Ed Markey on resolutions and revolutions
Ed Markey stands out in a lot of ways. He has been one of the most steadfast allies of Sunrise, he was one of the authors of the Green New Deal resolution and sponsored it in the senate. But he’s not new to this fight. Like he points out in this conversation, he’s been calling for a transition to renewable energy - a “Solar Society” he used to say - since he first ran in 1976. And that’s not the only issue where he’s been ahead of the curve. He’s passed more than 500 laws, and they have reshaped the relationship between corporations and everyday people in industry after industry. It’s hard to read about him and not see him as some kind of wizard with knowledge of the future, who knows what has to be done before it’s obvious to anyone else. And we need his magic now more than ever, because while the politics of the past decades were largely about managing unprecedented growth, the climate crisis reminds us all that if we don't act now we are on the brink of unprecedented destruction. Beyond that, the people who were denied their share of the pie when times were good will be the most impacted when things turn bad. We have an opportunity right now, at this moment in history, to stop the climate crisis and remedy entrenched injustices. But to do that, we are going to need Ed.
Early voting for the primary has already started, so please do whatever you can to help send Ed Markey back to the senate.
Visit his website to get involved at www.edmarkey.com
The transcript below was edited for length and clarity. To hear the audio, check out the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or search for Sunrise Movement Boston on other podcast apps!
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Sunrise Boston
The first thing I want to get at is that when Sunrise came to you with a Green New Deal, you didn’t have to say yes. It was basically a group of kids asking you to work with them and put your name on this thing that involves transforming the entire economy. Most Senators probably would have told them to get lost. Why didn’t you?
Senator Markey
Well, I had been working on this issue for a long time and [climate change is] a threat to the entire planet. It’s a threat to all future generations here in our country, but across the whole planet. And the Sunrise Movement is the movement that we’ve been waiting for. It’s young people rising up and saying, it’s time to act. It’s urgent. The science is undeniable. It’s getting worse by the month. Each year is hotter than the year before. The Arctic is dangerously melting. In the Antarctic, storms are more intense. We have fires out in California right now, going on simultaneously, that have never been seen before. We have two hurricanes hitting the Gulf of Mexico at the same time. These are events that have never been seen before. And it is absolutely imperative that we act.
After Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected, she was talking about a Green New Deal. I called her up and asked if we could meet. We had lunch and we talked for two and a half hours, the two of us, drafting a Green New Deal resolution. It took us from the first week of December to the first week of February to draft it, to make it just perfect. We included intersectionality, frontline communities at the front of the line, and ensuring that communities of color were fully included and also protected.
We drafted a 14 page resolution, but the goal was to unleash a revolution. That’s what the Sunrise movement was. Within the next week, Trump gave his state of the union. Each Senator gets one guest they can put up in the gallery. So I invited Varshini Prakash to be my guest, to look down at Trump — this denier in chief, this anti-science, racist, criminally negligent man—so Varshini could be the witness for an entire generation. And then I would walking out of the gallery with her to make sure the world knew that I was partnering with Sunrise, because that is going to be the way in which we change how not only United States but the whole world views these issues.
Sunrise Boston
The points you made there completely resonate. It’s increasingly, palpably clear that we are running out of time. And also like you pointed out, when we’re acting to fix this environmental problem we have to do that in a way that will reduce systemic inequities instead of deepening them, because that’s the default if you don’t [deliberately] address them.
Senator Markey
Absolutely. And what has happened? Initially people were saying it’s Socialism. It’s one thing for Trump and Fox news to be saying it, but we had so many Democrats who were saying, ‘Oh my goodness, this goes too far, it’s pie in the sky.’ Well now Joe Biden is asking AOC and Varshini to help advise him on his climate policy! Now we have the next President saying we should have a 100% clean electric sector in our country by the year 2035! That wasn’t on the score board a year and a half ago.
What we’ve been able to do is move the whole discussion and make it very clear that the obstacles have always been political and not technological. Once we change the politics of the issue, the technologies are going to be ready to go. And by the way, young people will invent new technologies once the market is there and it will telescope the time frame which it takes in order to implement a 100% clean energy society. That’s why I’m so proud of what the green new deal has done.
