If you’re asked to picture an environmentalist or climate activist, what do you see? Is it a white guy with a beard who wears a Patagonia fleece and rides his bike to work? Whether you agree with the policy or not, one of the benefits of the Green New Deal lies in the fact that it ‘builds a bigger tent.’ By addressing the twin pressures of climate change and income inequality, the proposed legislation opens the conversation about climate to a wider audience.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today we have with us another remote episode and this time it is with Rihanna Gunn-Wright. She is the policy director at New Consensus and one of the architects behind the Green New Deal. We’re very excited to have you here with us, Rihanna. Thank you for being here with us.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Oh, I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me.
Ross Kenyon: Pass it to Christophe for the standard introduction to our show. Christophe.
Christophe Jospe: I’m excited for this one. We have a surprise for you. I don’t think we’ll play our full deck of cards just yet.
Unknown speaker: Oh, is it a game?
Christophe Jospe: Get ready. All right. All right. Surprise is out. To my left, we have another co-host in the studio, Nori Advisor Ramez Naam. Super happy to have you in here.
Ramez Naam: Great to be here. Hi, Rihanna. Hi, Rihanna.
Christophe Jospe: If you’re listening to our other podcast, which is Carbon Removal Newsroom, you will have heard Mez actually come on and talk about the Green New Deal. And it’s something he’s written about extensively and thinks a lot about. And when he heard we are doing this episode, he basically was like, put me in, coach. I was like, all right.
Ramez Naam: Actually, I was shanghaied by these two gentlemen here. But whatever. I’m here. Hi, Rihanna. I’m delighted to be here.
Christophe Jospe: All right. So Rihanna, welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. That’s what we’re all about. I think you are too, because the Green New Deal has some really lofty goals to shake things up and do things which are good for the climate. We’re going to get into that. But before we do, we like to start with the guest’s origin story, sort of where they come from, what is the path that took them to where they are today, which is sitting on your couch in somewhere not in Seattle, looking back at us.
Ramez Naam: How did you become a superhero, Rihanna?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Wow, that’s so funny. You haven’t seen me parallel park, so you should really reserve that. And I’m not even kidding. I just, like two days ago, had to park like three blocks away because I was just like, nope, nope, nope, can’t do that from where I had to go. It was fun. So I’m from the South Side of Chicago. I grew up there in a neighborhood called Inglewood. I was raised by my mom and my grandmother and Actually in the same house that my mom had grown up in. My grandparents were one of the first Black families to actually move on to our block.
My grandmother actually still owns a house. And it was really, I think I was really shaped by Inglewood because my family literally saw the neighborhood that they lived in go from being This, you know, pretty well connected, like internally well connected to neighbors, having like bustling businesses, kids outside all the time. They make it sound kind of idyllic. And of course, they were like, still, I mean, it was a still, especially as it became a black neighborhood. There were still projects nearby, but it just seemed to be, at least in their memories, pretty bustling and pretty socially cohesive.
By the time I came up, it had been really ravaged by the crack epidemic. The city had more or less completely divested from the neighborhood. And so I grew up in the shadow of that. And I went to sort of magnetic schools, not in my neighborhood. And so I think I started asking questions kind of early about like, why does my neighborhood look so different? Why is it poor? You know, like what is happening? Because the people that I’m meeting at school who live in different neighborhoods don’t seem to be any smarter, right, or better than my family or the people that I know.
And so... I was thinking about that, and I come from a family. My mom and my grandmother are both pretty structural thinkers, so they were always sort of on me. And I actually thought they were conspiracy theorists when I was growing up. I was like, is this systemic racism real? It is. Spoiler alert. And so, but my mom would always be talking about like how like business interests had and the ways that the city was starting to think about financing were impacting the way that public schools were funded and the business models and all of these things.
But when I was 14, I moved away, went to a high school called IMSA, which is Illinois Math and Science Academy, largely because there weren’t any good schools in my neighborhood. And the ones that were good, I was going to have to travel You know, hours away. It was going to take me hours to get there on public transportation or we were going to have to move. So I went to a boarding school, IMSA boards, that Ramez actually went to a bit after he went. And so I graduated from there to Yale, double majored in African-American studies and women’s studies.
