On the first of a two-part series, two political scientists from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy offer insight on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal and discuss the degree to which the resolution could transcend political ideology and bridge coalitions. Returning to the show is Brian Greenhill, an associate professor who researches international relations, human rights and international organization. He spoke on the UAlbany News Podcast last season on the approaches policymakers take when addressing the risks of climate change. Joining Greenhill is Jennifer Dodge, an associate professor of public administration and policy at UAlbany. Her research focuses on environmental policy conflicts, with special attention to the role of policy advocacy efforts by nonprofit organizations.
On the first of a two-part series, two political scientists from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy offer insight on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal and discuss the degree to which the resolution could transcend political ideology and bridge coalitions.
Returning to the show is Brian Greenhill, an associate professor who researches international relations, human rights and international organization. He spoke on the UAlbany News Podcast last season on the approaches policymakers take when addressing the risks of climate change.
Joining Greenhill is Jennifer Dodge, an associate professor of public administration and policy at UAlbany. Her research focuses on environmental policy conflicts, with special attention to the role of policy advocacy efforts by nonprofit organizations.
The UAlbany News Podcast is hosted and produced by Sarah O'Carroll, a Communications Specialist at the University at Albany, State University of New York, with production assistance by Patrick Dodson and Scott Freedman.
Have a comment or question about one of our episodes? You can email us at mediarelations@albany.edu, and you can find us on Twitter @UAlbanyNews.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Welcome to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah O'Carroll.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Today I'm speaking with two guests from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at UAlbany. You may recognize one of them, Brian Greenhill who I spoke with during our first seasoned. Greenhill is an associate professor and vice chair who focuses on international relations, human rights and international organization. Also joining us is Jennifer Dodge, an associate professor of public administration and policy at Rockefeller College. Her research analyzes environmental policy conflicts with special attention to the role of policy advocacy efforts by nonprofit organizations.
Sarah O'Carroll:
I have Brian and Jennifer with me to talk about US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal and how the resolution has put climate change on the national agenda for the 2020 presidential election.
Speaker 2:
Several Democrats unveiled a Green New Deal last week modeled on President Roosevelt's New Deal, but aimed at addressing climate change.
Speaker 3:
Moving America to 100% clean and renewable energy by 2030 through major investment increases in wind and solar power sweetened with generous tax incentives.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, Brian and Jennifer, thank you for being here.
Brian Greenhill:
Thank you.
Jennifer Dodge:
Thank you for having us.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, this past February, Alexandria, Ocasio-Cortez, the U S Representative for new York's 14th congressional district, introduced her Green New Deal with Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts. I'm wondering if either of you can provide some historical context to help us better understand what led up to this moment and perhaps some insight on what was at play with the broader movement on climate action.
Jennifer Dodge:
Yeah. Sure. I think we should look at the Green New Deal as something that is the culmination of many decades of organizing from civil society and nonprofit organizations and community based organizations. We shouldn't think about this policy as something that just popped out of the head of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but is really, I think, coming out of her connections with grassroots organizations in her own community, but also her awareness of broader environmental and environmental justice movements.
Sarah O'Carroll:
The Green New Deal seems incredibly visionary and holistic. What is or why is the fact that AOC chose to introduce this plan as a resolution significant?
Jennifer Dodge:
What it does is it lays down an agenda that's an a progressive agenda that brings together these concerns over environmental destruction and these concerns over economic issues and puts those together. It lays out all of these problems that we're going to experience in the beginning, and that's a very stark description of the things that we're going to experience and it's well founded in science and social science. Then, it connects that with progressive policies that are connected to economic issues. It's not going to be binding policy as you suggest, but it's an aspiration and a vision of where we could go to transform the economy so we're producing fewer greenhouse gas emissions and also so we're addressing some of the economic issues that we're confronting.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Now, Brian, you focus on the two approaches that policymakers take when addressing the risks of climate change, that of adaptation and mitigation. Does one tend to be more palatable in terms of public endorsement, broadly speaking, or do the two more often work hand in hand? And I'm just wondering how each side of the conversation might interact with each other and what implications is dynamic has for the Green New Deal in terms of its persuasiveness.
Brian Greenhill:
There are many kind of interesting parts to this debate. I think a really large part is first of all just getting people to take climate change seriously and to kind of appreciate the gravity of the situation here. Regardless of what people may think about AOC's proposal for the Green New Deal, what I think is going to be really effective is just by having this big bold plan, even if it's being pilloried on the right is still something that's kind of helping to cement this idea that we really are at a crisis point. Just last October, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released this report saying that we basically have 12 years left if we want any hope of getting to the 1.5 degree centigrade warming target.
