Another excellent, well articulated, and deeply needed
voices of truth! Let us all unite behind making
this New World a reality! — Molly
Sanders believes that as our economy rapidly shifts to renewable energy, power companies should be publicly owned and controlled, and the biggest polluters should help underwrite the costs.
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Interestingly, this is the part of the Sanders plan, which builds on the resolution introduced by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, that has received the most pushback from media commentators—who have been quick to dismiss public ownership over renewables as impractical and radical.
Yet for many Iowans, it is precisely these parts of the Sanders plan that make it most exciting.
Plenty of Iowans support renewable power and feel a tremendous sense of urgency about the climate crisis—after all, their communities are facing historic flooding, and their crops are dying as a result of both record-setting heat and cold. But like most of us, Iowans also have a keen sense of fairness. And they know from hard experience that when for-profit companies own the wind farms that dot their rolling hills, consumers and working people get a raw deal.
For instance, Alliant Energy, one of two major investor-owned utilities serving the state, raised rates in 2017 and 2018 and then sought to hike the average consumer’s monthly bill by yet another $20 this year (an effort that has been unsuccessful so far). Even as Alliant collected $500 million in profits last year, showered money on shareholders, and paid its CEO over $6 million, it blamed the rate increases on the cost of new wind investments.
For the thousands of Iowans who have been packing Sanders rallies over the last few weeks, it’s experiences like this that have made the senator’s climate plans so resonant. They understand that at a time of tremendous economic inequality and injustice, only a plan firmly rooted in both fairness and boldness has a hope of building the support necessary to take on the big polluters and win transformative climate action.
The boldness of Sanders’ plan is not in question. He is proposing to spend an astounding $16.3 trillion to get our economy off fossil fuels, an exponentially greater investment than any other candidate, one that actually meets the scale and urgency of the climate crisis. And yet it is how he is proposing both to raise and spend that money that is the true game-changer.
More than a decade of so-called market-based climate policies have expected workers and consumers to foot most of the bill for climate action. The result is often fierce backlash: In Chile, an increase in public transit fees sparked the recent uprising, and in France, an increase in fuel costs did the same. As in Iowa, it’s not that people are opposed to climate action. They are simply so overburdened by stagnant wages, job losses, and cutbacks to social services that they can’t accept getting stuck with the bill for the climate crisis.
Sanders’ Green New Deal plan doesn’t ask them to. Instead, it calls for polluters and the rich to pay their fair share, using a range of tools from progressive taxes to litigation and ending fossil fuel subsidies. And rather than watching the profits from a renewable energy revolution flow into the pockets of shareholders and executives, publicly owned utilities would keep the profits in communities, where they can help pay for badly needed services. Not only would the entire plan create an estimated 20 million jobs, but through investments in green public housing, health care, and child care, the people who are under the most economic stress would see their lives directly improved.
Please continue this article here: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/25/realism-bernie-sanders-climate-policy
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