I didn’t know what policy was actually until my senior year. My friend, I was just focused on writing my senior thesis and I looked up and all my friends were talking about jobs they applied to and I hadn’t applied to one job. And so I was like, oh, I just thought I had to graduate. Oh, I should probably figure that out. And he was like, you should do policy. And I was like, what is that? And I was like, I know what policy is because my senior thesis is on welfare policy.
But I was like, that’s a job? And he was like, yeah, I mean, people do it. And so I went to our department like a week later and I was like, I need, you know, I’m looking for jobs. I don’t want to be an investment banker or a consultant. I wanted policy. And she was like, um, I hear this one fellowship. So I applied, got it, worked at a small think tank called the Institute for Women’s Policy Research for A couple years, got a Rhodes Scholarship, went to Oxford, did my master’s in comparative social policy, came back, worked as a UX researcher for about a year, and then went back into sort of like policy.
I became a policy analyst at the Detroit Health Department. And then my boss decided to quit and run for governor, Abdul El-Sayed. So he asked me to join his gubernatorial campaign as a policy director. And I hemmed and hawed and cried a lot and told him he was trying to ruin my life. I had just got married and I was like, yo, like I finally just got like a real nine to five. Like I just eat carbs when I come home and play my dog. And you want me to go work crazy hours.
My husband is up. Political organizer. So I was like, I seen those hours. I know this trick. Oh, no. And I was like, I don’t even know if I can do that work. Like, what are you talking about? But I took it and he, Abdul’s a big nerd and he was really committed to policy. So the Elizabeth Warren play that, well, it’s not a play, but what she’s doing where you like release a policy every week and just like, Or like, here’s how you could get to our vision of the world.
We did that. So we released like 250 pages of policy over 11 areas in like six months. Man. Which was really wild. And so finished that. The founders of New Consensus approached me, asked me if I would do for America what I did for Michigan. And I told them if they pay me enough.
Ross Kenyon: That’s a great answer.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah. And the first project they were working on was the Green New Deal. So they brought me on. To work on that first as a four month contract and then after the Green New Deal sort of exploded and New Consensus decided that it would be the Green New Deal would be the focus of the work of New Consensus for the foreseeable future. I decided to stay on and this is how I got here. It’s weird because I still in lots of ways don’t feel Part of the climate movement. I know that we are, but I feel so new to it.
I’m constantly asking when people invite me to talk, I’m like, I just got here. People have been working on this for decades, maybe someone else.
Unknown speaker: But the Green New Deal is climate policy. Yeah, it is.
Ramez Naam: It’s the most ambitious climate policy anyone has put forth in ever, basically. So I think that counts as climate policy.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It does, but it’s just, I guess, new. Because when I was attracted to the Green New Deal, because of the ways that it married, sort of focus on climate with equity. And so that’s part of why I came on. But I mean, I also spent a lot of my, all of my policy work has been largely focused on Trying to figure out how do you use policy to sow power back into communities and individuals who have been disempowered largely through the same mechanism, which is structure. So how do you do that?
And so environmental policy always struck me as like kind of really white and I didn’t really understand the connection, although now I do. So it’s just also still an adjustment in my mind to be like, This is actually a much more vibrant and connected and diverse and endeavor than what I thought. But sometimes your brain and your heart don’t always like Well, it has been really white until now, actually.
Ramez Naam: And so when you’re talking about your childhood and growing up in a community that had been like ravaged, not just by something that happened to it, but by structural issues and policy choices, like the Green New Deal, your Green and New Deal are both like they’re co-equal in that is what I hear and for reasons. So tell us like just what is the Green New Deal? Like what’s your bumper sticker for the Green New Deal?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: So the Green New Deal is a proposal to tackle the tomb crises of climate change and income inequality with the scale, speed, and scope that science requires when it comes to actually mitigating the climate crisis. And it takes an economic mobilization framework, both because we believe that is what is actually necessary in order to Achieve the emissions reductions that we need to achieve and to get to a net zero economy on the timeline that we need to do that on. And also, it’s the most promising way to do that while also renegotiating some of the power relationships that need to be negotiated in order for us to have a more just society and put in place some of the structures that we need to have a more just society.
And also, largely because the same policies that you would need to Deal with income inequality that are among the most effective are the same ones that you need to actually have a functional and successful economic mobilization. Because it requires workers, because it requires basically everyone can work to work and to be able to do that. It requires, which means that Folks need the ability to take these jobs and to thrive in them and to join supportive industries. And we know that the barriers to that are all patterned by.
