In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world are turning to ‘Green New Deals’ as a win-win solution to both economic crisis and climate catastrophe. Nowhere is this more apparent than the all-encompassing European Green Deal (EGD), launched by the European Commission to bring the continent’s carbon emissions down to net zero by 2050.
One might assume that the environmental movement would be happy with this policy initiative, but since the EGD’s launch it has been met with fierce criticism. The ecosocialist Daniel Tanuro has argued that US President Roosevelt’s original New Deal, upon which Green Deals are conceptually modelled, was ultimately aimed at maintaining social order during the Great Depression and thereby upholding the capitalist status quo. In the same way, many are challenging the new wave of Green New Deals for not questioning the fundamental structures of our existing economic model.
How green is ‘green’?
The psychologist Abraham Maslow once said that “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. The European Green Deal embodies this maxim. The hammer is the market and the nails include growth, debt and financialisation.