I had the mayor of Milan, Italy come in to see me, and he wanted to talk about a Green New Deal for Milan. And if he did it, would I endorse what he was doing in Milan, Italy. So the Green New Deal isn’t just the United States. Now it’s the whole planet. And I give Sunrise all the credit for having the insight and the energy to change the whole political dynamic in our country.
Now we have the next President saying we should have a 100% clean electric sector in our country by the year 2035! That wasn’t on the score board a year and a half ago.
Sunrise Boston
It is so exciting that that really feels like it’s what’s happening. Like you said, the 2035 Build Back Better RPS target for the entire country is a game changer. And also like you pointed out, South Korea passed a Green New Deal, and they’re working on a European Green Deal. It really is something that feels like it’s catching on all over the planet, which it really needs to.
Senator Markey
The way I view it is that the Green New Deal has helped our country, our leaders, and the whole world to lift their gaze to the constellation of possibilities in these issues. The response is overwhelming. And by the way, when we win in November, there’s going to be a big IOU politically next January 20th to cash in, in terms of making sure that we can implement the most progressive policies in all sectors of the American economy.
Sunrise Boston
You touched on this a bit, but when your career started, climate change wasn’t a thing people talked about much. As the science became increasingly clear, you were one of the first politicians to act on it. Before the Green New Deal you co-authored the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill. Before that you worked on appliance efficiency and fuel economy standards, transforming our energy system in a bunch of different ways. How has public perception of climate change evolved in your view over the past few decades? And what made you pay attention early on when most of your colleagues didn’t seem to care?
The Green New Deal has helped our country, our leaders, and the whole world to lift their gaze to the constellation of possibilities
Senator Markey
Well, in 1980 — this is unbelievable, but 40 years ago — I partnered with a group called the Campaign for Safe Energy. They were the Sunrise Movement of their time. And what they did at the Democratic Convention in 1980 in New York City, was they gathered enough signatures to nominate me for Vice President of the United States. They got enough delegates who were willing to sign on to nominate me. And of course, the Carter administration was like, ‘what’s going on here?’ I was underage. I was not old enough to be vice president, I was like AOC. We were just gonna tip the system upside down. But what we negotiated was 10 minutes in prime time where I could lay out a future of clean energy. And in that address, I called for a 100% Solar Society, a clean energy society. That is what we had to commit ourselves to. And that is what we had to put on the ballot.
So I delivered that address to the Democratic National Convention in primetime in 1980, and we’ve made some progress since then but not as much as we should. [Now,] I think our time has arrived. Sometimes you can be right, but too soon. You need an extra injection of political reality. And that’s what Sunrise is doing all across the country. [Now,] all of these people are winning in state after state running on the revolution, on the Green New Deal. By the way, we had almost every one of the Democratic presidential candidates embrace the Green New Deal. Who had that on the score board a year ago?
And now vice president Biden is saying that the Green New Deal is the framework for fighting the climate crisis. And all of it is meant to have more ambition, more vision, higher goals that match the magnitude of the problem. My campaign literature when I ran for the first time in 1976 [even] calls for us to be a Solar Society. I was doing it right from the very beginning of my career, but the reinforcements are coming over the hill and they’re called the Sunrise Movement.
Sunrise Boston
This momentum that is finally being built is inspiring and palpable. Like you said a few minutes ago, the barriers were political rather than technological. And finally people are starting to listen to the thing you’ve been saying for 40 years.
Senator Markey
Absolutely. It’s all political. It didn’t get sunnier or windier in the last 10 years, but we’ve gone from 2,000 megawatts of solar to 80,000 megawatts of solar. We’ve gone from 2,000 all-electric vehicles to 1.5 million all-electric vehicles. We’re going from 25,000 megawatts of wind to 125,000 megawatts of wind. It did not get windier. It did not get sunnier, but at the state level, in many States, they changed their rules. We put new tax benefits and regulatory policies in place, especially in the first year of the Obama Administration and my law in 2007 to increase fuel economy standards. And all of a sudden technological breakthroughs started to be made because it was the law. All we have to do now is change the laws even more so that we increase this twofold, threefold, fivefold, tenfold, and just telescope the timeframe so that children have to look through the history books to find there ever was such a thing as fossil fuels.
