Opinion
Why Texas Republicans Fear the Green New Deal
Small government is no match for a crisis born of the
state’s twin addictions to market fixes and fossil fuels.
By Naomi
Klein
Ms. Klein
is a senior correspondent at The Intercept and the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair
at Rutgers University. Her new book is “How to Change Everything: The Young
Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.”
Feb. 21,
2021
Since the
power went out in Texas, the state’s most prominent Republicans have tried to
pin the blame for the crisis on, of all things, a sweeping progressive
mobilization to fight poverty, inequality and climate change. “This shows how
the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal,” Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said
Wednesday on Fox News. Pointing to snow-covered solar panels, Rick Perry, a
former governor who was later an energy secretary for the Trump administration,
declared in a tweet “that if we humans want to keep surviving frigid winters,
we are going to have to keep burning natural gas — and lots of it — for decades
to come.”
The claims
are outlandish. The Green New Deal is, among other things, a plan to tightly
regulate and upgrade the energy system so the United States gets 100 percent of
its electricity from renewables in a decade. Texas, of course, still gets the
majority of its energy from gas and coal; much of that industry’s poorly
insulated infrastructure froze up last week when it collided with wild weather
that prompted a huge surge in demand. (Despite the claims of many
conservatives, renewable energy was not to blame.) It was the very sort of
freakish weather system now increasingly common, thanks to the unearthing and
burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas. While the link between global
warming and rare cold fronts like the one that just slammed Texas remains an
area of active research, Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech
University, says the increasing frequency of such events should be “a wake up
call.”
But weather
alone did not cause this crisis. Texans are living through the collapse of a
40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in
the way of effective climate action. Fortunately, there’s a way out — and
that’s precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear.
An
Energy-Market Free-for-All
A fateful
series of decisions were made in the late-’90s, when the now-defunct,
scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically
deregulate Texas’s electricity sector. As a result, decisions about the
generation and distribution of power were stripped from regulators and, in
effect, handed over to private energy companies. Unsurprisingly, these
companies prioritized short-term profit over costly investments to maintain the
grid and build in redundancies for extreme weather.
Today,
Texans are at the mercy of regulation-allergic politicians who failed to
require that energy companies plan for shocks or weatherize their
infrastructure (renewables and fossil fuel alike). In a recent appearance on
NBC’s “Today” show, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, summed it up: “We have a
deregulated power system in the state and it does not work, because it does not
build in the incentives in order to protect people.”
This
energy-market free-for-all means that as the snow finally melts, many Texans
are discovering that they owe their private electricity providers thousands of
dollars — a consequence of leaving pricing to the whims of the market. The
$200,000 energy bills some people received, the photos of which went viral
online, were, it seems, a mistake. But some bills approaching $10,000 are the
result of simple supply and demand in a radically underregulated market. “The
last thing an awful lot of people need right now is a higher electric bill,”
said Matt Schulz, chief industry analyst with LendingTree. “And that’s
unfortunately something a lot of people will get stuck with.” This is bad news
for those customers, but great news for shale gas companies like Comstock
Resources Inc. On an earnings call last Wednesday, its chief financial officer
said, “This week is like hitting the jackpot with some of these incredible
prices.”
Put
bluntly, Texas is about as far from having a Green New Deal as any place on
earth. So why have Republicans seized it as their scapegoat of choice?
A Shock to
the System
Blame
right-wing panic. For decades, the Republicans have met every disaster with a
credo I have described as “the shock doctrine.” When disaster strikes, people
are frightened and dislocated. They focus on handling the emergencies of daily
life, like boiling snow for drinking water. They have less time to engage in
politics and a reduced capacity to protect their rights. They often regress,
deferring to strong and decisive leaders — think of New York’s ill-fated love
affairs with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani after the 9/11 attacks and Gov. Andrew
Cuomo in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Large-scale
shocks — natural disasters, economic collapse, terrorist attacks — become ideal
moments to smuggle in unpopular free-market policies that tend to enrich elites
at everyone else’s expense. Crucially, the shock doctrine is not about solving
underlying drivers of crises: It’s about exploiting those crises to ram through
your wish list even if it exacerbates the crisis.
To explain
this phenomenon, I often quote a guru of the free market revolution, the late
economist Milton Friedman. In 1982, he wrote about what he saw as the mission
of right-wing economists like him: “Only a crisis — actual or perceived —
produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken
depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic
function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and
available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
Republicans
have effectively deployed this tactic even after crises like the 2008 market
collapse, created by financial deregulation and made deadlier by decades of
austerity. Democrats have, largely, been willing partners. This seems
counterintuitive, but it all comes back to Friedman’s credo: The change doesn’t
depend on the reasons for the crisis, only on who has the ideas “lying around”
— a kind of intellectual disaster preparedness. And for a long time, it was
only the right, bolstered by a network of free-market think tanks linked to
both major parties, that had its ideas at the ready.