Christophe Jospe: Can I ask a dumb question? Use the term economic mobilization. What does that actually mean?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: So basically an economic mobilization is a very fancy way of saying that. That the country will throw its full might behind a problem and try to solve it by investing in industries, by having the public sector take a more active role in the shaping and regulation and really direction of markets. And that we will also attempt to, it’s not central planning of the economy, but you’re attempting to solve a problem by basically figuring out In part, where you need the economy to go and how to support, how to drive the economy in those directions, both directly and through very fruitful partnerships with the private sector.
Ramez Naam: And why now? Why propose it now? And why do you think it’s got such an incredibly strong response at this point in time?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: I think why propose it now is because of where we ended up. I think... And the problems that we have at the moment, right? I think an economic mobilization frame might not or likely would not have been the right frame if we were talking about moving on climate 30 years ago, right? You have a much longer timeframe. Right. You can approach things in a more incremental fashion and also the sort of economic inequality had not reached the levels that it is right now, at least not across the board. I mean, the black unemployment rate is always double.
The white unemployment rate has been for the last four decades, right? So obviously some communities always have lagged behind because of structural issues, but it wasn’t to the level that it is now in terms of economic inequality across the board. And so you’re at this very, I think you’re sort of at a moment where you have twin pressures where you have to, I mean, bring down emissions globally. At least 50% by 2030. I think that’s what the IPCC reports is. Globally, now there’s arguments, which I believe that the U. S.
has to move faster, but even if you take that as gospel, that means that you have to reduce emissions 50% in 10 years, which is an incredible task and is going to require the full might of the nation because of how Far behind we are. And I think it’s similar with economic inequality. For a long time, most of the ways that we’ve tried to deal with inequality is redistribution through the tax system. But when you’ve got inequality at the levels that we have, that’s not Especially with the taxation system that we have right now, that’s not possible.
And so you have to be doing some things before income gets taxed, actually in the labor market. And so the sort of two needs coalesce in a way that can be addressed by economic mobilization. But I think it’s really, a lot of it just has to do with how much progress we’ve made so far and the timeline that we have to make the progress that we need to make. And I think it’s gotten a really strong response because we are, I think people sense that we are talking about not only the ways that climate change affects them in their daily lives and not just like the average temperature of the earth or parts per billion or emissions reductions.
That’s all very abstract.
Ross Kenyon: It’s not very connected to people on a daily basis. It’s very abstract and scientific.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah, it’s very abstract. So I think that’s one. And then The world that we are painting, the vision for the Green New Deal, where there’s millions of high-wage jobs, where folks can be mobile, can move to where jobs are because they know that they can get a job on the other end, that they don’t have to rely on their employers for insurance, where we’re talking about having clean air, clean water. These are things that people have been agitating for for a long time. And so I think it was met with such a big response because I think it was one of the first policies that came out In a long time, we’re like in a holistic manner.
We are saying that like this is the America that we want, which I think maps onto the America that a lot of people want and thought and had started to really feel was not possible.
Ramez Naam: Were you surprised by the enthusiasm that people came out in support of the Green New Deal?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah, I was. I mean, so I started on like a four month contract and the idea was that like You know, there were these new candidates who had won their primaries through Justice Democrats, particularly Ocasio-Cortez was really, she had run in part on a Green New Deal and she wanted to, to like keep it going in Congress. And so, but, and so we were working on it to give them something like a basis to figure out, you know, how they wanted to, what they wanted to do next in terms of introducing legislation once, you know, she was sworn into Congress in January.
But even then, no one thought they would pay attention. And so when people did pay attention, it blew up post the protest. It was surprising, I think, to all of us.
Ramez Naam: That’s awesome. Like other good surprises? Like what else has been positive for you about this?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: The public reaction. I wasn’t sure.
Unknown speaker: Yeah, he’s not known as a radical, right?
Ramez Naam: How do you think that came to be? No, he’s not known as a radical.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: No, and it’s so great. I love hearing him now because he’s always talking about revolution. He’s always tweeting about how this is a revolution and we need a revolution. But him coming on board because, again, the sort of media popular narrative was that Dems didn’t want to be involved with these new lefties and they were just disruptive. So to have someone like Senator Markey not only You know, co-sponsor the Green New Deal, but to actually be like an originating sponsor and to really validate that like this is this economic mobilization that this level of ambition is what climate policy needs and is what is required was really exciting and not something that I foresaw.
