U.S. Air Force photo by Rebecca Amber
By investing in the capacity to manufacturing the infrastructure of a greener America, we can create jobs and combat climate change.
By requiring that all goods produced for a new, green infrastructure be made in the United States, the proposed Green New Deal can set our economy on a course of widely shared, long-term, and sustainable economic growth. But its success, or failure, may rest on how much it focuses on manufacturing.
Manufacturing is critical to producing wealth, not just a stage in the evolution of human society. Germany’s manufacturing sector, for example, is twice the size of that in the United States. Both Germany and Japan (which also has a comparatively large manufacturing sector), have concentrated on producing the machinery used to produce manufactured goods.
Together, manufacturing and infrastructure create a “virtuous circle” of economic growth, with the development of one reinforcing the development of the other. Long-term infrastructure outlays provide a stable market for domestic manufacturing firms, reduces investment risk, and gives firms the opportunity to develop new technologies. By researching and developing the Internet, for example, the government provided a foundation for the production of trillions of dollars of equipment, goods, and services.
We estimate some 20 million new jobs could be created by an assortment of infrastructure building programs to create projects like an Interstate Renewable Electricity System and an Interstate High-Speed Rail System. Our manufacturing sector could rise from employing 9 percent of our workforce to 20 percent, the level in Germany. And the benefits would be shared among Rust Belt white, African-American and Latino communities, all devastated by deindustrialization.
Manufacturing and infrastructure create a “virtuous circle” of economic growth.
Just as the space program stimulated new methods of production, the Green New Deal would do the same. And just as the defense department financed the purchase of new productive machinery both during and after WWII, the same mechanisms could be employed to create the market for the new green productive systems that would be needed to create a more environmentally sound manufacturing sector.
If a much poorer and depressed United States could spend 2.2 percent of its GDP on the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, we can manage a similar percentage (and more) today. That’s $600 billion that could be used for reinventing and rebuilding a sustainable set of infrastructure systems, and the machinery to be able to manufacture that infrastructure here at home.
Geographically and socially targeted investments are nothing new, as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hoover Dam, and other grand projects of the original New Deal attest. As we proceed to invest in new methods of production we will have the opportunity to reinvest in places and in groups of people that have suffered the most from deindustrialization, and to insure a “just transition” of fossil fuel and other workers into rewarding green jobs.
Financing the research and development, skill building, and actual physical production needed for a Green New Deal is a challenge, but we should ignore the carping of deficit hawks who call it impossible. Look at the transcontinental railroad, or the space program—both projects generated tremendous wealth far outweighing the costs of investment, and generated new technologies, new productive capacity, and new sources of knowledge. Looked at this way, investing in the Green New Deal is investing in our own evolution as a productive and just society.
Mandatory requirements for “locally-produced” content should include the creation of the industrial machinery itself.
Mandatory requirements for “locally-produced” content should be applied, including eventually the creation of the industrial machinery itself. All of these factories that produce goods at home can be required to be unionized, and some to become employee owned and operated after a few years.
Heavy investment by the federal government in green manufacturing will catalyze a long period of widely shared economic growth. A Green New Deal presents us with the opportunity to not only lay down an economic foundation for a society not threatened by the catastrophe of unattended global climate change, but also the ability to heal from deep wounds of social and economic inequity.