Brian Greenhill:
That where it would still be pretty awful, but at least it wouldn't be quite as catastrophic as some of the other things. I think the fact that, I think, all but one of 20 Democratic presidential candidates are supporting it at least in some form is kind of really good in the sense that it's helping to kind of turn this into a much more mainstream idea. Something that would have been dismissed as a crazy radical plan five or 10 years ago is now being taken very seriously. The fact that people in the right are paying so much more attention to it, actually a lot more attention than people in the left, mean that this thing is growing legs and people are concerned about it.
Brian Greenhill:
Going back to the question you first asked about different ways of how we should respond to climate change. The research I had done was looking at the relative emphasis placed on issues of climate change mitigation versus adaptation. There has been the debate within the environmental community about whether putting messages out there about adaptation possibilities might have the kind of perverse effect of making people more laid back about climate change as a solution and as a problem rather. Our research showed that at least in there within the constraints of the experimental design we did it seem to be that that wasn't the case.
Brian Greenhill:
The two can go hand in hand and I think everyone now is accepting that any conversation about climate change has to deal with both mitigation and that adaptation. Because even in the best case scenario, we've still got an awful lot of adapting to do because there's no hope anymore of kind of resetting the clock and being able to kind of go back to what the previous generation has enjoyed in terms of of climate. So there's definitely going to be some climate change, it's just whether that is an amount of climate change that is truly awful or whether it's something that's instead difficult, but nonetheless kind of livable with.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Jennifer, you work with nonprofits advocacy and environmental policy conflicts. Are there any national or multinational organizations that come to mind that might do what Brian was speaking to as far as bringing together nations or bringing together cities that might serve as models as we think about increasing civic participation in cities?
Jennifer Dodge:
Yeah. I did some research several years ago on the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. It's a network of organizations of communities of color and indigenous communities across the Southwestern United States and also in the border States and Mexico. They work together on regional policies to create environmental justice in their communities, and they had this incredible approach to dialogue within their broad networks to set the agenda for themselves in terms of creating positive policy on environmental issues and participation in those issues.
Jennifer Dodge:
But then also collaborating with government agencies who are willing to collaborate with them to sort of bridge the divide between activists and people who are running environmental agencies and they were able to have these really nice dialogues. I think they have a lot to teach us about how to actually engage in that joint work. I think there are plenty of examples out there for groups that are trying to design bold action that has these issues of equity incorporated into it, but then also who are willing to work with decision makers and policy makers when they're willing to collaborate also to to bridge those divides.
Sarah O'Carroll:
It does seem to come down to people's willingness to engage with these issues and to recognize our own contributions to our carbon emissions. And it's clear that we could be having more productive conversations about climate change even though that there's been this heightened intensity about the conversation at the federal level. I'd be interested in hearing from both of you how we might find common ground at least to a degree to which a reasonable conversation about what to do about it from a public policy perspective can happen and what suggestions might you have in terms of finding more common ground and is there a way that we can talk about the green new deal in a more effective manner, even if we don't necessarily agree on all of its content.
Brian Greenhill:
I think one way in which the conversation can become more helpful is if there's a focus more on the kind of more practical kind of bread butter, day to day issues that climate change will bring, talking about things like, say, transportation infrastructure. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez put out a video, I think it was last week or the week before. This really beautiful like seven minute video with kind of animated watercolor paintings, sketches showing where it's meant to be her talking 10 years from the future about what might have happened after the Green New Deal or the package of of eight pieces of legislation that bring that into effect, how that might have changed the world.
Brian Greenhill:
It starts out with her traveling on a bullet train between New York City and Washington, DC, and talking about this massive wave of investment like in the 2020s in high speeds rail networks. And so, things like that is something that most ordinary people who don't feel very connected to environmental issues can certainly reap the benefits from. One of the perhaps more surprising features of the Trump presidency has been the fact that there hasn't been more of a push on infrastructure investment, which was something that Democrats were really kind of in some ways wanting, but at the same time that afraid that the Republicans or through Trump could use that to really kind of split the Democrats in this way.
Brian Greenhill:
I think focusing on some of the kind of ancillary benefits of efforts to combat climate change, like infrastructure investment, like the fact that the Green New Deal was so much of it is about employment and about creating kind of a viable dignified ways of living for people who right now have very limited employment options. I think that could really help kind of achieve buy-in even if people are never really ... Even if the large majority of people are never really going to be passionate about climate change as an issue itself.
Jennifer Dodge:
I also just want to echo a couple of things that Brian was saying. I think creating a really exciting vision of what the future could be is a really important tactic for getting people to think about climate change and what a positive future could be. Sociologists call this creating imaginaries of the future. We have energy imaginaries that can be very positive, which is the one that he described in this video. We can also have future imaginaries that are very negative that if we don't address climate change, we're going to experience these catastrophic outcomes.