Back in November when the protests happened.
Ramez Naam: Do you have any idea how that happened? Anything to share with us of like, how did somebody like, like Ed Markey, like, I mean, he’s a great guy, but like, this is not what we would have expected. How did he get on board with this?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: How did the co-author of Waxman Markey come on board with a Green New Deal? Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a question that everyone has. And I am not in the office. So like, I don’t have the inside scoop.
Ramez Naam: Yeah.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: So just like, you know, I got a text one day that was like, Oh, Senator Markey wants to co-sponsor. That’s amazing. Yeah. So I don’t know. But I think it’s really ultimately that he deeply cares about climate change and wants to see a change and recognizes the level of ambition that’s necessary to get to where we need to go. And so I think it’s probably that simple, but how it actually happened and the Internal, I can’t say, but I would love to know.
Unknown speaker: I am curious too.
Ramez Naam: That’s amazing. Most of the conversation about the Green New Deal has been about federal policy, but here in Washington, I think just yesterday, Governor Inslee, Jay Inslee, also running for president, signed Bill that got passed in the House and Senate of 100% clean electricity in Washington State by 2025, no more coal, carbon neutral with carbon credits by 20-something, and then by 2045, 100% actual, fully carbon-free electrons. And like New Mexico passed something big. There’s a bill in Illinois where we both live.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Puerto Rico, New York just passed. Yeah, New York.
Ramez Naam: Absolutely. Pennsylvania, even a Republican is talking about it in Pennsylvania. Like is some of this- Minnesota. Is some of this state action, is that the Green New Deal in action?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah. I mean, I would never take responsibility for that. Those have been- You know, like the CCPA, they’ve been working on that for long before we came on. I worked on stuff here in 2016. But it has been exciting to see them proactively in lots of these states connected to a Green New Deal and talk about it.
Ramez Naam: Yeah, that’s Green New Deal passion, like helping pass some of this stuff.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah.
Ramez Naam: Yeah.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah. And I think it’s a two-way relationship because the only way that I am so confident that we can get the Green New Deal done and other folks who work on the Green New Deal is because states and localities have been making these moves and have been working on these things far before even the federal government. And without federal support, they’ve been figuring out a way to do that out of their own budgets, which is huge when you are state and local government. They do not, they cannot print their own money, right?
You have a budget. And so... For them to actually make these commitments and to put power behind it, that means that they are using some of their resources and making this a priority. And there’s so many innovative program models and policy models happening at the state and local. So I’m glad that like the Green New Deal can give them, can help create a frame that they can attach to and that they can, you know, Totally.
Unknown speaker: Totally.
Christophe Jospe: And I think that’s one level of response that we’ve seen to the Green New Deal. I was in D. C. a couple weeks ago and spending time with different lobbyists or people who actually are more on the right of the aisle. And they were a little bit frightened. They didn’t like the Green New Deal. And they were saying, oh, man... We need to come up with our own response, which can achieve climate impact, but we don’t like the Green New Deal. And so it’s kind of just funny to see that even if people who are opposed to this idea are still in response to the proposal of Are you happy that they are engaging in climate policy for the first time in a serious way, at least that I can remember?
Ross Kenyon: Is this good for the Green New Deal? Is it challenging? How do you feel?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Absolutely. No, it’s not challenging. The reason that the resolution went out And this is from the authors of the resolution that I’ve learned from AOC’s office. And she said something very similar on the MSNBC town hall, which is that the reason that the Green New Deal was released as a resolution, a non-binding resolution with high level goals, was precisely to create the space for these types of debates and for people to step in with solutions because this is far too big of a problem. To attempt to continue to solve with like clever people in a room talking to one another, right?
Like everyone working on it. So it is exciting. And that’s actually when I knew that this thing had legs because no offense to Democrats, but Republicans have a very good and sometimes better sense of politics. And so when we ended up on Fox News 24-7, I was like, uh-oh. This has something, because otherwise, why are you giving us the time of day? And this has time every day.
