The 1936-1937 sit-down strike forced General Motors to recognize the United Auto Workers as the workers’ union.

It began on December 30, 1936, at Fisher Body No. 1 in Flint, Michigan: workers occupied General Motors factories, launching one of the key struggles in U.S. labor history. A Women’s Emergency Brigade brought them food; when the police tried to drive out the strikers with tear gas, the women broke the windows to give them fresh air. After 44 bitter winter days, the sit-down strike forced GM to recognize their union, the United Auto Workers.

It was no accident that Flint was the scene of this historic battle. One hundred years ago, when the city boasted the largest factory in the world – a Buick plant – the people of Flint elected a socialist mayor. But GM founding partner Charles S. Mott won two years later, campaigning on a platform whose first point was “Only men who are successful at business should run city affairs.”

A painting on display at the Alfred P. Sloan museum in Flint depicts the Women’s Emergency Brigade during the sit-down strike of 1936-37.

The U.S. auto industry pioneered not only mass production but also mass consumption. “The American citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer,” the pro-business Flint Journal editorialized in 1924. “Consumption is the new necessity.”

By the early 1950s, when I was a baby and my parents moved there, Flint’s workers were earning the highest industrial wages in the nation. In an exhibit called “Flint and the American Dream,” the city’s Sloan Museum displays the household belongings of a typical auto worker of the era: the kitchen appliances, formica countertops, and chrome-and-vinyl furniture, the lawn mower and charcoal grill of my childhood.

Abandoned houses pockmark the author’s old neighborhood.

Flint’s American dream is now a distant memory. Starting in the 1970s, one auto plant after another shut down, a downward slide vividly portrayed in Michael Moore’s film Roger & Me. In the 1981 recession, Flint had the highest unemployment rate in the country. Today, despite the fact that Flint’s population has fallen to less than 60% of what it was in 1960, the city’s unemployment rate still ranks in the top 20 among the country’s 372 metropolitan areas. In the neighborhood of company-built bungalows where I lived as a toddler, the pavements are cracked, the median strips overgrown with weeds, and abandoned, burnt-out houses decay amongst the surviving homes.

How did this reversal of fortunes happen?

The reasons behind Flint’s collapse are not only the greed and sheer ineptitude of General Motors’ management, memorably depicted in Roger & Me, but also monumental public policy failures. These include:

• massive foreign borrowing, an overvalued dollar and unprecedented trade deficits, beginning in the Reagan era, the fatal macroeconomic nexus that decimated American manufacturing;

• the failure to grow Medicare into a nationwide single-payer health care system, leaving U.S. firms – alone among those of advanced industrialized countries – saddled with employer-provided health insurance costs that further eroded their competitiveness; and

• racial divisions, “white flight” to the suburbs, and ill-conceived expressways that tore apart the social capital that was needed to mount an effective local response to these crises.

The grim result is that the American auto industry, which already had pioneered planned obsolescence in consumer goods, went a step further: Flint became a disposable city.

What can we learn today from Flint’s history? In hindsight, the consumption-based social contract espoused by the Flint Journal was not sustainable. It turns out that being a consumer is not a substitute for being a citizen. Caring about things is not more important than caring about each other. Private goodies are not a worthy substitute for public goods. Government cannot be entrusted safely to captains of industry. Our ability to consume cannot be detached from our responsibility to govern ourselves.

So Flint’s American nightmare teaches us this: When we elevate consumption above citizenship, we imperil not only our democracy, but in the end our economy, too.

Do some communities “win” from environmental injustice? At first glance it may seem that when minorities and low-income neighborhoods suffer disproportionate air pollution, other people benefit from cleaner air. But in an analysis of exposure to toxic air pollution from industrial facilities in the United States, James Boyce and colleagues at the Political Economy Research Institute find that the metropolitan areas with the largest disparities also have the most pollution — so much so that even middle-and-upper-income whites breathe dirtier air than their counterparts in other cities. The implication: environmental justice can be good not only for minorities but for white folks, too.

Read more here

Triple Crisis blogger James Boyce published the following commentary on E3′s Real Climate Economics blog.

“In one of the more memorable moments of the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama explained why he rejected John McCain’s call to postpone their September debate in Oxford, Mississippi, during the negotiations on the first financial bailout package. “It’s going to be part of the president’s job,” Obama declared, “to be able to deal with more than one thing at once.””