When
Hurricane Katrina broke through New Orleans’s long-neglected levees in 2005,
there was, briefly, some hope that the catastrophe might serve as a kind of
wake-up call. Witnessing the abandonment of thousands of residents on their
rooftops and in the Superdome, small-government fetishists suddenly lost their
religion. “When a city is sinking into the sea and rioting runs rampant,
government probably should saddle-up,” Jonah Goldberg, a prominent right-wing
commentator, wrote at the time. In environmental circles, there was also
discussion that the disaster could spur climate action. Some dared to predict
that the collapsed levees would be for the small-government, free-market legacy
of Reaganism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for Soviet Communism.
None of it
happened. Instead, New Orleans became a laboratory for the shock doctrine.
Public schools were shut down en masse, replaced by charter schools. Public
housing was demolished, and costly townhouses sprang up, preventing thousands
of the city’s poorest residents, the majority of them Black, from ever
returning. The reconstruction of the city became a feeding ground for private
contractors. Republicans used the cover of crisis to call for expanded oil and
gas exploration and new refinery capacity, much as Mr. Perry is doing right now
in Texas with his calls for doubling down on gas.
Many tried
to stop them. Teachers’ unions, despite having their members scattered
throughout the country, did their best to fight the privatizations. Residents
of public housing and their supporters faced tear gas to try to stop the
demolition of their homes. But there were no readily available, alternate ideas
lying around for how New Orleans could be rebuilt to make it both greener and
fairer for all of its residents.
Even if
there had been, there was no political muscle to turn such ideas into reality.
Though the environmental justice movement has deep roots in Louisiana’s “cancer
alley,” the climate justice movement was only just emerging at the time Katrina
struck. There was no Sunrise Movement, the youth-led organization that occupied
Nancy Pelosi’s office after the 2018 midterms to demand “good jobs, and a
livable planet.” There was no “squad,” the ad hoc alliance of congressional
progressives whose most visible member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sent shock
waves through Washington by joining the Sunrisers in their occupation. There
had not yet been two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns to show Americans
how popular these ideas really are. And there was certainly no national
movement for a Green New Deal.
Lying in
Ruin
The
difference between then and now goes a very long way toward explaining why Mr.
Abbott is railing against a policy plan that, as of now, exists primarily on
paper. In a crisis, ideas matter — he knows this. He also knows that the Green
New Deal, which promises to create millions of union jobs building out
shock-resilient green energy infrastructure, transit and affordable housing, is
extremely appealing. This is especially true now, as so many Texans suffer
under the overlapping crises of unemployment, houselessness, racial injustice,
crumbling public services and extreme weather.
All that
Texas’s Republicans have to offer, in contrast, is continued oil and gas
dependence — driving more climate disruption — alongside more privatizations
and cuts to public services to pay for their state’s mess, which we can expect
them to push in the weeks and months ahead.
Will it
work? Unlike when the Republican Party began deploying the shock doctrine, its
free-market playbook is no longer novel. It has been tried and repeatedly
tested: by the pandemic, by spiraling hunger and joblessness, by extreme
weather. And it is failing all of those tests — so much so that even the most
ardent cheerleaders of deregulation now point to Texas’s energy grid as a
cautionary tale. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, for instance,
called the deregulation of Texas’s energy system “a fundamental flaw.”
In short,
Republican ideas are no longer lying around — they are lying in ruin. Small
government is simply no match for this era of big, interlocking problems.
Moreover, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s former prime
minister, declared that “there is no alternative” to leaving our fates to the
market, progressives are ready with a host of problem-solving plans. The big
question is whether the Democrats who hold power in Washington will have the
courage to implement them.
The horrors
currently unfolding in Texas expose both the reality of the climate crisis and
the extreme vulnerability of fossil fuel infrastructure in the face of that
crisis. So of course the Green New Deal finds itself under fierce attack.
Because for the first time in a long time, Republicans face the very thing that
they claim to revere but never actually wanted: competition — in the battle of
ideas.
Naomi Klein
(@NaomiAKlein) is a senior correspondent at The Intercept and the Gloria
Steinem Endowed Chair at Rutgers University. Her new book is “How to Change
Everything: The Young Human’s Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.”
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