Complete Interview: The Temperature Transcends Race
(Page 5 of 7)
Mar-.Apr. 2008
interview by Hannah Lobel
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Is that realistic, economically and politically?
Absolutely. When you do focus groups and polls around global warming, energy independence, and economic development, the support for government investment into new technologies and infrastructure is far higher than public support for raising the cost of energy, which is effectively what a regulation-centered approach to global warming would do.
A paradigm shift needs to happen to move traditional progressive and Democratic politics away from a politics of limits and toward a politics of possibility. It’s hard because a lot of the people who are in charge of global warming policy today, from big environmental groups to members of Congress, came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when a politics of limits worked pretty well dealing with past environmental problems like smog in Los Angeles and river and lake pollution.
Faced with a problem like global warming—which is centrally connected to economic growth, since energy is the lifeblood of the economy—those folks need to have a fundamentally different way of seeing the world. It’s not obvious to us that the baby boomers are going to be able to make that change or whether the change is actually going to have to be made by people who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s and have a far greater appreciation of complexity, globalization, and the challenges that the new energy economy is going to pose.
It’s going to cost so much money. How do you convince progressives to get over their fears of being tagged “tax and spend” liberals?
Well, the funny thing is that fear is strongest among baby boomers. When we went to Power Shift, which was the youth climate conference, we just didn’t find a lot of progressive young people all that worried about being called “tax and spend.”
One of the truly great contributions that President Clinton made, but also President George W. Bush, is that it’s pretty darn clear now to the American people that, in terms of fiscal stewardship, Democrats do better than Republicans. That said, there are going to be people who are going to accuse advocates of major government investment like us of being tax and spend liberals. We welcome that fight. It’s basically a fight over how we want to invest our shared assets. And that’s exactly the kind of existential question that we want to put at the center of our politics. We want to see an investment in the future, an investment in clean energy, not more investments in stupid wars in the Middle East or in our addiction to oil.
You have a lot of critics. How have people responded to your critique of environmental justice in Break Through?
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