The Green New Deal in the news
The global economy is facing a ‘triple crunch’. It is a combination of a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and the looming peak in oil production. These three overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm, the like of which has not been seen since the Great Depression. To help prevent this from happening, and to lay the foundations of the economic systems of the future, we need a Green New Deal.
This letter was published in The Guardian on 10 August 2018:
Kim and Nick Hoare’s heartfelt call for a cross-party action programme for tackling climate change is crucial (Letters, 9 August).
Yet there is a way that the UK could contribute to substantially reducing its domestic carbon emissions while addressing the other serious threat of rapid and ubiquitous automation [...]
This letter was published in the Guardian on 4 May 2018:
John Harris is right to say the left has articulated no comprehensive answer to the existing and future threats posed to employment by automation. Key to this must be prioritising labour-intensive sectors that are difficult to automate, such as health, education and elderly care. Equally [...]
The Green New Deal group came together in 2007 because its members were all convinced that a huge economic downturn was imminent and that one answer to it would be a Green New Deal to fund green infrastructure that could help tackle climate change and generate, jobs and business and savings opportunities in every constituency.
Ten [...]
Reposted from Tax Research UK and written by Green New Deal member Richard Murphy:
The Guardian has something decidedly right in its editorial today, saying:
When running for the Labour leadership, Jeremy Corbyn wanted a “people’s quantitative easing” to boost the economy. It was frostily dismissed in 2015 as being forbidden by provisions in the Lisbon treaty. If we leave [...]
This letter was in The Guardian on 26 November 2017:
Your editorial on productivity and robots repeated the cliche that automation does cost jobs, but more are created. The problem with this is that the new jobs are frequently in different places from where they are lost and require very different skills, hence exacerbating the problems [...]
This letter was in the New Statesman (which is nicknamed the Staggers):
This was the lead Guardian letter on 27 September 2017:
In your editorial (26 September) on John McDonnell’s proposal that PFI contracts be bought back by a future Labour government you suggest that any such action might be constrained by the need to persuade the financial markets to continue to lend the government money. This was an [...]
Colin Hines and Richard Murphy had this letter in the Guardian on 5 September:
Zoe Williams is right: another credit crunch-induced “crash” is likely and the only affordable rescue package will be some form of quantitative easing (With Britain’s addition to debt, another crash is certain, 4 September). This time it must generate jobs for [...]
All ideas ideas have their moments. Some of them are pivotal. The trouble is knowing when those pivotal tipping points arrive.
Post Hurricane Harvey in the USA the Green New Deal is having one of its moments. The New York Times ran an articlelast week by Rebecca Elliott that specifically referred to the idea, saying:
Certainly, the hurricane’s victims [...]
This letter was written by Colin Hines and was published in the Guardian on 12 June 2017:
Sorry Brenda from Bristol, but another election looms, and this time a progressive alliance of Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, Plaid and the Greens need to get their policy ducks in a row to win it. Firstly, these must [...]