The Green New Deal is filtered through an extremely normalized understanding which purposefully ignores and marginalizes women and BIPOC. Only feminist perspectives solve.

Green jobs I: Jobs for whom? “Where are the women?” Or, more broadly, “who is being included, who is being excluded, and who is actually present but made invisible?” These basic questions have motivated much feminist research and policy work over the years. Bringing these kinds of feminist demographic questions to examining GovtGNDs, it quickly becomes clear that the GND focus on creating clean energy jobs has paid little attention to the gender and racial makeup of the groups that will likely benefit and those that will likely lose out. Typically, GovtGNDs make two cases regarding “green jobs.” The first is that investing in renewable energy production and environmental management has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of green jobs in areas such as clean technology manufacturing; upgrading of infrastructure; creation of public transit systems; expansion of wind, wave, and solar power; retrofitting buildings with greener heating and cooling systems; and restoring wetlands and forests (Novello and Carlock Citation2019).Footnote3 The second argument, related but distinct, is that current workers in the fossil fuel sector should be supported, so that they are not penalized in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This argument usually stresses that workers in the fossil fuel industry typically have skills that would be useful for the green jobs envisaged. Many feminists, including those operating within trade unions, the ILO, and liberal think tanks and media (Guerrero and Stock Citation2012: 13; International Labour Organization Citation2015; Littig Citation2017; Baruah Citation2018), point out that the good quality green jobs promoted in many GNDs will not likely provide many opportunities for women and for Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) of any gender, in part because of the barriers they face to participating and advancing in the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) sector. Women are underrepresented in STEM fields, for reasons including a lack of training and educational opportunities and the disproportionate burden of unpaid labor on women (International Labour Organization Citation2015; Littig Citation2017; Baruah Citation2018). Due to “sticky floors and glass ceilings” – systemic issues ranging from material barriers to gender stereotypes – not only do women struggle to enter these fields, but advancing within them is more challenging (Baruah Citation2018). As of 2019, in the US, for example, fewer than 20 percent of workers in the clean energy production and energy efficiency sectors are women (Muro et al. Citation2019). In the EU, women's representation across all economic activities is 46 percent, but only 25 percent in the energy sector (Czako Citation2020). Similarly, BIPOC are underrepresented in STEM fields. Lack of education opportunities and training, stereotypes, the historical erasure of many Black women and men who have played important roles in STEM fields and other aspects of systemic racism have combined to produce a White-dominated sector, especially at the top. In addition, women and BIPOC tend to be less represented in the “brown economy” sectors, such as oil and gas – from which, in GovtGNDs, many workers will be supported to transition to green jobs. In the US, for example, only 14 percent of those employed in the mining, oil, and gas sector are women, and 87.2 percent of people employed are White (US Bureau of Labor Statistics Citation2021). In the EU, women comprise just 12 percent of workers in mining, and 17 percent in oil and gas (Czako Citation2020). This kind of approach, which emphasizes demographic questions of who is included/excluded and who benefits, often gives rise to policy recommendations centered on improving participation and representation. As such, some feminists call for GNDs to correct for the underrepresentation of women in the STEM sector by: attracting girls into STEM subjects from a young age (Lefton, Madrid, and Sadiku Citation2012; Von Hagen and Willems Citation2012; UN Women Citation2014: 47; Littig Citation2017: 323); ensuring apprenticeships for women in STEM fields (Lefton, Madrid, and Sadiku Citation2012; Von Hagen and Willems Citation2012; Baruah Citation2018); encouraging the sector to target women through recruitment events (Baruah Citation2018); legislating to prevent discrimination and guarantee fair working conditions (Von Hagen and Willems Citation2012; UN Women Citation2014: 47; Petrović Citation2016); and ensuring gender parity in decision-making functions, management boards, and advisory groups (Guerrero and Stock Citation2012; Lefton, Madrid, and Sadiku Citation2012; Littig Citation2017). Intersectional feminists emphasize that these measures must not be race-blind and should enhance the inclusion and advancement of women of color and other BIPOC in green jobs (Williams Citation2014: 185; Williams, Phillips, and Hall Citation2016). What is made evident, then, by this feminist questioning of who would get (what are currently defined as) “green jobs,” is that GovtGNDs could actually deepen preexisting gender and racial inequalities rather than ameliorate them. The policy responses that follow, affirmative measures to ensure that the benefits of expansion in this sector are more widely shared, could at least in part preempt that deepening of inequalities and be a step up for those individual women and BIPOC who benefit from the increased job opportunities. But beyond a more equitable distribution of jobs in expanded green energy and environmental management sectors, these policies would have little impact on the twin environmental and inequalities crises. Green jobs II: Whose labor