What "environmental" means

You know those coastal élites who think it's funny to be preoccupied with cow farts and the like? I guess they just think the 40% of all US land that's devoted to agriculture, as Purdy notes, producing 9% of our carbon emissions (in the very conservative EPA figures), is just flyover country. Seriously, those people love to talk about the "heartland" and their deep connection with the rural population, but they don't really believe it exists outside of their sentiments. Photo via University of Minnesota Extension. 

Another approach to the thing I wanted to say about the Green New Deal from Jedediah Purdy-Britton in the Times ("The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like") and its roping of everything from indigenous rights to combating monopolies into the same structure:

this everything-and-the-carbon-sink strategy is actually a feature of the approach, not a bug, and not only for reasons of ideological branding. In the 21st century, environmental policy is economic policy. Keeping the two separate isn’t a feat of intellectual discipline. It’s an anachronism.

Because all these factors are literally built in to the situation:

Our carbon emissions are not mainly about the price of gasoline or electricity. They’re about infrastructure. For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants, cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the species. Everything most of us do, we do through it: calling our parents, getting to work, moving for a job, taking the family on vacation, finding food for the evening or staying warm in a polar vortex. Just being human in this artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape.

So the proposals to retrofit buildings, retool transportation and build a clean-energy system are simply ways of tackling the problem where it starts. They are public-works projects because large capital projects — especially ones that, like highways, involve widespread public benefit — have always required public money. They are jobs programs, unless robots do the work, so the jobs might as well be good.

The deeper point is that any economic policy is a jobs policy. The oil and gas sector provides at least 1.4 million American jobs, more if you believe industry estimates, and depends on public subsidies and infrastructure. You might say that producing the disaster of global climate change has taken a lot of economic policy and produced a lot of jobs programs. Reversing direction will take the same.

And so on. It's kind of what "environmental" means, isn't it?