Speaking with Drs. Chomsky and Pollin

Here’s a fabulous set of interviews of Noam Chomsky and economist Dr. Robert (Bob) Pollin at UMass Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), on the Green New Deal.  Long-time readers will remember that Bob was good enough to let me use an interview I conducted with him as a chapter in my second book, Is Renewable Really Doable? back in 2011.  If you want to see a resume that’s as long as your arm, you may want to check this out.

For decades, he and his associates have been analyzing, with ever-increasing rigor, the effect of renewable energy on the economy, in particular, the employment rate.  There is a long-running and aggressively disseminated myth that clean energy is a job-killer, and that environmental regulations in general serve to damage the economy; PERI’s work has gone a long way to dispelling this misconception, and to prove that the precise opposite is the case.

Unlike the New Deal that was launched in the United States during the 1930s to end The Great Depression, the Green New Deal is, out of necessity, international in scope.  The U.S. accounts for only about 15% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.  China represents another 22%, leaving 63% from the rest of the world.

As one would suspect, the interviews are loaded with an extremely wide-ranging set of compelling ideas, like the Green New Deal’s impact on human productivity and thus affluence.  What happens when rural spots in Africa and India are electrified and women no longer have to spend many hours each day gathering wood for cooking and heating?

Fabulous stuff.