Only the Green New Deal solves environmental sustainability while ensuring continued growth – ensures social sustainability, a green transition, and solves populism.

The first aspect of the Green New Deal is the wholesale transformation that is necessary to produce a rapid and robust answer to global warming. This is the all-hands-on-deck industrial strategy that has been called the “moonshot of our time” and likened to “wartime mobilization.” This component requires all the technological know-how, skill, and expertise necessary to achieve the engineering feat of transforming the production system from fossil fuels to clean energy. It creates quality union jobs with prevailing wages to reverse the extraordinary hollowing-out of middle- income jobs in the labor market.

But industrial policy is not the same thing as full employment policy, though it may temporarily produce full employment during the mobilization phase of the green transformation. The second aspect of the Green New Deal thus ensures that, through a mixture of policy measures, this industrial strategy results in economic security for all. The Job Guarantee is one of those measures. It is the safety net that is especially needed by people who are most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change and most susceptible to mass layoffs in the transition process.

Finally, the Job Guarantee offers the basis for a new social contract by establishing a new labor standard, ousting unemployment as a macroeconomic stabilizer, and preventing its social and economic costs. The social contract also pays its dues, so to speak, to workers in mining and oil exploration, who have depended on the fossil fuel industry for their livelihoods and have disproportionately born the health effects of these jobs. Both low- and high-skilled fossil fuel workers would need to transition to the green economy. The skilled chemists, geologists, and engineers would join the wholesale mobilization effort perhaps more easily than the roustabouts, deckhands, and day laborers. Though, if the WWII mobilization is any indication, all manner of skills will be needed for the Green New Deal as well. For those left behind in the transition, the living- wage Job Guarantee would be a crucial safety net.

It should not be difficult to meet the promise to fossil fuel workers either. In the US, there are only about 516,000 nonsupervisory workers in the mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction industries (89,000 in oil and gas extraction, 148,000 in mining and quarrying, and the rest in support activities like exploration). An income safety net or early retirement can be provided for those who have toiled away on rigs and in mines, as well as generous disability support for those afflicted with black lung disease or other health problems. But for those who wish to work, the employment office would assist in finding opportunities with comparable pay in the green economy.

During the transformation, it may be hard to clearly separate mobilization jobs from Job Guarantee jobs. The proposal here is to draft separate legislation for the Job Guarantee to ensure its longevity beyond the Green New Deal. Both would require the public sector to take a leadership role in creating large-scale investment initiatives and smaller public service employment projects for those left behind. But analytically, and as a matter of legislature and institutional design, it is important to separate the two for the following reason.

Imagine that the mobilization effort has done its job, temperatures have stabilized, zero-emissions targets have been reached, and the energy grid and food production system have been transformed. What would happen next? Could we afford to honorably discharge the Job Guarantee? The answer is “no,” because this transformation would not expunge the cyclical and structural variations of the economy. We failed to secure the right to work during the Roosevelt revolution, when we closed down the New Deal programs. We temporarily achieved full employment through wartime mobilization, but were unprepared to maintain full and living-wage employment for all during the peacetime postwar economy. Without an employment safety net, the goal of a useful and remunerative job for all was abandoned and the new zombie full employment concept – the NAIRU – was born. Whatever green future we produce will be neither just nor equitable if it continues to tolerate mass unemployment.