The Green New Deal only worsens the ecological crisis and is underpinned by a desire to save capitalism.

The Green New Deal is the main proposal on the Left, and in a social democratic framework it makes a lot of sense. It directs massive public spending to pay for a total infrastructure overhaul, completing the tran- sition to renewable energy, while also increasing social spending to ameliorate the inequalities that have provoked growing crises in nearly all the world’s democracies. At the same time, government-subsidized production may be enough to trigger a new industrial expansion and leave behind the crisis of accumulation global capitalism has been dragging in its wake since 2007, and in some senses since the 1970s. In a stroke, the Green New Deal could resolve the three interconnected crises that threaten the state: the ecological crisis, democracy’s crisis of legiti- macy, and capitalism’s crisis of accumulation.12

In truth, the GND should be catechism for the most ardent defenders of the current system, toppling as it is, but it seems that nearly everyone is one long step behind events. Conservatives, locked in their perpetual existential crisis, are too threatened by the updating of their privileges that they are further destabilizing the system they are trying to protect, as always.13 Centrists are trying to preserve a middle ground where there is none. And so it has fallen on progressives, many of them avowed anti- capitalists, to become capitalism’s last line of defense.

Economists have largely acknowledged that the current model of permanent deficit spending by governments is in fact feasible, with gov- ernments always spending beyond their budgets.14 However, it is only possible to avoid major defaults and economic collapse if governments continue to service interest payments, which they can only do if their economies keep growing, giving them a higher GDP and higher incomes year after year. The massive expenditures of the Green New Deal require an increase in deficit spending which in turn requires a constant increase in the overall volume of the economy. Any Green New Deal would mean giving up on any hopes of degrowth in favor of the dubious proposi- tion that infinite economic growth can in fact be healthy and sustainable on a finite planet. Some have tried to revive this pipe dream by conjuring up a slanted portrayal of the information economy, suggesting that its processes are creative, affective, and ethereal; therefore not dependent on material extraction. The Bitcoin boom—with appropriately named Bitcoin miners now using more energy than many mid-sized countries—should put to rest any doubts that capitalism is always fun- damentally extractive. All value chains eventually come back to killing ecosystems and selling the corpses.

Despite promises of spending for social justice programs, the GND remains climate reductionist. It will increase the amount of destruc- tion caused by so-called green energies by several orders of magnitude, add new devastating infrastructures for carbon capture and storage, spur wars and coups for copper, lithium, and cobalt, and it will create a multi-trillion-dollar market for land—carbon sinks, sites for wind and photovoltaic production, biofuels—that will be the death knell for small-farmers, peasants, and Indigenous communities the world over.

By richly incentivizing carbon sinks, world governments and NGOs are laying the groundwork for a massive land grab that is set to match the scale of the invasions and colonization of the sixteenth to eigh- teenth centuries. Expanding the market for carbon—whether through tax credits or major government subsidies—will be a huge boon to the logging industry, to energy companies, and to agribusiness as remaining agricultural lands will have to shift towards more intensive, infrastruc- ture-heavy, market-oriented production.

It is easy to see why Wall Street and the luminaries of Big Business tend to be tepidly in favor of the Green New Deal or similar propos- als.15 The GND means a massive amount of government funding and tax credits, and companies like Microsoft, Tesla, Google, and forward-think- ing oil companies like BP are the best positioned to capture that money. The main point of reticence is that the GND would increase government intervention and control over the economy, just as the original New Deal constituted a transfer of “control over world liquidity … from London and Wall Street to Washington” in the words of Giovanni Arrighi.16

Nearly all the projects we looked at in Chapter 3 are short on resources. All of them can use more support. But none of them are calling for billions of dollars of infusions in government money, precisely because they know that would destroy them, monetizing the cracks in the system where they have been able to thrive, bringing in major corporations eager to profit off human and ecosystem services, and in the Global South increasing the funding for paramilitary death squads far beyond what the drug and logging industries were ever able to provide.

A reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that pulled the US out of the Great Depression, the GND set itself up for an illuminating, and accurate, historical comparison. The original New Deal brought to bear immense government resources to stimulate the economy and create employment. It is often associated with the beginning of Keynes- ian economics, governments running deficits to actively intervene in the economy in coordination with a central bank. Though the New Deal is lionized by progressives, it presents a curious allusion for the environ- mental movement, given how it was exemplified by the construction of megaprojects like hydroelectric dams that displaced tens of thousands of small farmers and destroyed entire river valleys, or more than 1 million kilometers of roads and highways that scarred the land and constituted an infrastructural handout to the automobile industry that would come to dominate the architecture of American life, as well as becoming a principal source of air pollution. True, the New Deal also included refor- estation and soil conservation efforts in response to the Dust Bowl. However, government aid was designed not to restore the health of the land but to continue commercial agriculture. The Dust Bowl only ended when rainfall patterns returned to normal in the region, and while soil conservation improved, other ecocidal practices continued, as evidenced by ongoing desertification today as well as the dead zone in the Missis- sippi River delta.

The New Deal has a sheen of social justice due to a few programs that challenged oppressive inequalities. The Federal Writers’ Project, for example, paid writers to record oral histories of certain populations, most famously documenting the memories of thousands of elderly Black people, the survivors of the last generation to live through slavery. While there is a clear value in such projects of historical memory, the Federal Writers’ Project manifested and reinforced the very inequalities that were being addressed, as typically occurs when governments throw money at a problem of social justice: most of the writers getting government checks to survive the extreme misery of the Depression and record the memories of slavery’s last survivors were not Black but southern whites, many of them from families who had profited off of slavery and off of the sharecropping that followed it.17

Even Naomi Klein, in her book in favor of the GND, acknowledges that the original New Deal was deployed because it “appeared at the time to be the only way to hold back a full-scale revolution.”18 It provided the hand-outs and the funding to weaken or institutionalize social movements, getting them under control, and within the framework of well paid, institutionalized labor unions and full employment underwritten by the government, it replaced the revolutionary internationalism of the workers’ movement—a movement that launched mutinies throughout World War I and countless general strikes, insurrections, and revolutions at the war’s end—with the narrowed horizons of patriotism. The New Deal set the stage for the weakness of revolutionary movements after World War II, for the nationalism and conservatism of the Cold War and all the assaults on workers’ rights and social justice that entailed.

Historically, social democracy has always planted the seed of its own destruction. That’s exactly what the Green New Deal does. It prevents a real solution, it kills off our best chance for a better world, in order to save capitalism, to kick the can down the road, or more realistically, into the laps of the people who will bear the brunt of this new industrial onslaught. The Green New Deal is colonialism as usual.

Asad Rehman calls it “green colonialism” and points out that the green energy transition of the Green New Deal is reliant on the same economic structures that have caused the problem. He also underscores the danger of the mining boom a green transition would require. “Resource extraction is responsible for 50 per cent of global emissions” as well as a great deal of violence against poor communities from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Chile, he says.

At the heart of our economic system fuelled by the City of London is a belief that the UK and other rich countries are entitled to a greater share of the world’s finite resources irrespective of who we impoverish in doing so, or the destruction we cause.

This green colonialism will be delivered by the very same entrenched economic interests, who have willingly sacrificed both people and the climate in the pursuit of profit. But this time, the mining giants and dirty energy companies will be waving the flag of climate emergency to justify the same deathly business model.19

By trying to capture existing channels for economic action on a global scale, the GND will inevitably plug into the institutional pathways and Eurocentric framework of development, a thinking and practice that has been roundly criticized as racist. As Rajni Kothari put it, “where colonialism left off, development took over.”20