How To Fix The World That Capitalism Has Broken

Kate Aronoff, staff writer at the New Republic, discusses her new book "Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet — And How We Fight Back" on the world's climate future and the policy solutions needed to slow climate change in the coming decades. Sam Seder and the Majority Report crew discuss this.

Overheated How Capitalism Broke the Planet & How We Fight Back
by Kate Aronoff » https://www.powells.com/book/overheat...

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Sam Seder: Your suite of non-reform reforms, as you refer them. What where... If you were going to construct something, I mean obviously it would look like the Green New Deal, on some measure, that we have seen. Let's just start with the idea of how do we get that passed. How do we implement these non-reform reforms, like major structural changes to our economy, when we've got a guy who literally shot the cap and trade bill with a shotgun. I've said in the past an AR-15, I guess it was a shotgun. It's been a long time since i saw that ad. And that's how Joe Manchin got to office. That was his big commercial, like literally firing at the stack of pages that were cap and trade. How do we get there politically?
Kate Aronoff: Yeah so, what I argue in the book and me and several co-authors sort of wrote about and co-authored a book "A Planet To Win" is that there has to be this virtuous cycle between policy and politics, right, so sort of reigning logic of the Democratic Party for a long time was that if you give people stuff that makes their lives better they're probably more likely to vote for you. That fell out of fashion for some of the reasons we talked about earlier in the 1970s and 1980s, but that is you know a fairly standard logic that's not a magic bullet, but climate policy probably has to follow something like that. So for many, many years, climate policy has been talked about like the carbon tax, like these other market-driven tweaks as something which can be fit in sort of around the edges. It's the sort of realm of technocrats, and something that only can be dealt with basically in a boardroom, or by very skilled people who are taking a serious look at this problem. And we just know that the problem is way too big to fit around the edges, right. Somebody's going to know, and we have a fossil-fuel industry with a PR arm, which is very ready to call out anything called climate policy, so what i argue is that you know you have to bring that to the people and this is what folks who are pushing for a Green New Deal really center on, is that climate policy has to make a credible threat to make people's lives better, right. And so i look at policies like a federal job guarantee, which can do a lot of this very climate necessary work that the private sector is in prioritizing and also would have a massive impact on people's lives right, taking away involuntary unemployment, giving people a job that is dignified that pays them a living wage and that is improving their own communities with work that is decided by folks from their communities. These sorts of things, I think, have to start the cycle, to put it very bluntly, re-elect Democrats for a long time to come. It's not enough to just have a sort of one-off climate policy passed and to cede over to Republican rule, which will strike it down in the courts maybe before an election happens. Which will pass new laws or repeal them or whatever. What we saw in the New Deal and have seen you know throughout U.S history that it takes sort of sustained role by in our case now the Democratic Party and unfortunately, no real warm feelings toward the party apparatus but practically when we have one of two major parties that is not interested in climate violence.