Sunrise Boston
Looking forward, can you paint me a picture? What will Massachusetts look like in the upcoming years if we pass a Green New Deal, as opposed to if we don’t?
Senator Markey
Well, number one, the water off the coast of Massachusetts is the second fastest warming body of water in the world after the Arctic. We’re in the crosshairs and it’s impacting our fishing industry and our lobster industry. They need cold water, our fish and lobster. So they’re voting with their claws. They are moving northward to the cold water. So it’s already having an impact on us.
The most important Supreme Court decision on the environment is a Massachusetts vs. EPA, April 2007 decision in which Massachusetts sued the EPA saying that they were not regulating greenhouse gases, and that it was having a dramatic impact accelerating the erosion of our beaches. The Supreme court decided five to four in our favor, and then ordered the EPA to make an endangerment finding. And so actually Bush’s EPA made that decision and Dick Cheney would not allow [the finding] to be issued. Then that’s what Barack Obama used along with my 2007 law on fuel economy standards and the California Clean Air Act to increase fuel economy standards to 54.5 miles per gallon. We’ve come a long way since then, but Massachusetts was the state that sued because our beaches are under assault from Provincetown all the way up to plum Island in Newburyport. They’re under assault. We can see the erosion. We can see the impact that it is having.
[Editor’s note: The Boston Globe did a lot of reporting on the rapid erosion of the MA shore line, and danger to Cape Cod in particular, due to climate change in Summer 2019: On the edge of a warming world, 7 things we learned, and a story on The North Shore]
And at the same time, we already have 110,000 clean energy jobs. It’s already one of the top 10 employers in the state. We can save all of creation by engaging in massive job creation. Massachusetts should be the leader. We were the leader in the tech revolution. We now have hundreds of thousands of jobs in the tech sector because we were the leader. The same thing can happen in the clean energy sector. We can develop the technologies, save our own state, save the country, and the world simultaneously and Massachusetts can and should be the leader.
Sunrise Boston
Extending that and looking forward, I think a lot of us feel that there is a huge amount riding on this upcoming election. Why is this moment in history — fall 2020 — so important?
Senator Markey
If Trump gets reelected, it’s the equivalent of a death sentence for the planet. That will be eight years where we not only make no progress, but progress is rolled back, and an example is set for the rest of the world where they don’t have to do anything either. It’s going to cause irreparable damage to the planet for future generations, years upon years to come as all of these greenhouse gases get [released] into the atmosphere and load the dice for disaster. For the most vulnerable people, especially. The United States has to be a leader, not only the technological leader, but we should be the moral leader and political leader as well. So that’s why. Climate is on the ballot in November. That’s why people have to back Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We have to be out there, enthusiastically, for them.
The Paris climate agreement expires the first week of November, the same week that the American people are going to the ballot box to select a new president. We not only need the Paris agreement to continue, we need to strengthen it dramatically. It now has been eclipsed, in terms of what we’ve learned on science, just in the last four or five years. [Editor’s note: indeed it has.] So everything is on the ballot with regard to climate, everything.
Young people have to partner with older generations and get the vote out. I can see that happening in my race, the partnership of Sunrise with older generations of climate activists. It’s just so powerful and inspiring to me. They inspire me. They give me energy, just seeing them out there campaigning and doing the work. And if we have one thing to do in this era of American politics, it’s to make sure that Donald Trump is just a footnote in history.
Climate is on the ballot in November. That’s why people have to back Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. We have to be out there, enthusiastically, for them.
Sunrise Boston
You really do feel that, when you’re in the marches, when you’re in the crowds, you see people from every generation. [Editor’s note: that’s the pre-COVID climate marches.] And we all have the same message, which is to look at the data and do the things you need to secure a livable future.