Ramez Naam: Do you think there’s any bipartisan potential? Do you think that there’s some things that you could carve off a handful of Republican senators to vote for?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: I mean, I think so. I mean, if you look at the resolution, it includes a lot of the things that particularly Republican lawmakers Say that they care about at least to their constituents and to their base, which is jobs, high paying jobs, you know, ability to control your own electricity, right? To generate your own power and to be independent in those ways, right? We’re talking about, you know, high quality jobs. We’re talking about reinvesting, right? In a lot of de-industrialized areas, which are red areas, right? We’re also talking about investing heavily in rural areas, which are also...
Red areas often. And so there’s a lot of things that I think appeal or could appeal to Republicans. So I think there is an option. Obviously, I think we have very different ideas of how the economy works and how that best could work. But there’s also a lot in the Green New Deal, at least the understanding of the economic thinking that new consensus brings that is about The role of the private sector and fruitful public-private partnerships and how do you actually take markets seriously in the context of a transition like this, that I think can also appeal to the GOP.
But I think at this point, it’s really the balls in GOP court, not the right ground.
Ramez Naam: So I am really glad to hear you say all of that, Ashley, because I think that we give up too easily on getting replicants to support some stuff. Like the biggest wind power states in the U. S. are all like in the Midwest and all, right? So you’ve also gotten some criticism. Has any of that criticism been useful to you? Like, is there anything that you’ve heard that’s been like, oh, I’m just going to change my mind on that? Like anything that you’ve changed?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So one thing is that some land use and housing has come up a lot. Hmm. Housing is in the Green New Deal, but just like the really, I hadn’t, I can’t say I had thought a ton about land use and the ways that it would be important for achieving a net zero economy. And so I’ve learned a lot about that. And an idea that I initially like sort of had dismissed was including public housing and like building more public housing and energy efficient public housing. As part of an effort to like upgrade all homes and buildings and provide, you know, safe, affordable housing.
Cause when I first heard, I was like, nobody likes public housing. Like I grew up in Chicago. We had huge projects like, and no one was a big fan of them. And I mean, they, they decimated them in ways that were really wrong. And you know, when they got rid of them and, and put families really in a precarious position, but still. And so I just, in my mind, I was like, I was like, Just knocked it away and was like, no one cares about housing. But after, like, I just recently met a scholar on this who’s thinking really hard about the Green New Deal and was talking about the role of public housing and, you know, some European nations and how it can actually be really awesome and designed well and beautiful.
And it actually made me really rethink and be like, actually, yeah, there’s no real reason why public housing shouldn’t be part of a Green New Deal. Yeah. Talking about building energy efficient, affordable housing, and especially because a lot of housing in low income neighborhoods is old. The housing stock is old. It could have structural issues beyond what, you know, in ways that like- Right, less efficient. It would be incredible to make them energy efficient if impossible.
Ramez Naam: Yeah.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: So you will need new housing stock to replace that is dignified.
Ramez Naam: Yeah.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Right? You, in fact, need to or want to move. And that’s just one reason why you should do it. And so that’s really changed my mind. And I’ve also been thinking a lot about what does it mean to have productivity without growth, prosperity without growth, which is something that a number of critics have brought up and does like a focus on growth, even in the GND to sort of reify an emphasis on, you know, Growth should happen no matter what, even if it’s extractive. And is that possible or useful in the context of the transition we’re trying to make?
Ramez Naam: I think we can have non-extractive growth, though. I mean, GDP is decoupled from extraction energy for the last couple of decades, since the 70s, really. Yeah.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: I think it’s possible too, but I also am recognizing that I don’t know as much about it as I thought I did. So I’ve been trying to be thoughtful and listen to more critiques and also ideas about alternative GDP and ways that you can be thinking about growth side of extraction and a concept called, I think people talk about it as public luxury and private, I forget, but this idea that Right now, we’re very focused on getting luxuries at an individual level. Like my house needs a pool, right? My house needs this.
But what about a world where there’s just a beautiful, you know, well-taken-care-of community pool, right? That public goods will always have to be considered sort of... Like a beach, public luxury, right?
Ramez Naam: Like the beaches are. Yeah.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Exactly. So how do you build public luxury and how do you make that available and how do you move away from a model of like just individual accumulation? And the only way you can get luxuries is to get them individually.
