Saving 1.5C Requires the U.S. to Quickly and Fundamentally Rethink Work, Debt, and Fiscal Spending
While this week’s modest breakthrough in U.S. climate spending negotiations is a sign of hope, the reality of the situation demands that we push our government into taking action on climate change that meets the moment.
If we are to save our planet from becoming uninhabitable and prevent the current onslaught of climate-related disasters from getting worse in the short term, a lot more things have to go right — and right now. “To avert climate catastrophe,” the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said back in April, “main emitters must drastically cut emissions starting this year.”
Drastically. Starting this year. In 2022. Of which there are only 5 months left.
The United States, being one of these main emitters and the main emitter historically, needs to both heed the call to reduce emissions this year and readjust our goals to align with science. According to the Climate Action Tracker, in order to keep global average temperatures below the Paris Agreement’s 1.5˚C limit, the United States now needs to aim for national emissions reductions of at least 57–63% below 2005 levels. (This is well in excess of President Biden’s goal to cut emissions to 50–52% by 2030, or the 40% cut to emissions the U.S. would purportedly see if we passed this week’s Manchin-approved climate spending in the Inflation Reduction Act.)
So, what are we to do with the 5 months we have left? What are the low-hanging fruits that can be leveraged on a nationwide scale that can start actually reducing emissions now, as in this year? More importantly, what actions are practical enough, popular enough, and worth fighting for that can make emissions actually start to decline in 2022?
Here are four: retrofit buildings for energy efficiency, implement a climate job guarantee, reduce working hours, and eliminate household debt.
Retrofit Buildings for Energy Efficiency
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, buildings represent 40% of all U.S. primary energy use and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Roughly half of the energy used in buildings goes to heating and cooling — about 20% of all energy used in the U.S.
To help decarbonize and electrify the U.S. building sector, the White House recently invoked the Defense Production Act (DPA) to ramp up the national production of clean energy technologies. These include heat pumps — which are electric-powered heating and cooling systems that are more efficient than those that burn fossil fuels — for domestic heating and cooling use, and as exports to help Europe end its reliance on Russian fuel. As part of the plan, the Biden-Harris administration is also working on expanding rooftop and community solar panel production and building insulation, providing a means to further decarbonize and reduce total building sector energy consumption.
Scaling the production and deployment of these technologies will bring jobs and energy cost savings to working families. However, if we are to ensure that we reduce energy use in buildings in the time required (ASAP), we need to make sure that all American families and businesses can afford these installations in the first place.
The U.S. government should look to Italy for inspiration on this front. The Italian government is offering its citizens a Superbonus tax credit of up to 110% of the cost of insulating and upgrading their homes with renewable energy technology. (The extra 10% figure is designed to cover interest on loans taken out to pay for the cost of upgrades.) Property owners receive repayment in the form of annual tax deductions over 5 years. Effectively, this means the government pays for the renewable energy upgrades to your commercial or residential building over time (capped at a reasonable threshold based on building size and overall energy usage).
In 2022, the U.S. government should implement a Superbonus tax credit, improving upon Italy’s model and adapting it so that anyone, regardless of their wealth or income, is incentivized to insulate their property and ditch fossil-fuel-powered heating systems to replace them with less-expensive, less energy-intensive, electrified, cleaner, renewable energy technology. Renters could also petition their landlords to make the switch knowing they could save money on their energy bills.
Decarbonizing the building sector needs to start immediately. Reducing its emissions will be a years-long process, but a Superbonus tax credit will yield the quickest returns. In the first eight months of its implementation, Italy’s government claims they reduced CO2 emissions from home heating by as much as they did in the last 20 years.
This is the kind of speed we need, but how do we ensure that we have a workforce ready to meet the demand of clean energy technology installation? This brings us to the climate job guarantee and work time reduction.
Implement a Climate Job Guarantee
A federal job guarantee program in the U.S. would establish a right to a job for anyone who wants one, set at a living wage, to work on useful projects and national priorities, such as building and installing clean energy technologies for the building sector. The New Deal era’s Civil Works Administration (CWA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and Work Projects Administration (WPA) programs of the 1930s and 40s, originally designed to reduce unemployment and poverty, offer a blueprint for this idea. Today, a job guarantee polls very well among both Democrats and Republicans. It solves several problems at once: it eliminates unemployment and poverty, it raises wages to living-wage standards (private employers would be under pressure to follow suit or risk losing staff), and it allows us to rapidly staff up and train a workforce that can meet the demand for electrifying and better insulating the building sector. Jobs in the federal job guarantee program would offer a shorter work week, too, forcing private employers to offer similar policies, and effectively reducing work hours nationally. Here’s why that is critical to driving down emissions:
Four-day work weeks automatically eliminate a day of commuting and since over 3 in 4 Americans commute to work by car, a significant reduction in vehicle emissions would be seen and felt immediately.
