There are, however, structures that are too expensive or contain too much sunk-cost infrastructure to simply walk away from, and those will need to be defended for longer than is ideal. There is danger of the Concorde fallacy, the conviction that it’s less wasteful to throw money at a lost cause simply because you’ve invested so much already, and I fear that may be the case for Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, and many other coastal cities, but an immense amount of financing will be spent in their defense with a variety of projects, ranging from fortified seawalls to organic buffering systems in the bays to multibillion-dollar sea gates. New York City’s destiny, for instance, will likely be as the most expensive fortress in human history. The US Army Corps of Engineers will create a federalized coastal fortification defense strategy that builds in ample room for sea level rise. The rest of the American coast, piece by piece and year by year, will be repurposed by the CCC and transformed into the largest national park in our country. The coastline will be returned to public space, to be utilized for the benefit of all. My sister suggested the name “American Shores National Park,” and so far, that is what has stuck.
The question is where will everyone leaving these communities go? This dovetails with our economic crisis. A lack of aggregate demand requires stimulus, and therefore the restructuring of our energy, transportation, and agricultural systems will be supplemented by the largest spending on public works ever. In addition to all the emissions abatement and clean energy programs described above, stimulus will patch holes in state budgets and provide additional funds for hiring teachers, firefighters, policemen, emergency responders, and for shovel-ready infrastructure projects. However, the bill will also harness $100 billion to retrofit existing public housing and vastly expand it in depopulated, deindustrialized municipalities largely across the Great Lakes region. Midsize cities and large towns that have suffered under the impacts of poor policy, poverty, and addiction will become CRMCs with incentives drawing the clean energy and decarbonization industries. Other sizable investments will be made to transition displaced workers from the coal, oil, and gas sectors into carbon removal (the skills are largely similar; one is simply drilling wells to deposit carbon instead of exploiting it), as well as in communities that have borne the brunt of fossil-fuel development, especially Appalachia and the Gulf states. Curricula of new training centers will focus on postsecondary technical education and be grafted onto the existing network of community colleges to allow for rapid instruction in skill sets.
Finally, the newly created Advanced Research Projects Agency-Biosphere (ARPA-B) will conduct research into gigaton-scale carbon mitigation techniques and begin steps for deployment of solar radiation management (SRM) aerosols. Though this last point has proved highly controversial, the task force unanimously agreed some form of SRM lies in humanity’s near future. As polluting plants come off-line and their aerosols dissipate, global dimming will abate quickly with the consequences of up to one degree of warming imminent. This cannot be allowed to happen. In total, the stimulus portion of the legislation will total $5 trillion in the first year and an additional $20 trillion over the next fifteen years.
Social policy was of course a heated topic of debate, and typically Secretary Rathbone, Tony, and myself would have been skeptical of attaching ancillary concerns to the immediate issue of carbon abatement. However, the scale of the crisis necessitates more radical measures to address the culprit of inequality. There is an unquestionable economic and environmental advantage to eradicating the structural inequities of our current system. This begins by disciplining out-of-control transnational financial capital and making it work for the purposes of remedying the climate crisis. A financial transaction tax will curb speculation and raise approximately $300 billion per year while the regulation of tax havens will wring out the aimless hot money producing distortionary effects around the globe. A carefully designed estate and consumption tax on extravagant consumer goods: private jets, recreational boats, homes beyond the primary residence, electronics, estates larger than $5 million, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics, cosmetics, and finally advertising. Advertising is an insidious form of pollution that has distorted the economy in myriad ways, particularly in the digital age (data brokers in particular will be targeted). Restructuring the income tax to impact the top 10 percent, 2 percent, .5 percent, and .01 percent, respectively, will pay for a host of new programs, including an elimination of student debt, tuition-free university education, universal pre-K, and universal health, vision, and dental care.
Of course, the eco-economic crisis is without borders, and the nation-state system has already demonstrated its crippling limitations. We cannot force any state to decarbonize, democratize, and redistribute at the barrel of a gun, but we can use the imperial power of the United States, its economic muscle, and its impressive propaganda capabilities to galvanize a sense of planetary purpose and equity. I can already hear some of our left-wing critics expostulating on the hegemonic aims presented here. Their critique will be an interesting footnote, steamrolled by the present emergency.
Linking carbon policy across the world will be paramount. This begins with the border adjustment tariff of the shock collar, imposed on the products of all foreign-based exporting firms, forcing free-rider countries to adhere to emissions abatement. There is some question as to whether this duty will be legal under international trade law, which is irrelevant. The United States built the IMF, WTO, and NAFTA, and we can just as easily rebuild them around a new carbon order. The Climate Stabilization and Development Fund (CSDF) will be a multilateral fund that will provide financial support for countries transitioning to clean energy production. Modeled on the Montreal Protocol, we hope to eventually finance it at $150 billion a year to help the developing world deploy zero-carbon energy. We’ve seen the limitations of nonbinding treaties, but with the CSDF and linked carbon policy, we have the beginnings of an international “contract and converge” regime.
Undoubtedly all the great accounts of this historical moment will be written from the Chinese perspective. Awash in internal refugees, its food system buckling, China’s finances are also in crisis as low- and middle-income countries fail to service their debts due to climate disruption. Additionally, the environmental impacts of half a century of unrestrained industrial production are combining to cripple the state. Though many a salivating Maoist has looked with envy at China’s authoritarian government and the speed with which it has implemented limited environmental policy, this was obviously, as Congresswoman Aamanzaihou once said, “a fool’s wish on fool’s gold.” The Communist Party’s only real goal was total control; therefore, it would sacrifice anything for continuous growth, consumption, and the acquiescence of its population. At the first signs of trouble, the party knew only more repression and murder of its people. Authoritarian, kleptocratic, and plutocratic rule across disparate human societies have in common that they are inherently unstable. Because China is undergoing a political convulsion, the temporality and effects of which are impossible for us to know and understand at the moment, we must focus diplomacy and policy action there with a carrot-and-stick package to encourage first, decarbonization, and second, human rights and democratic reform.