Ramez Naam: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Rihanna, I really appreciate you saying that. I love when people say that they don’t know something. I respect the hell out of that. I don’t know why it’s not more common. I guess it means that you’ve lost the argument. But I think for more neutral people in the audience, you’re like, this person became more credible because they were willing to. So kudos. And in that same spirit, who do you think is the best place for one to go to read criticism of the Green New Deal? Is there anyone that you see quite often harping on it that you’re saying, damn, some of these are really good points and we need to find ways to mitigate some of these potential negative effects of our policy?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yes. So the public housing one. So that part of that writing has been Jacobin or Jacobin. I’m never sure how to say it’s one of those words.
Ross Kenyon: You want to be real French about it? Jacobin magazine.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Published a series on the Greek deal, and they’ve done a lot of this work around housing and land use. And so I haven’t read everything in that series, but I have looked at some of it, and I found that useful. Ramez actually has, I think, put out some really useful and productive criticism.
Ramez Naam: Thank you. I’m glad that’s been useful. I tried to frame it positively.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah, no, but it was helpful in thinking about technology. The Jerry Taylor piece in Miss Ganson, I definitely didn’t agree with all of it, but I thought he had some... Some useful ideas about passage and sort of if you’re interested. It’s much more about sort of the political aspects.
Ramez Naam: I thought that was really interesting too. Like not being able to, like without the filibuster, like what can you do and how do you not scare voters. I think that was interesting.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah, so it’s focused a lot on political structures and the politics. But if folks are interested in that, it’s definitely an interesting critique worth thinking about. So yeah, so those are the places. And there’s actually a lot of indigenous folks writing, particularly around the prosperity without growth idea that I found useful.
Ross Kenyon: We’ll put many of the critics named in the show notes in case any of you listeners would like to learn more. I think it’s good to be well-rounded in that way and hear from people, and I’m sure you think so too.
Ramez Naam: I really liked actually that those criticisms you listed that were useful came from both sides. Like you found like some that were like probably further to the left, like Jacobin or Jacobin or whatever, like Niskanen and so on. So that was cool.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, definitely. I had two comments and I’d love your reactions on these, Rihanna. One of the things that I do really like, and we were talking with Michael Leggett, who’s Nori’s head of product about this with Mez very recently, which he loves the idea that there’s a moral mission. The country feels fragmented. This is something that could be unifying that we haven’t yet had. And maybe we haven’t had it effectively since, at least in terms of war, it definitely hasn’t existed since World War II. Not the Korean War, not Vietnam, not any of the proxy wars of the Cold War.
Maybe like Gulf War One, maybe had it for a week. I don’t think it lasted that long, but maybe it was the Apollo mission that did some of it too. But the Green New Deal is something he craves. And I link this back to, I read Sebastian Junger’s Tribe on Homecoming and Belong. I said, this actually gives people what they crave without having to go to war. And this actually may be really good for that. And then I had one other comment. I’m spieling out here. I’m sorry, Riyadh. I forgot.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Have you noticed all of my answers are spiels? I always feel awful during these interviews. I’m like, oh, you asked a simple question. Here’s my five-point treatise. Hold on. It’s only going to take me four minutes. Just hold tight.
Unknown speaker: It’s funny because it’s true.
Ross Kenyon: And it’s good. Yeah, I heard them do that to you for the Vox podcast that you did recently. It was, yeah. And I’ve behaved so much.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: I know. David Roberts was so nice. He was just like, okay. David Roberts is awesome.
Ramez Naam: Also a Seattle or North Seattle resident, by the way.
Ross Kenyon: Yes, indeed. Yeah, I behave so well. So I’ve been taking a step back in this podcast. I’m trying to condense all of my comments into a very short amount of time. The one thing I had a question about, and this is a criticism that I’ve seen coming from left of center that I think is really interesting as pertains to the guaranteed jobs portion, which you should introduce and talk about. But I’ve really liked the work of David Graeber, who, forgive me if I’m mischaracterizing your work, David, if you somehow listen to this, anarchist anthropologist.