“Something similar can be said about climate policy. A variety of proposals – for public investment, carbon pricing, regulatory standards – are cooking in Washington’s political stew. Sometimes the proponents of specific policies are tempted to oversell their merits, while dismissing other policies as unnecessary or even counterproductive. But if Congress and the Obama administration are going to get smart on climate change, part of their job is to deal with more than one policy at once…”

Read the full commentary on E3′s Real Climate Economics blog

There is no doubt about it: people are changing the Earth’s climate. The evidence for what scientists call “anthropogenic climate change” is overwhelming, notwithstanding the obfuscation efforts of the climate change denial industry kept on life-support with infusions of corporate money.

But to say that our emissions of greenhouse gases are causing climate change is not to say that every extra person automatically multiplies the problem. Nor does it imply that population control is the ultimate solution – a view espoused by some on the Malthusian fringe of the environmental movement.

The Washington-based NGO Population Action International claims that human population trends are “a major driving force of emissions growth.” Flashing the simple but misleading equation “More people = more emissions” on its website, the UK-based Optimum Population Trust sells “population offsets” by which individuals and organizations ostensibly can “offset their carbon footprint” by funding family planning programs.

On Valentine’s Day, the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity gave away ten thousand “endangered species condoms” sporting slogans like “Wrap with care, save a polar bear.”

Voluntary family planning is a good thing in its own right. But condoms won’t save the polar bear.

Blaming climate change simply on human numbers is itself founded on denial – denial of the real causes of the problem and denial of our potential to forge positive solutions. It spreads demoralization and paralysis at a time when we need hope and activism.

In recent decades population growth rates have plummeted across the globe. In the Global South, the average number of children per woman is now 2.7 and it is predicted to fall to 2.1, the replacement level, by mid-century. In the meantime, in the poorest countries with the highest birth rates, consumption levels are so low that they contribute little or nothing to greenhouse gas emissions. In the Global North, where below-replacement fertility is now the norm, demographers worry mainly about the rising ratio of elderly to young people.

For most of human history, people did not pour greenhouse gases into the air. Climate fluctuations from natural causes were slow, and so people could adapt to them. This changed in the nineteenth century when we commenced burning fossil fuels – coal, oil, and natural gas – on a large scale. For the past six generations or so, we relied for much of our energy on poisonous stuff excavated from beneath the Earth’s surface. It is this crude technology – not human numbers – that drives climate change.

Blaming climate change on “people,” rather than on specific things done by specific people in specific times and places, puts Malthusian environmentalists in an uncomfortable position. After all, they’re people too. The psychological solution is to project blame onto others, while drawing comfort from the thought that they are the enlightened exceptions to the rule. This conceit feeds the greening of hate, the scapegoating of foreigners and immigrants for our environmental ills.

The people-as-problem message also undermines public receptivity to environmental truths. Most people do not appreciate being told that they are a cancer on the face of the Earth. The fact that nearly half of American adults do not believe that humans are causing climate change cannot be attributed solely to corporate propaganda and deficient education. It also reflects their desire for a worldview that is not based on self-loathing.

Instead of buying into the “more people = more emissions” equation, we should put the blame for climate change squarely where it belongs: on fossil fuels and the vested interests that seek to perpetuate dependence on them.

We also ought to give credit where credit is due, recognizing the positive innovations in energy efficiency and renewable energy, including smart-grid technologies to facilitate locally distributed power generation and green-power superhighways to lower the costs of transmitting wind and solar power over long distances. The clean-energy future is being created by people, too.

“An upside-down faucet, just open and running out.” That’s how an oil-spill expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute describes the massive release of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico that began April 20^th at British Petroleum’s Deep Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. [See live video feed of the spill here.]

The disaster has opened an information faucet, too: every day, more truth about the real costs of fossil fuels is emptying into public view. Desperate efforts to control both spills are underway.

After its 450-ton blowout preventer failed, BP tried burning the oil slick, creating the macabre spectacle of the ocean on fire.

The company then tried using chemical dispersants to reduce the oil reaching the surface, a strategy that helped to create enormous underwater oil plumes – as much as 10 miles long, 3 miles wide and 300 feet thick – now floating toward the powerful loop current that could “slingshot the oil into the Atlantic Ocean around the Florida Keys” and threaten the eastern seaboard. The dispersants themselves are toxic, but their impacts on marine ecosystems are poorly understood because the chemical recipe is a proprietary secret.

