Resource tax? Green new deal? Or new social contract?

The three-way accord between business, labour, and conservation, in the Joint Statement has little to say about de-commissioning big global warming players. In many ways it reads like growth all over again, and for this reason begs an in depth environmental audit. But it also falls short of a new social contract. The deal is a “job stimulus package” to build prosperity and insulate the Australian economy from future shocks. The social responsibility of miners, bankers, and shareholders, as citizens, is not addressed. (For related readings: ACTU, Green Gold Rush: The Future of Australia's Green Collar Economy (2008); and for a core Australian Green Party statement: Christine Milne, Re-Energising Australia (2007).)

For sure, the market needs to be insulated from shocks, but equally, the ecosystem and future generations need to be protected. Human health depends on a continuous metabolic exchange with clean air, land, and water. A focus on innovative production should be matched by a focus on social and ecological re-production. Thus, a green new deal mark II, might integrate the precautionary and regenerative labour expertise of women caregivers and of Indigenous land managers.

The current Joint Statement is fundamentally business as usual. Cultural differences are not acknowledged; social justice becomes an employment statistic; the worker is “social capital”; and the environment is translated as “energy efficiency”. The living web of nature that human bodies are a part of is externalised as an object “out there”, a measurable resource. In the tautological reasoning of economics, “energy efficiency” is said to have “value” because it will “reduce the $ cost of the CPRS ...”

Frankly, this green new deal looks more like a scrum than a social contract. Joint Statement recommendations are said to have “both technology push and market pull” - which means that the business sector is rewarded from both the turnover in green construction and possibly new profits from carbon trading as well. The decrease of carbon pollution and increase of “healthy green industries” is considered a “double dividend” of “natural and social capital”.

It is surprising to encounter the neoliberal doctrine of “domestic competitiveness” in a document authored by the ACF and ACTU, quote:

Australia's ambition should be to capture a quarter of a trillion dollars of industry share in what will be a global industry worth almost US$2.9 trillion dollars.

This is a clear commitment to export-led growth and free trade. But once international freight emissions are taken into account, how green will it be?

The priorities of the Australian deal are urban consumerism, manufacture, and exchange value. There is little attention to employment through natural forest and catchment restoration, despite the enhanced earth cooling that results from this kind of re-productive work. Agriculture is passed over, even though agro-industry has massive carbon emissions; and even though sustainable small-scale farm employment and clean, local, eco-sufficient provisioning are highly desirable.

In an early review of “the double crunch” paper, an Australian Greens researcher suggested that Australia needs a Green New Deal index. But measures used by ecological economists have many methodological shortcomings. The steady-state Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) or the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) are each based on the very ad hoc GDP construct. And beyond this, ecological feminists reveal the GDP, UNSNA, ISEW, HDI, and GPI to be systemically flawed by errors arising from lack of gender literacy (Marilyn Waring, “Policy and the Measure of Woman: UNSNA, ISEW, HDI, and GPI” in Ariel Salleh, Eco-Sufficiency & Global Justice 2009).

The global financial and ecological crises are often put down to “human greed”, but this diagnosis bypasses structural and cultural differences within societies and between societies in terms of international consumption patterns. Not everyone is mortgaging the earth. The key driver of both economic and ecological debt is the corporate sector - a very specific class, ethnic and gendered grouping - along with its “wanna be” mates in the global South.

Like the financial crisis, the environmental crisis is equally an effect of living on unsecured credit - an extraction from the thermodynamic cycles of nature faster than these can readjust. Moreover, if 60 per cent of global greenhouse gases are generated by industry, 20 per cent by transport, and a fair portion by agro-industrial enterprises, why target housewives about saving energy in the home? Yet this is what British Petroleum has been doing in Australia with its One Million Women public relations campaign. Given the Caribbean oil spill, BP might do better appointing these housewives and mothers to its Board.

Is it really possible to author a coherent green new deal in the absence of a new social contract? The short sighted pragmatism that dominates Australian politics contrasts with the vision of New South Wales Green Party MP Lee Rhiannon, who clearly has a new compact in mind when she writes (in an email exchange with me):