and left to their own wits, and deeply alienated from their governments. That combination of fear and isolation, if left to simmer, is potentially explosive and could easily tear apart the very fabric of civilized life. Peer assemblies are a way to channel a community’s sense of powerlessness in the face of climate change into a sense of shared responsibility for the biosphere that we will need in the years ahead and centuries to come.
Let me be very clear about the timetable for ushering in a glocal Green New Deal and the transition into a smart Third Industrial Revolution. The juvenile infrastructure for the First Industrial Revolution was laid down across the United States in thirty years, between 1860 and 1890. The juvenile infrastructure for the Second Industrial Revolution was built out in twenty-five years, between 1908 and 1933. The shorter time was due, in part, to the fact that the Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure was able to build on a First Industrial Revolution infrastructure already in place. With this in mind, the Third Industrial Revolution infrastructure can likely be built out in twenty years—a single generation—by building off the two industrial revolution infrastructures that preceded it and that are still partially in place to facilitate the transition.
Please do not let anyone tell you this can’t be done. By 2040, we should be there if each and every one of us pulls our own weight and carries our own load, with grit and determination, as part of a community and nationwide commitment.
The Green New Deal is not just about mobilizing the public to pressure governments to loosen the purse strings, pass legislation, and incentivize green initiatives. Rather, it’s the first call for a new kind of peer political movement and commons governance that can empower entire communities to take direct charge of their futures at a very dark moment in the history of life on Earth.
Living off the fossil fuel deposits of the carboniferous era for more than two centuries gave us a false sense of an open-ended and unlimited future where everything was possible and with little price to pay. We came to believe that we are the masters of our fate and that the Earth is here for our taking. We failed to see that there is always an entropy bill for whatever takes place on this planet. We called this era the Age of Progress. Climate change is now the bill come due. We are entering a new epoch and a new journey. The Age of Resilience is now before us. How we adapt to the new planetary reality that faces us will determine our future destiny as a species. We are fast approaching a biosphere consciousness. We need to be hopeful that we can get there in time. This is the Green New Deal I believe in.