counts? While asking “who is included/excluded?” often has the effect of leading to calls for greater participation and representation in existing institutions or processes, sometimes these questions do more than that: sometimes they can prompt a questioning and rethinking of basic, definitional conceptualizations in a field. For example, if we ask where are the women and BIPOCs in GNDs, we not only notice that they are poorly represented in green jobs, but also that where they tend to be concentrated is in care jobs (such as healthcare, education, childcare, and care for older persons), which are themselves relatively low carbon. Thus, many feminists point out, if GNDs aim to tackle both climate change and inequalities, investing in care jobs and care infrastructure would serve both ends at once; why, then, are care jobs not considered green jobs? And why do GovtGNDs more broadly neglect a key sector of the economy that is crucially important and already relatively green – the work of care or social reproduction (Röhr and van Heemstra Citation2013; Bauhardt Citation2014; Di Chiro Citation2019; Cohen and MacGregor Citation2020)? Here, of course, feminist analysis makes it clear that exclusion of care jobs from the concept of green jobs is not some kind of natural definitional fact; instead, it is a choice that reflects the ways care is unseen and unvalued because it is assumed to “come naturally” to women and to be “unskilled” (Folbre Citation2002). And in structurally racist societies, that devaluing of care work accounts for its heavy concentration of BIPOC workers. Thus, GovtGNDs rely on and reinforce gendered understandings of what work is seen as valuable, thereby buttressing gendered and racialized inequalities. This kind of feminist questioning of what is missing also reveals GovtGNDs’ silence about unpaid care work. This is even the case in GovtGNDs developed during the COVID-19 pandemic, which finally made it more difficult to ignore the importance of paid care labor. Unpaid social reproduction work is assumed, in GovtGNDs, to be “infinitely available” (Bauhardt Citation2014: 65) – whether it is work “required to maintain everyday life in all societies” (Di Chiro Citation2019: 4) or work that women do to address community needs that arise out of racial and ethnic group disparities (Banks Citation2020). By neglecting unpaid care work, GovtGNDs have also ignored the ways in which their “solutions” are likely to increase the care and provisioning burdens of those carrying it out. Many GNDs focus, for example, on sustainable travel, advocating for more cycling, public transport, and walking, but sustainable transport plans, if not attentive to gender at the design stage, can increase the time and effort of unpaid care work. Similarly, arguments for individual eco-changes (such as using washable diapers) can increase the workload of those carrying out caring labor (Randall Citation2012; Weller Citation2017). When feminists ask not only who but also what is included/excluded in the category of “green jobs,” a different range of actions and policy recommendations follow, designed to create an economy that values and expands the low-carbon care labor not traditionally considered “green work” (Röhr and van Heemstra Citation2013; Dengler and Strunk Citation2018; Cohen and MacGregor Citation2020). These include creating well-paid, high-quality, unionized jobs in the care sector (for example, through supporting a domestic workers’ Bill of Rights); challenging the devaluation of care work as women's work and breaking down the stigmas associated with people who do care work; highlighting the skilled nature of care work, valuing unpaid work and taking steps to promote more equitable sharing of this labor; and promoting measures that make the care sector even greener (Cohen and MacGregor Citation2020; Palladino and Gunn-Wright Citation2021). Thus, we can see that asking what is missing/excluded in how green jobs are conceptualized leads to a more ambitious range of policy proposals than just asking who is excluded from green jobs. These policy proposals would take us further in addressing the intersecting crises we face by making paid work in the care sector plentiful, valued, and rewarded, attractive to both men and women. This would help create an economy that is greener, by creating more jobs in relatively low-carbon sustainable livelihoods. And it would help create an economy that is fairer, as well-paid care work could help tackle gender and racial inequalities, as well as lead to a more gender-diverse and racially diverse group of carers. Clean energy – is it clean? Is it green? If feminist questioning of who and what is included/excluded can lead to destabilizing basic concepts such as green jobs, the concept of “clean energy” is perhaps an even more critical example. Feminist questioning that is not only intersectional, but also rooted in a postcolonial, decolonial, or global justice perspective, interrogates where women in the Global South fit into these plans for green, clean energy; this then necessitates looking at the whole production and disposal cycle, which – in turn – troubles the very concept of clean energy itself. What quickly becomes apparent is that GovtGNDs focus on the parts of green energy production, installation, and consumption that take place in the Global North. And they ignore the elements of the green energy product lifecycle – including the mining of critical minerals for car batteries and solar panels, the production of wind turbines, and e-waste disposal – that typically occur in the Global South and/or on the lands of Indigenous and other poor and marginalized communities in the Global North, often with devastating consequences (Táíwò Citation2019). Mining of lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, and other high-value minerals required for renewable