3. GND can attack social roots of consumption by expanding beyond energy production- this is crucial to global social justice

(Dean Snyder is assistant professor of political economy at Antioch College. Matt Guardino is associate professor of political science at Providence College and author of Framing Inequality: News Media, Public Opinion, and the Neoliberal Turn in U.S. Public Policy (Oxford University Press 2019). )

Looking Ahead The massive public investments that a transformative Green New Deal requires should reach beyond energy production and distribution to reshape government’s role in the interlinked areas of commerce, communication, and consumption. Policy and institutional reforms like these can undercut business models that feed ecological destruction, nurture political spaces to defend against corporate backlash, and create launching points for further progress. Public action to raise wages, reduce working hours, and eliminate consumer debt combined with initiatives to raise the quality and sustainability of consumer goods, strengthen privacy rights, weed out pernicious advertising, and democratize our political discourse. These moves would help foster concrete improvements in everyday life that can produce lasting popular support for the broader left political project. While we have focused here on the United States, reimagining and reshaping consumption in the world’s most economically powerful and ecologically destructive nation has global implications. For one thing, cutting wasteful consumption in the Global North is essential to offset increases in essential consumption in the Global South demanded by social justice and human dignity. And beyond the existential menace of climate change, current consumption patterns exacerbate a host of global socioecological ravages, from the islands of plastic-choking oceans to the mountains of toxic e-waste that endanger the world’s poorest and most marginalized people. Even if every megawatt of US electricity came from zero-carbon sources and every transportation mode ran on green power, serious efforts to build a world where most people can flourish require a new politics of consumption.