Is the Green New Deal For Real?

5 min readJan 13, 2019

This Week: Going (Radically) Green — with Naomi Oreskes, Bill McKibben and Dan Schrag. Listen today at 2pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our thinking. Thus, we are drifting toward catastrophe beyond conception. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.”

Chris dug up this quote from Albert Einstein as we were thinking about the show for this week. A new manner of thinking indeed!

The good news is that there are some green shoots of new thinking, thanks to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other new freshman upstart congresspeople arriving in Washington.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez protesting outside Nancy Pelosi’s office with the Sunrise Movement

And let’s not forget the green vets who have been on this case for years, chief among them Bill McKibben, the writer, activist and loyal friend of many good causes. Bill’s book The End of Nature turns 30 this year; he has another coming out in April to update the dreary state of things: Falter: Has the human game begun to play itself out?

The real star of our show in many ways was the now notorious AOC, the congressperson from the Bronx who has put the environment front and center on the new Washington agenda. As Bill says:

When young people at the sunrise movement took over Nancy Pelosi’s office in December. She went and joined them. That’s a remarkable breach of congressional protocol and not the thing you would expect from a freshman congresswoman. But she did it with brio and style and joy and managed to transform the debate almost overnight. Suddenly people who’d spent decades explaining that we would need to move in tiny little incremental steps were beginning to talk about the idea of change on a scale that we haven’t really seen since LBJ or FDR. This time the three-initial queen of this work was AOC. And I think now that the idea is out there, there’s probably no bringing it back. What she’s talking about and the sunrise movement people they’re talking about and really more and more and more people are talking about is a program to deal with climate change that’s actually commensurate with the scale of the problem, that is to say that begins not with the question, ‘what is politically realistic,’ but begins with the question, ‘what is actually required,’ and then answers with the politics that you would need to reach that goal. What’s actually required, as they point out, is to get us off fossil fuels within the next ten or fifteen years. That’s an unbelievably hard task. To make it happen we would need large measures like, for instance, the federal jobs guarantee that Ocasio-Cortez puts forward in her draft legislation.

(Bill is an old friend and booster of ours. He wrote a piece about our old radio show in the Atlantic magazine a while back.)

Dan Schrag thinks the Green New Deal has stuck when so many other climate initiatives haven’t because it’s tied to a larger economic plan. Naomi worries that connnecting it to a big government program is just the way conservatives could tank it. In fact, she says, a different name might be better — one that recalls a big bi-partisan project like the Apollo Project or the Manhattan Project.

Naomi Oreskes, Bill McKibben, and Daniel Schrag

The discussion made for a nice hopey changey change of pace to an otherwise gloomy week. As radio producers we’re ready to join the cause and help create the equivalent of the WPA—the blanket administration that oversaw the Federal Music Project and the Federal Writers’ Project, among other programs.

We dug into the New Deal and some of the results of the WPA, including Woody Guthrie’s song “Roll On, Columbia,” which we sampled during the program.

Coming Soon

Chris was excited by Robert Pogue Harrison’s recent essay about Rene Girard in the New York Review of Books. Look out for a show explaining the theorist’s work and his contemporary relevance.