energy and other green technologies is already surging, and demand for these and other “clean” energy minerals is expected to increase nearly 500 percent by 2050 (Fleming Citation2021). Mining of these high-value minerals drives land grabbing and violent land dispossession, the pollution of water, air, and soil, the loss of livelihoods and/or toxification of livelihoods, and the socioeconomic harms of community destruction in countries throughout the Global South (Tandon Citation2012; Randriamaro Citation2014; Bell, Daggett, and Labuski Citation2020). Even the briefest look at just one aspect of one example – the mining of lithium in the Andes – hints at the disjuncture between GNDs’ positive images of clean energy and the anything-but-clean impacts of its production. Producing a single ton of lithium takes 500,000 gallons of water; even at present levels of extraction, this causes real problems for communities – and women in particular – across the Andes, as the water sources they depend upon for food production, for drinking, for washing, have been diverted to mining operations or poisoned by chemical leaks from lithium mines (Aronoff et al. Citation2019). Furthermore, it is not only mining that is driving land dispossession and degradation across the Global South, but also the expanding demand for agrofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels. The EU's Renewable Energy Directive, with its targets for EU countries and corporations to reduce emissions through scaling up of forms of energy classed as renewable, including agrofuels, is increasingly the main driver of land dispossession in Africa (TNI Citation2012; Cotula Citation2014; Borras et al. Citation2016). Globally, the demand for agrofuels destroys rainforests, depletes biodiversity, forces Indigenous peoples off their land, and replaces environmentally sustainable smallholder farming with mono-crop, petrochemical-intensive industrialized farming, all with specific adverse impacts on women due to their assigned responsibilities for provisioning their families and communities. At the other end of the “clean energy” lifecycle, e-waste disposal also has devastating impacts. When solar panels, electric batteries, and electronic equipment reach the end of their lifespan, the components are most often shipped to the Global South.Footnote4 This waste is vast – the Americas and Europe produced an estimated 25 million metric tons of e-waste in 2019 (Forti et al. Citation2020). And, with the transition to more renewables, this waste is growing – all the solar panels currently in use, for example, will be entering the waste stream by 2040 (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] Citation2011).Footnote5 This e-waste is composed of heavy metals and persistent toxic substances. Women and children in the Global South bear the disproportionate burden of disposing of these toxins, intensifying the harms of long-established patterns for dealing with general waste (McAllister, Magee, and Hale Citation2014; Bell, Daggett, and Labuski Citation2020). Often, they sort through to extract the reusable components – using low-tech tools without protective equipment – at the risk of irreversible damage to their health and fertility (McAllister, Magee, and Hale Citation2014). In sum, feminist questions that focus beyond the US- and Euro-centric purview of GovtGNDs, to the whole life cycle of the production of clean energy, make the very concept of clean energy deeply problematic. They make it clear that what looks clean to eyes in the Global North is not; they abnegate the fantasy of “clean” energy sources that come without negative social and environmental consequences (Dengler and Seebacher Citation2019). Several different kinds of policy implications flow from this awareness. One direction for policy is to focus on ameliorating the conditions faced by those most affected. For example, some of the harms to women and other marginalized groups in the Global South (or North) might be lessened by trying to ensure that decisions about extractive industries are made through local democratic processes, that extraction be subject to free, prior, and informed consent, and that any resettlement would be to locales that are environmentally appropriate for the continuation of people's livelihoods and communities, with adequate financial compensation (Sweetman and Ezpeleta Citation2017). Other measures advocated by feminists include the fair distribution of benefits of extractive activity and the protection of workers’ rights (Daniel and Dolan Citation2020); and legislatively forcing corporations to recycle e-waste at their expense in the Global North and including e-waste concerns in UN Monitoring Committees’ agendas (McAllister, Magee, and Hale Citation2014). A different scale and logic of policy solutions emerges if we acknowledge that the toxic toll paid by people and ecosystems in the Global South for clean energy in the North is part of a larger pattern, a continuation of hundreds of years of colonial relations in which the North has exploited and extracted human and natural resources from the South, downloading to the South the costs of northern prosperity, while ignoring the human and environmental harms. Feminist exploration of these issues leads to calls for policies that seek to transform those political economic relations, as we explore later. Finally, a third direction for policy can arise with the feminist troubling of the idea of “clean” energy. Without the fantasy of clean energy growth as a thoroughly benign solution to the need to drastically cut carbon emissions, policymakers and the public would have to confront questions such as: “should rich countries and communities continue consuming energy at current levels?”, “how much is enough?”, and “what are the purposes to which energy is being put, and do they make sense?”