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Why It’s Time for a ‘Green New Deal’
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Success doesn't come cheap. The bonuses will cost the government up to $265 million this year. Those costs, coming on top of the financial-sector bailouts, will exacerbate France's budget deficit. But Paris says the new expenditures are betting on future energy savings as well as the "formidable follow-on effect" of raising employment and creating dynamic new sectors in the economy. "This time it won't be about sacrificing the future for the present," said Sarkozy, "but on the contrary, putting our country in the best possible situation to face the future."
Can the rest of the world be persuaded to take even more dramatic steps? What of countries like Poland, which produces 94 percent of its electricity from coal? Or China, which pumps more carbon dioxide into the air in eight months than the European Union is likely to save in the next 12 years with all its programs to reduce emissions 20 percent by 2020? Complicated schemes to price carbon emissions and trade carbon credits, some of which are in place, may provide a useful mechanism. So might the costly and almost entirely untested schemes to capture and store the carbon dioxide produced by power plants and factories—the "clean coal" that both McCain and Obama talked about frequently on the campaign trail.
But the political and financial reality is that no government will be so moved by the dire predictions of the world's scientists and the doomsday scenarios on computer models that it will allocate trillions of dollars just to meet those postulated challenges. What governments might do, and some certainly will do, however, is spend huge sums soon to kick-start their economies and create millions of jobs. "The nation is asking for action, and action now," said Franklin Roosevelt when he took office in 1933 and launched the New Deal. Today the global economy—the planet itself—is asking for the same thing.
With William Underhill in London and Jessica Ramirez in Washington, D.C.
© 2008
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