House Speaker Nancy Pelosi might have written it off as the “Green Dream,” but a little less than a year after six presidential hopefuls in the Senate co-sponsored Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s long-shot legislation, one city has decided to turn its own small-scale, local “Green New Deal” into a reality.
In 2018, voters in Portland, Oregon, passed a ballot measure allowing the city to finance the Portland Clean Energy Community Benefits Fund. This fund can now raise cash from a tax on large retailers, defined as corporations earning $1 billion in revenue nationally and half a million dollars locally. It is intended to create “green jobs and healthy homes” and to implement the city’s Climate Action Plan “in a manner that supports social, economic, and environmental benefits for all Portlanders, including the development of a diverse and well-trained workforce and contractor pool in the field of clean energy.”
What this means in practice is as vague as that description suggests. Portland is expecting to rake in $60 million annually through this tax, and it has just six months to begin allocating the funds.
Willamette Week, a local alt-weekly, reports that the city still hasn’t developed any metrics with which to judge whether it is a success. A nine-person committee is in charge of deciding where the funds go based on applications from qualified nonprofit organizations, but there are no strict guidelines governing what it does with this slush fund, and there’s no mechanism for holding the committee accountable.
As the Week notes, the initiative delineates that 40% to 60% of tax revenue ought to go to renewable energy and energy efficiency projects, but 5% — again, of a multimillion-dollar fund — is reserved for “future innovation.”
The initiative’s supporters don’t hide the fact that their aim is not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As occurs with most bombastic grabs for tax revenue, industries lobbied the city for exemptions. Ultimately, some construction and waste management firms curried favor with the city. But rather than complain about cronyism or even lost revenue to advance green energy, the bill’s most vocal proponents lamented the loss of cash handouts to “black, indigenous, and other communities of color.”
Conservatives feared that Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal is really just a socialist Trojan horse from the start — green on the exterior but red on the inside. Her since-ousted chief of staff confirmed as much after critics were denounced by the Left as climate denialists.
“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti, told the Washington Post. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”
What’s amazing, though, is that what supporters are billing as a “climate justice tax” is a very small endeavor compared with the Green New Deal. Whereas one would involve spending $60 million a year on various green projects, the Green New Deal would require tens of trillions of dollars in new spending. Among other things, the federal proposal advanced by Ocasio-Cortez calls for moving entirely to renewable energy, from the current 17%, within a decade; building “smart” power grids; upgrading every single building in the country to make them more energy-efficient; and overhauling transportation. Portland is also attempting its initiative in an overwhelmingly liberal city in which two-thirds of voters supported the referendum. The Green New Deal would have to impose its agenda on people a lot less sympathetic, including many who understand that it will cost them their livelihoods.
If Portland can’t even figure out what this fund is supposed to accomplish, how can the rest of the country, particularly states overwhelmingly opposed to such a plan, stomach the principles and practice of a much more ambitious and expensive national Green New Deal?
Federalism blesses us with the chance to test out public policies in jurisdictions where they enjoy the most popular support. There’s no question that Portland supports its newfangled fund, and good luck to the city’s inhabitants in their endeavors. But if they can’t make it work, there’s certainly no reason to think this is a good idea at the federal level.