His book, Bullshit Jobs, is about how some of these jobs might not necessarily need to exist and that a UBI, a universal basic income or guaranteed basic income, may actually honor the humanity. And the word that I know you love is dignified. Be a more dignified way of doing this, then some of these jobs will certainly be high value, but how do you guarantee that this doesn’t end up like Republicans might think it’s going to be the DMV, but in national parks? So how do you make sure that these are high value jobs that don’t fall prey to this making people pantomime labor that actually isn’t producing value?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Well, I think that’s part of the reason for introducing a jobs guarantee in the context of economic mobilization to decarbonize because there is just a ton of work to do. Right. Like you’re not just talking about building new stuff. You’re talking about decommissioning old stuff. Right. There’s also when you have so many people working, supportive industries could explode like child care. Right. And like elder care. Right. Because people, the women who largely women who are doing that care work, well, you know, will have access to other jobs that, you know, finally, particularly if there’s universal health care, but Even in the absence of that, could actually be at a wage point where it makes sense for them to work versus care, right?
Because that’s actually a trade-off. So there’s a lot of productive work to be done. And I mean, I think the New Deal is a good example. Of course, I’m sure some of those were like pantomiming work, but the large majority of it was useful work. And I think the reason for not a UBI is Or it’s not a ruled out, but the reason that it’s not mentioned in the resolution is, again, because you’re kind of, if you’re an economic mobilization, if you need all the people working, a UBI could have a counterproductive effect, right?
Not necessarily. It probably won’t, especially if you’re pitching it at the level that at least I’ve heard, which is a grand a month. But still, you know, it could. And so... I think that’s one, I think, actually kind of secondary consideration as I’m saying it. I think the other reason for sort of a jobs guarantee is that you want people to be able to move to where there is productive work or work that they feel is productive because we’ve seen mobility or migration patterns change with every single major economic migration.
Ramez Naam: But yeah, so I think that those- Move to Arizona and install solar.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: But I do think I’m not, honestly, in the context of decarbonizing as quickly as we have to do, I’m not particularly worried about there not being enough work. I don’t really foresee that.
Ramez Naam: But maybe. Maybe. I mean, who knows? But I think there’s enough work. I’m not actually sold on the jobs guarantee because I feel like if we invest this much, it’ll create jobs. But I don’t think you’re wrong that there’s a lot of work to be done.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I also think the function of a jobs guarantee is also to mitigate the chance that these are low quality jobs, right? Because you create a particular floor and depending on also what industries you’re putting people in, I mean, jobs guarantees are designed in part to create competition for, you know, in the context of job quality with private jobs. Private employers and to push up job quality standards in areas where they could be higher, but largely it seems like employers are choosing not to do that for profit reasons.
Ross Kenyon: All right, so maybe we have time for one last question. I think if there’s more you want to talk about, unless you have a hard stop, I think I’d allow even a little extra.
Ramez Naam: Well, I’ve got one. I’ve got one. It’s the only one left for me to ask that I have to.
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Ramez Naam: So like zoom out, it’s not just the US. The US is the number one country responsible for cumulative emissions and climate change so far, but it’s a planet, right? Like, so it’s not just the past, it’s the future. What does the Green New Deal do on a global scale? Like what changes about the rest of the world if we do this as Americans?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: So the Green New Deal, I think in terms of internationally, the resolution lays out a few goals. Actually, there’s one bullet point, but please don’t take this- Poorly people. There’s one bullet point for infrastructure, too. It’s just that kind of party. Literally, it’s like infrastructure. It’s like, yeah, that’s just a small thing. That’s not a problem. There is sort of, I think, a threefold vision. The first is to make the U. S. a leader in some of these technologies so that they’re cheaper, more easily exported, or They’re cheaper, they’re more easily exported, and that the U.
S. is also just able to sort of include them in foreign aid or be helpful in that way. The second is that a lot of countries are not going to come to the table or take it seriously if the U. S. is hemming and hawing the way that we have on climate. And so the hope is also by creating a Green New Deal and making this sort of ambitious action. It sends a signal. Not just to our allies, but to other folks in the world that this is something that the U.
S. takes seriously. And we’re going to try to get folks at the table to also not necessarily do their own Green New Deals, but to sort of reinvigorate a global commitment to it. And then, of course, the third is trade. There’s a lot of thinking that needs to be done about trade, particularly in the context of manufacturing. And so the Green New Deal is That’s something that’s in the resolution, and that’s something that we think about a lot. But I think the ultimate goal in all of this is that even now, I’ve been approached by no less than three governments, international governments, about creating their own Green New Deal.
