In 2021 we deserve a New Deal, a Green one

Two items we neglected to mention in yesterday's report on unusual happenings for December in our North Country: as we backed out of the garage, we noticed a small swarm of insects near a tree trunk; also, as we returned from our visit to the St. Croix river, we encountered a swarm of four motorcyclists headed in the opposite direction. Flying bugs and motorcycles are NOT what we expect to see around here at this time of season.

As with many aspects of weather these days, we can't claim the open water, insect hatches and motorcyclists in mid-December are due to climate change, global warming etc., but we do think they're enhanced or increased or made more probable by increasing global temperatures. Because we're now in the season when, traditionally, greenery is brought into the house, let's also bring in, for the yule season and the start of a new year, some consideration for a Green New Deal [GND]. And, because this is a time of year when we old timers often wax nostalgic, let's put the GND in the context of two intellectual powerhouses of our youth, each of whom is still very relevant today, R. Buckminster Fuller and Noam Chomsky.

Fuller tells us, in several variations "You can't change anything by fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through superior methods." We've once again brought Fuller to the fore of our thinking because we've noticed how much time, energy and other resources are being expended these days fighting the fascism and insanity the Republican party is trying to foist on US. We also need to keep in mind Fuller's observation that "To ask a politician to lead us is to ask the tail of a dog to lead the dog." That brings US, we hope, to the substance of a Green New Deal and Noam Chomsky's book about it.

We haven't read Chomsky's book but we have read the full text of the GND. We also note that  the GND is a framework and, as such, a moving target. That's part of what appeals to us about it. It's also a much better model of how we can and should respond to the challenges of needing to change the energy basis of our economy with minimal damage to the people and institutions involved. For example, we'd be much more comfortable with the concept of "keep it in the ground" if those who put that tactic as a priority would also explain how we are to heat our house whose furnace was changed not many years ago from oil to natural gas-fired. Should we settle for electric space heaters in all the rooms? What, if anything, would our homeowners insurance think of that? We need both systems change and planned, systemic changes. The GND is a start for getting there.

Image Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Anyhow, the Literary Hub web site has a nice article by Chomsky himself: A Green New Deal Can Create Jobs and Livelihoods. Here's one excerpt:

The Green New Deal moves us in the right direction. You can raise questions about the specific form in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey introduced it. But the general idea is quite right. And there’s very solid work explaining exactly how it could work. For example, a very fine economist at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Robert Pollin, has written extensively on it, and in extensive detail, with close analysis of how you could implement policies of this kind in a very effective way, which would actually make a better society. It wouldn’t be that you’d lose from it; you’d gain from it.

Chomsky goes on to point out that:

Moving to zero net carbon emissions, and fast, is the point of Stan Cox’s important new study, The Green New Deal and Beyond. Cox advocates on behalf of the GND as one step of several we need to take to stabilize the planet. But as Cox and others point out, the GND does not challenge the fossil-fuel industry. In fact, the term “fossil fuels” appears nowhere in the Congressional GND resolutions, and the GND think tanks are not stressing the elimination of fossil fuels. Cox suggests policies that would free us from fossil fuel use before it’s too late. He also suggests doing so in a manner that breaks the patterns of social, racial, and environmental injustice that have been historically inseparable from the forms of economic injustice that have destabilized the planet’s ecosystem.

Each of these books will be at the start of our reading list for 2021, as will R. Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. You can expect to read more here about the GND and our spaceship home during the course of the next year. Maybe enough of us will adopt the new and improved model of how we can create jobs and livelihoods without destroying the support systems on which we rely for clean air and water to move the Biden administration in a more life-affirming direction. We should plan to thrive, not simply survive, as a result of the transition.

For now, we'll note that "It's not just a festival of lights. May it also be a festival of hope, happiness, love, and health. Happy Hanukkah." Let's avoid the

Death of a Naturalist

By Seamus Heaney

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

Of the townland; green and heavy headed

Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,

But best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks to range on window sills at home,

On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

The fattening dots burst, into nimble

Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

For they were yellow in the sun and brown

In rain.

    Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked

On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

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