Senator Markey
Right. But I see young people in unprecedentedly higher numbers. It’s amazing. It’s energizing. I think it gives everyone hope that action is on the way. It’s Sunrise, which is just such an aptly named movement.
It’s what I was talking about in 1980 at the Democratic Convention. I said we should go to 100% solar. I had earlier made reference to wind and other renewable energy resources, with solar just being the headline. Ultimately solar is going to be the least expensive and the most easily deployed and ubiquitous technology, once we actually make a breakthrough in storage battery technologies. And it’ll revolutionize the automotive sector simultaneously and just make it so inexpensive for people to plug in every night. Then we can export these technologies around the world because it will be American people who make those breakthroughs. That’s what happened with the telecom revolution. American young people made the breakthroughs and now 600 million Africans are walking around with smartphones in their pockets. That’s only from the 1990s to today. And won’t it be great when they are able to harness the sun to plug in their smartphones, not only in the United States, but all around the planet. And we get a chance to brand that all Made in America.
Sunrise Boston
Absolutely. I mean, solar already is the cheapest, right? The levelized cost of solar is way cheaper than anything else. [Editor’s note: globally, utility-scale PV bids are spectacularly low cost and changes to the energy mix in the US are increasingly dominated by new solar installations and the retirement of non-economic fossil fuel plants.] And if I had hours to talk to you, I would love to talk to you also about telecoms regulation. You’ve been involved in so many transformations over the past few decades. Thank you for fighting for this for the past 40 years, and continuing to fight for these changes. You are a huge inspiration for all of us, and we are looking forward to continuing to partner with you.
Senator Markey
Thank you. And I’ll just say this, I moved over 200 megahertz of spectrum for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh wireless companies in 1993. We prohibited the first two incumbent companies from bidding because it was a duopoly. It was analog, it was 50 cents a minute, and the phone was the size of a brick that people had to carry around. By 1996, only three years later with the five new companies in, boom! We moved to digital, had flip phones, and it was under 10 cents a minute. Now people were calling across the country from a phone in their pocket. And then only 10 years later, a smart guy invented the iPhone, a little computer with the same power as the Apollo mission in everyone’s pocket. So it happens very quickly once you get the incumbents out of the way.
That’s why I’ve been working so hard to get the incumbents out of the way in energy, because the same thing will happen. And this generation of young people will make those technological breakthroughs. This generation of political leaders will make sure that it gets implemented at the state and the federal level. And then we will see a total price collapse, the way we did with making long distance calls. Right now, you and I are talking and we don’t even know where we are. I’m here in Malden, but you could be in Palo Alto or you could be anywhere. [Editor’s note: for the record, I was in Boston] And we’re not even thinking about the price because we had a revolution. We need that same revolution in renewables, and the price will just become irrelevant because of the technology.
[Editor’s note: a subscription service for renewable energy, where you pay for infrastructure upkeep but not necessarily per amount of electricity used, may indeed be on the table if we build overcapacity of cheap solar and wind to deal with the intermittency of renewables. Negative wholesale prices are already a thing.]
So thank you to Sunrise for everything you’re doing. You’ve created a a movement, not a moment.
And that’s our interview with Ed Markey. I just want to reflect for a second on what he was saying there at the end. There are very few people in the world with a sweeping theory of social and economic change that they have validated by successfully applying it. Most politicians lucky enough to enjoy some success have their moment, tinker with some stuff, declare victory, and fade away into history. Ed isn’t that kind of politician. He’s been shepherding successive waves of technological and social change that have rippled across our country since he started in 1976. When he draws a parallel between telecoms regulation and fossil fuels, he isn’t some armchair historian waving his hands and cherry picking similarities. He’s saying, ‘I knew what to do then, and I know what to do now.’ And right now we live in a world that’s nowhere close to an even playing field. Governments spend literally trillions of dollars a year supporting fossil fuel companies. Markey wants to get those incumbents, the companies polluting our air and water and threatening our way of life, out of the way to make room for clean energy. He’s played this game before, and he’s our best chance to win it now.
