Vi behöver grön Keynesianism!

Stockholms Öppna TV-kanal har börjat sända Democracy Now! på mornarna så äntligen finns det ett vettigt morgonprogram att titta på för människor, av människor. Idag intervjuades bl a författaren Van Jones om sin nya bok "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems". Trots en sådan pretentiös titel hade han en del intressant att säga. Se inslaget på Democracy Now!. Han menar att vi behöver en grön Keynesianism, en regering som satsar på grön omställning, ombyggnad av samhället genom ökade statliga utgifter.

We’ll call it the rise of the green Keynesians, the idea that the government is going to have to play a role in the economy, we’re going to have even more deficit spending to kind of stimulate the economy, to move us through.

And when you look at, you know, what should you spend that money on, last time we had a stimulus, we gave out a bunch of checks to people who ran out to Wal-Mart and bought flat-screen TVs, so we stimulated the economy—it was just the Chinese economy, not this one. The smart way to do a stimulus is to invest in infrastructure. And the smart infrastructure that we need right now is infrastructure that gets the price of energy down, that gets us more energy independent. All roads point toward a major investment in clean energy, probably funded in part by deficit spending on the part of the government.

But let’s be clear. The real solution to this whole thing is to put a price on carbon. The biggest economic stimulus I can imagine would be a carbon tax or a cap and trade, cap and dividend, cap and cash back, some sort of cap on carbon, so that suddenly there is a market signal for private capital to start moving aggressively in a clean energy, low carbon direction.

Once you do that, you unleash innovation, you unleash technology, you unleash entrepreneurship. Much more importantly, solar panels don’t put themselves up. Wind turbines don’t manufacture themselves. Everything that is good for the earth, that’s good for clean energy, gives a job and an economic opportunity. What we’ve got to do is capture that for people here who are going to be out of work, who are struggling, and use that as a springboard. You can’t build the economy on credit cards. You can build an economy based on clean energy, based on solar panels, based on wind, based on geothermal, smarter, non-food-based biofuels. There are literally—there’s literally, I think, a $100 billion play out there in clean energy for the United States, but not a whole lot of $100 billion plays in the economy right now. This is one of them.

Att sänka skatterna för att ge enskilda möjligheten att köpa skitprodukter som håller i max 3 år kommer på sikt leda till vår undergång. Vi måste gemensamt fatta rationella samhällsbeslut och satsa på det som kommer gynna alla både människor, djur och växtliv.

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om Keynesianism, miljö, Democracy Now