In exploration plans filed with the government’s ethically-challenged Minerals Management Service in February 2009, BP claimed it was “unlikely that an accidental surface or subsurface oil spill would occur from the proposed activities,” and that if this happened, “due to the distance to shore (48 miles) and the response capabilities that would be implemented, no significant adverse impacts are expected.” So far, oil has washed onto 65 miles of Louisiana’s shoreline, penetrating more than 10 miles into the coastal marshes that account for 40% of the wetlands in the continental United States. Fishing has been banned in 19% of Gulf waters under U.S. jurisdiction – a devastating blow to local livelihoods.

Containing the truth spill is proving as difficult as plugging the gusher. In the wake of the spill, BP CEO Tony Hayward launched a public relations campaign to “win the hearts and minds” of the people. A predictable apologist on Fox News claimed that natural seepage puts more oil into the ocean than accidents, and Rush Limbaugh asserted that oil is “as natural as the ocean water.” The New York Times reminded its readers that “America needs the oil.” All bring to mind what the late John Kenneth Galbraith once called “the effort to make pollution seem palatable or worth the cost.”

But the truth is swamping these efforts. Each day brings new revelations about the magnitude of the disaster. Even Fox News reports that it “could be much worse than we knew.” Experts estimate the rupture at 40,000-100,000 barrels per day, far above BP’s claim of 5,000 barrels. “It is clear BP has been lying,” concludes Congressman Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment.

The bad news about fossil fuels is not limited to the Gulf. “All oil comes from someone’s backyard,” observes Lisa Margonelli in The New York Times, noting that “Nigeria has suffered spills equivalent to that of the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969.” Recent mine disasters in West Virginia, Russia and China underscore the real costs of coal. Mining of Canadian tar sands, now the most important source of U.S. oil imports, is chopping into the world’s largest boreal forest and creating sludge ponds “so toxic that the companies try to frighten birds away with scarecrows and propane cannons.”

In the best-case scenario – with no accidents and minimal environmental damage from extraction – burning fossil fuels “only” emits greenhouse gases that threaten future generations, together with co-pollutants that lead to roughly 20,000 premature deaths annually in the United States, according to a 2009 National Academy of Sciences study.

As the real costs of fossil fuels become more apparent, support grows for the clean energy transition. “The disaster in the Gulf only underscores that even as we pursue domestic production to reduce our reliance on imported oil,” President Obama said last Friday, “our long-term security depends on the development of alternative sources of fuel and new transportation technologies.”  If the Gulf disaster accelerates this transition, it will not have been entirely in vain.

Triple Crisis Blog invited readers’ questions in advance of the April 24-25 IMF/World Bank meetings in Washingon. See all of the questions and answers here. A reader asked:

Q: Do you think that carbon/pollution/energy taxes could be a mechanism that helps us reduce our use of fossil fuels, while bringing funds to the governments that need them to pay their climate debt?

Boyce: Pricing carbon – via taxes or permits – is crucial to reduce the use of fossil fuels. Taxes and auctioned permits are equivalent: the only difference is that taxes set the price and let the quantity of emissions vary, whereas permits set the quantity and let the price vary. Both yield revenues to governments.

But it is important to recognize where these revenues come from: carbon taxes or permit prices will be passed by firms to consumers. And because fuels generally are necessities rather than luxuries, carbon pricing will hit the poor harder than the rich as a percentage of their incomes. In other words, it’s a regressive tax.

From the standpoint of political sustainability as well as distributional fairness, it would be a mistake to rely mainly on carbon revenues to fund international transfers for climate change mitigation and adaptation. A cap-and-dividend policy (like the CLEAR Act proposed by U.S. Senators Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins) or the tax-and-dividend alternative (advocated by climate scientist James Hansen) would reverse the regressive impact of carbon pricing by returning most of the carbon revenue to the people as equal per-person dividends. Such a policy would affirm the principle of equal and common ownership of each country’s share of the atmospheric commons. Payments on the climate debt are another important element of policies to combat global warming. These transfers can and should be financed by progressive taxes, just like other government expenditures.

Without much fanfare, U.S. legislators last December unveiled a new climate bill that just might succeed in breaking the political gridlock that has blocked action on global climate change. The bill, co-sponsored by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Susan Collins (R-ME), is a sharp departure from the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House of Representatives last June but subsequently died in the Senate.

The Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act proposed by Cantwell and Collins is a “100-75-25-0″ policy:

• 100 percent of the permits to bring fossil carbon into the U.S. economy will be auctioned. Polluters won’t get any permit giveaways, and there will be no scope for speculation and market manipulation by Wall Street traders.
• 75 percent of the auction revenue is recycled directly to the public as equal per-person dividends. The majority of households will receive more in these monthly dividends than they pay in higher energy costs.
• 25 percent of the auction revenue is dedicated to investments in energy efficiency, clean energy, adaptation to climate change, and assistance for sectors hurt by the transition away from the fossil-fueled economy.
• Zero offsets are allowed. In other words, polluters can’t avoid curbing use of fossil fuels by paying someone else to clean up after them.

The bill’s political prospects are uncertain. The coal and electric utility lobbies will fight for the permit giveaways of the moribund House bill. Wall Street and the financial sector — with about 130 lobbyists working the climate policy issue in Washington — want a carbon market as a new outlet for their creative talents. But the cap-and-dividend alternative has emerged from the political shadows as the leading candidate to replace cap-and-giveaway-and-trade.

International Implications

The design of national policies to curb fossil carbon emissions in many ways is distinct from the architecture of an international accord. National policies deal with how to cut emissions and allocate distributional impacts within countries. International accords deal with how to allocate emission rights across countries and raise funds for North-South financial transfers (aka climate debt service) for mitigation and adaptation. But the two policy arenas are not entirely disconnected.

Passage of the new bill could improve the prospects for an international deal in three ways.

First and foremost, CLEAR would remove a key impediment to an international agreement: the refusal of the U.S. government — in particular, the Senate — to act on climate change. CLEAR would not only establish the architecture for U.S. implementation of any international agreement on emission reductions, but also give the U.S. public an incentive to support more ambitious targets. A tighter cap would mean bigger dividends and hence bigger benefits to most families. Finally, CLEAR could inspire others to consider this approach. Studies of other countries, such as China and Hungary, show that a cap-and-dividend policy would benefit the majority of their people, too.

The bill doesn’t address U.S. contributions to climate change mitigation and adaptation in other countries. Modest transfers could be financed from the bill’s investment fund. But such transfers would not meet either the need for assistance or the commitments required for an international accord. Ultimately, however, international transfers shouldn’t be financed from carbon permit revenue, which is a regressive tax in the absence of dividends, instead of general government revenue.

A Part of the Whole

CLEAR can be one element of a comprehensive U.S. climate policy. Like anything that keeps “oil in the soil” and “coal in the hole,” it will make fossil fuels more costly. The resulting price signals will drive firms and consumers to invest in energy efficiency and renewables. By recycling most of the carbon revenue back to households as dividends, CLEAR can head off a backlash against higher energy prices and win durable public support at a time of general economic difficulty.

Other elements of smart climate policy include public investment — notably in R&D, retrofitting buildings, mass transit, and a “smart grid” for electricity — and regulatory standards that work where price signals can’t reach.

If America clears the way for CLEAR, it will not be the last word. But it will be a big first step.

A version of this post appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus.

Michael Ash and I at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have released a new edition of the Toxic 100 Air Polluters, a ranking of the top corporate air polluters in the United States.

The Toxic 100 rankings are based on releases of hundreds of toxic chemicals from industrial facilities across the country. The rankings take into account not only the quantity of releases, but also the toxicity of chemicals, transport factors such as prevailing winds and height of smokestacks, and the number of people exposed.

For the first time, the Toxic 100 includes information on the disproportionate risk burden imposed on minorities and low-income communities – making it possible to compare corporations in terms of their environmental justice performance as well as overall pollution. The data reveal, for example, that minorities bear 65% of the air toxics risk from facilities owned by ExxonMobil Corporation – more than double their share in the nation’s population.

Read the full report here.

James Boyce

The United States Congress is expected to take up the Carbon Limits and Energy for America’s Renewal (CLEAR) Act in the coming months. The bill – a potential breakthrough in U.S. climate policy – was proposed in December by Senators Maria Cantwell of Washington and Susan Collins of Maine. In preparation for that debate,  Matthew E. Riddle and I have analyzed the household-level impacts of the bill’s cap-and-dividend climate policy and how these differ across the income spectrum and across the states.

A new report, Clear Economics, shares our findings that the CLEAR Act delivers positive net benefits to the majority of households  in every state: what these households will receive in dividends exceeds what they will pay as a result of higher fossil fuel prices.  We also suggest ways in which the interstate differences in impacts could be further reduced or eliminated altogether, and assess state-by-state job creation that will result from public investments in the clean energy transition.