Ramez Naam: That’s amazing. Very cool.
Unknown speaker: That’s really amazing.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: It’s probably upwards of that. So folks are interested and they want to see the same sort of commitment, this level of ambition, their country’s making similar commitments. So like it’s already making an impact. And I think the hope is that it will continue to make an impact. And the Green New Deal can frame some of the like The new Paris Agreement, the new more ambitious set of international cores that needs to come out of this in order to actually tackle climate change. So I think that’s the hope in addition to being able to provide really useful technical and financial assistance to developing nations and also to hopefully use our role to change some of the ways that say like the World Bank or other Sort of international monetary bodies that we’re part of, the ways that they encourage people to do development, which can still be quite focused on fossil fuels.
Ramez Naam: Yeah. I mean, I love all of those. And to your last point, I mean, I’ve seen like this year, every month, another like trillion dollar bank has said that they’re going to stop financing coal. And when I look at it, that’s happened partially because of climate, but partially because solar and wind and storage have gotten so cheap that these coal loans just suck, right? They’re not going to get paid off. Those plants aren’t going to keep running. So we had this program in DOE called SunShot that was like the most like Apollo, tried to get solar down to a dollar a watt installed by 2020, considered super audacious.
And it basically, by 2017, it happened. So I love all of those. You know, I’m obsessed with this idea of like, if we make it cheap enough to go clean, cheaper than dirty, everybody else will just do it, whether they care about climate or not. So I see that as a spillover.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah. So I mean, I think that’s also the hope is that as we invest in the U. S. hopefully becomes leaders in these different technologies, we’ll also be helping to push down the cost curve.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Well, Rihanna, thank you so much for being here. I think that was a very good episode. This isn’t me trying to flatter you, but I’ll flatter a little bit. I like listening to you speak. I just sort of, I just sort of like let it wash over me. I’m like this, a lot of details here.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: They call me very white of climate change.
Ramez Naam: Thank you, Rihanna. This has been awesome. I have to cut you off, but the way you talk is kind of hypnotic. Like I’ve just You talked from the head and from the heart at the same time. And that’s pretty cool. It’s a very natural.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: I also have a low voice and I talk slow. So it’s a bit like a weird Chicago lullaby, but all about climate change.
Ramez Naam: An enthusiastic lullaby.
Ross Kenyon: Did you just name the show? I think that’s the episode name now.
Christophe Jospe: I just want to add what I love about all this is it’s building a bigger tent. And, you know, as your stereotypical environmentalist who showed up to work wearing a Patagonia fleece, you know, usually riding his bicycle, white guy with a beard who lives in Seattle. Yeah. This is not a movement just for the people who look and think like me. People in Englewood, I think whatever happens around climate change has to be led by the people who are potentially facing the greatest risks against climate change. And I would say it’s the world that can take all this on.
So this just gives me a lot of hope and inspiration that the climate movement, sort of with all the things that are piling up that include the Green New Deal, just got a whole lot bigger.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah, I mean, that’s the hope. There’s so many people that could become climate voters. And I feel like the Green New Deal is pushing towards that shift and towards saying like a lot of people could be interested in climate and will care depending on how we talk about it. And so let’s stop talking about the like and stop being so focused on the small, you know, the people who are deniers. Because honestly, if climate deniers were poor black people, we wouldn’t care. We’ve dragged them along the long way. And so we would just, we wouldn’t care.
And so I think we have to stop foking. I mean, it makes sense. They have a disproportionate conservative, especially conservative white men in power have a disproportionate amount of power. But the fact is that the world is just so much bigger. Our country is so much bigger. And all of these folks who Are most at risk of climate change, but of also being left behind in an economy that is green, but stays the same as the one we have now, right? The same people will suffer. And so I think this is about acknowledging that like the U.
S. and our capacities and our imagination is so much bigger than it is than the leaders That we see the people who generally have power and whatever happens in the beltway. There’s a whole country that’s out here waiting and trying to participate in solutions.
Ramez Naam: Well, here’s to a bigger vision and a bigger tent.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Well, thank you, Rihanna. Thanks for being on the show. And hopefully we’ll speak with you some other time again, too. So thank you. Thanks much.
Rhiana Gunn-Wright: Absolutely. It was a pleasure. Have a good evening and weekend. TGIF. Happy weekend.