Reduce Working Hours
Countries like the U.S. with longer average working hours consume more resources and emit more carbon. As Boston College economist Juliet Schor explained in her recent TED Talk, reduced work time is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Four-day work weeks automatically eliminate a day of commuting and since over 3 in 4 Americans still commute to work by car, a significant reduction in vehicle emissions would be seen and felt immediately. The extra day off represents nearly a 20% drop in emissions, a figure that repeatedly appears in other national studies on four-day work weeks. Besides emissions, additional research has shown that reducing American working hours to European levels would also reduce total energy consumption in the U.S. by 20%. Ultimately, enabling Americans to spend less time working will allow us to cultivate less resource-intensive lifestyles and more time enjoying life — something we all deserve after enduring this pandemic, decades of wage stagnation and rising inequality.
As much as 92% of U.S. workers support a four-day work week schedule.
The movement to reduce working hours, through 32-hour and four-day work weeks with no loss in pay (also known as the 100–80–100 model, where workers receive 100% of their pay for 80% of the time and maintain 100% productivity), is becoming increasingly popular. As much as 92% of U.S. workers support a four-day work week schedule. A four-day work week pilot among dozens of U.S. companies and an effort to pass federal legislation for a 32-hour work week are both currently underway in the U.S. While the benefits for employees are obvious, such as reduced burnout and stress and more time for family, friends, or pursuing personal interests, employers who implement shorter working hours also benefit from improved staff retention, well-being, creativity, engagement, and in many cases higher productivity. Plus, reducing the hours worked per worker can further reduce (and potentially help eliminate) nationwide unemployment by distributing work hours amongst more people. While implementing policies to reduce working hours will look different depending on the kind of business model, the benefits to workers and businesses are seemingly endless.
One of the reasons many of us work so many hours in the first place is because we have so much debt. For example, evidence shows that people with higher mortgage payments are forced to work longer hours than they would otherwise. Any kind of household debt requires us to earn more than we would otherwise need to live a comfortable life, which is why, for the sake of our collective future, it is time to cancel as much of it as possible.
Eliminate Household Debt
Student loan debt has already been canceled for hundreds of thousands of borrowers defrauded by for-profit colleges. Hundreds of billions of dollars in PPP loans were also created, lent to private businesses, and then forgiven during the pandemic. So, federal debt cancellation is not unprecedented. We just need to do much more of it. Our central banking system allows for this kind of debt cancellation without having to raise taxes on everyday people or make cuts to spending on essential services. The ease with which our government can pass trillions of dollars in spending on tax cuts for the wealthy, quantitative easing measures to save failing financial institutions, PPP loan forgiveness programs for private businesses, and bloated military budgets without sounding a peep of alarm about the federal budget deficit tells you all you need to know about how much that deficit actually matters.
Household debt cancellation—including medical debt and student loan debt—will improve the cost of living for tens of millions of Americans who can then access more ecologically beneficial (and, ideally, low interest) financing for upgrading their homes for energy efficiency and electrification. Canceling debts incurred from privatized and commodified public services such as medical care and education must be followed by the de-commodification of those services so that this problem does not repeat itself. If the U.S. were to provide free access to healthcare and higher education like other developed countries so that people didn’t have to go into debt in the first place, the collective pressure to work longer hours and thus emit more carbon would decrease as well.
While reducing emissions quickly is the primary objective, reducing household energy expenses, ending unemployment, cultivating a national culture of work-life balance, and relieving people from rent-seeking industries and unjust debts are all urgent goals in these times, too. All of these initiatives are policy shifts the government has the ability to deploy, starting this year (without spending unknown sums of time and money on unproven carbon capture and storage technologies). That’s why it is imperative that we push now, harder than ever—harder than in 2018 when the Sunrise Movement erupted onto the scene—for bold, fundamentally system-changing climate action. This week’s protest by Congressional staffers that probably influenced Manchin’s pivot on climate action needs to be just one of many uprisings this year.
We are literally fighting for our lives, so we must do everything within our collective power and imagination to prevent the complete near-term collapse of our planet’s life-supporting systems. We must truly begin to demand nothing less than a paradigm shift in which our entire economic system is organized around meeting human needs and planetary stability first (rather than mere profit and GDP growth targets). Even if any of the ideas mentioned above were enacted at a partial scale, contributing to an emissions drop of just a few percentage points in 2022, the effect would be hugely impactful by demonstrating to American voters and to the rest of the world that these ideas work and are worth pursuing to the fullest extent.