Jennifer Dodge:
I think having a very positive vision of the future about what this transformation of the economy could look like that addresses a lot of the concerns that people have is something that we can get excited about and we can get behind. Then we can start to figure out, well how do we actually address that through policy? I think right now it's aspirational and it's meant to get people on board to think about how can we actually be in ways that will transform our economy, but also transform how we are dealing with environmental issues.
Jennifer Dodge:
So I think that's one really important piece of how this can be effectively communicated. I also really agree that we need to frame this in ways that actually address the concerns that people have very specifically not just dealing with practical policy issues. I think that can be really effective, but also just talking about what people care about. I think if we're going to experience more extreme weather events, we're probably going to have more issues of flooding and so that might affect people. And if we can talk about the things that people care about that might actually have a direct impact on their lives, then we can also encourage people to see themselves in the challenges that we're facing.
Jennifer Dodge:
Whereas I think it's easy for some people to not really feel what the impacts are going to be on them right now. If we can make that connection for people, I think that's really important.
Brian Greenhill:
One thing that I think is important for us to acknowledge, even though unfortunately there's no kind of easy solution to this, is that even though and we may find like in something like the Green New Deal real potential for kind of overlap or for bringing conservatives and liberals together, the problem we're facing as has been discussed so much in the past few years, is that all of this gets filtered through a very kind of hyper partisan bubble. Even on an issue like climate change, which obviously is going to affect everyone equally regardless of whether you're a a Democrat or Republican, there is a massive party split in terms of just the seriousness with which we acknowledge this is a problem.
Brian Greenhill:
The most recent Pew Research Poll on this found that 83% of Democrats now view climate change as a "major threat" to the U S whereas only 27% of Republicans do. So the problem is if these bold plans to try to deal with climate change, as admirable as they may be, if the end up, if Republicans are effective in kind of labeling these as just this kind of dangerous step towards some kind of socialist stake over of the economy. And if climate changes then seen as only a Democrat issue and even one that's just not taken seriously given that the president and the majority of Republicans in Congress are climate deniers, it makes it hard to sort of acknowledge some of these similarities.
Brian Greenhill:
Yeah. I don't want to sound overly pessimistic. I hope there is some way in which we can bridge these differences, but I think just that this kind of choose your news phenomenon that we're dealing with just now and the fact that there's such a big difference between just the importance that people attached to the whole idea of climate change between Democrats and Republicans is a major problem. I'm not sure, Jennifer, if you have any ideas on how we might bridge some of these gaps. But, I, right now we don't feel too optimistic.
Jennifer Dodge:
Yeah. No. I think it's a very, very wise caution and I think we might not see that bridge happening at the federal level with our legislature. That might not be the place where we're actually going to see action happening. I think it has to be grassroots action to actually have these conversations with people to understand how the impacts of climate change are going to affect everyone here and to start having those conversations at the local level and build support. I think that's happening in communities. That's happening at the state level.
Jennifer Dodge:
I think some hope might be if we see more blue wave in Congress, but that seems a little bit unlikely to happen in the Senate, at least not in a really major way. Yeah. I think I acknowledged that that's a challenge and that's a struggle. I think though that the reason why a lot of people on the right are attacking the Green New Deal so much is because they see the potential in it actually to bridge those divides and to diminish some of the power that the right is experiencing right now across the board on some issues.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Labeling it, that's socialism and we should thus treat it in the way that we might treat something. If we believe it's socialist, then that therefore is negative and we need to just dismiss it.
Jennifer Dodge:
Yes. Exactly. Mitch McConnell called it a socialist fantasy recently, I think. But, what we should do is not so much focus on those labels. We need to look at what is actually in the proposal, so I'm really glad we had a chance to unpack some of that because what it's talking about is having good jobs with good benefits, having strong labor rights, dealing with some of the issues that people experience related to healthcare and the affordability and accessibility of transportation and things like that. I think it's an interesting vision to as one possible solution to these issues that does have the potential to bridge those gaps.
Jennifer Dodge:
I think that's probably partly why the right is so concerned about it actually is giving so much attention to it. I do think having conflict is not necessarily a bad thing, actually. In my research, I talk about conflict as being a necessary part of actually deciding what we want. This is a great document to start that conversation in a serious way at the national level.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Well, Jennifer and Brian, thank you so much for being here today.
Brian Greenhill:
Thank you.
Jennifer Dodge:
Thank you.
Sarah O'Carroll:
Thank you for listening to the UAlbany News Podcast. I'm your host Sarah. O'Carroll, and that was Brian Greenhill and Jennifer Dodge from Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy. You can let us know what you thought of this episode by emailing us mediarelations@albany.edu or you can find us on Twitter @ualbanynews.