[Part 4 of the Beyond the Underpants Gnomes series, a response to Bill McKibben]
Maybe banging heads with corporations around the globe is more than you’re up for. No problem. There’s still a much better board to play on than DC or Copenhagen — the state/local board. I don’t know a lot about global municipal politics, so for this post I’m going to focus on U.S. state and local governments.
Because national newspapers and most large progressive groups are obsessed with DC, it’s easy to forget how much power local government has. The Progressive State Network estimates that states have control over $2 trillion a year — “almost three times the dollar amount of non-social security domestic programs administered at the federal level.” Through laws and liability rules, states regulate “trillions of dollars of commerce.” And through public pension funds, states have control of over $2.7 trillion of financial assets.
Local government can have a pretty impressive impact on global warming. Depending on the estimates, between two thirds and 70% of greenhouse gas emissions come from cities. And although most state and local governments are in financial trouble right now, there are plenty of things we could do to push for reducing global warming that don’t require states to spend lots of money. As ICLEI notes, for example, they set a lot of the rules of the game that affect emissions in the economy:
Local government planning and decision making is particularly important in the energy, transport, industry, water and land use sectors — where emissions grew the most from 1970 to 2004.
And unlike DC, you don’t need a super-super majority to get things done. That’s why there is a hell of a lot more interesting green work going on at the states than in DC; more on that in the next post.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t play at all in DC. But I think our emphasis ought to be in pushing money and opportunities down to the states, such as The Urban Land Institute’s “3 B’s” strategy for Federal transportation dollars I blogged in November. Ditto for federal Green jobs stimulus — instead of focusing everything on changing a handful of senators, focus on moving the money to where we have more room to maneuver.
Even if you think we should focus on DC, first we have to win in the states — in particular, the states that keep shutting the rest of the country down. As progressives are learning the hard way, being strong in California and New York doesn’t mean squat if we are weak in Louisiana, Nebraska, and Connecticut. If we’re going to win in DC in the long run, in key states like these we’ve got to build year-round campaign coalitions that know how to kick ass together. As the Right has demonstrated, state and local fights are great way to build that base.
There’s already lots of Enviro activist work going on at the local level, and some of it, such as the Sierra Club’s Cool Cities campaign, is coordinated. Similarly, in the Progressive States Network’s very sharp 2010 Shared Multistate Agenda, one of the six key areas state legislators across the country have agreed to fight for in a coordinated way is promoting Green Buildings.
So if there is already lots going on, what exactly am I proposing? Let me put it this way: do you know what your city or state’s plan is to reduce its emissions? Unless you’re an Enviro policy geek or live in New York City, probably not. Most of us are not paying attention to local or state fights. Suppose we did — all at once.
In short, what I’m talking about is a strategic play — moving money, energy, and other resources from the DC board to the state/local board.
Up Next: the moves already being made on the local board that demonstrate we can win big if we go local.
