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Neoliberalism PREVENTS public investment - public investment is key to adapting to carbon change
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- Fremstad ’22
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- The shift away from large-scale public investments has
- By defunding public investment
Neoliberalism PREVENTS public investment - public investment is key to adapting to carbon changeThis card is also supportive of growth, just opposed to neoliberalism** ALSO says that climate change has locked in, you could read it against a solves-CC impact to prove A-Climate Change is irreversible B-Only removing Neoliberalism solves* Fremstad ’22 [Anders and Mark Paul; July 2022; Department of Economics, Colorado State University, C306 Clark Building, Fort Collins, CO, USA and Division of the Social Sciences, New College of Florida, 5800 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota, FL 34243, USA; Neoliberalism and climate change: How the free-market myth has prevented climate action; “Defend public investment,” Ch. 4, p. 5-6] SPark With the rise of neoliberalism, the U.S. entered an era of anemic public investment, shown in Fig. 2. As of 2018, U.S. federal government nondefense investment was 43% below 1967 levels—falling from over 2.5% of GDP in the 1970s to just over 1.5% in the Reagan administration.8 The U.S. experienced a particularly significant decline in largescale public works projects. In a 2014 report, the U.S. Treasury noted that “the economic case for expanding infrastructure investment is clear, yet public investment has been declining as part of a long-term trend toward fiscal consolidation and lower public investment” (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2014). The lack of investment in U.S. infrastructure will cost the economy an estimated $4 trillion in GDP between 2016 and 2025 (American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), 2016) — without accounting for costs associated with climate change. Much greater public investment is needed for rapid decarbonization. As an example of how public research and development (R&D) can transform an entire industry, consider the case of solar power. The price of Solar Photovoltaic (PV) panels has declined 99% over the past four decades. This occurred due to significant investments in public R&D along with market-based incentives and public investments to deploy PV. While economies of scale have played an important role in more recent years, Kavlak et al. (2018) find that R&D, much of which was publicly financed, played a dominant role in cost reduction. Following these successes, the U.S. government created the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) in 2006 to advance technologies in the energy sector by supporting high-risk, high-reward research which was systematically underprovided in the private sector (Azoulay et al., 2019). Despite the program’s success in energy-related innovation, ranging from energy efficiency to energy storage and transportation, the program remains too narrowly defined and drastically underfunded (Paul et al., 2019). In 2018 ARPA-E’s budget was $353 million, roughly one tenth of DARPA’s annual budget (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), 2019). The shift away from large-scale public investments has constrained the U.S.’s response to climate change. Public investment remains a crucial component of any program to rapidly decarbonize the economy, because it is vital to leveraging economies of scale, solving coordination problems, and operating the economy at full employment. While a carbon price coupled with environmental regulation would provide households, firms, and governments with an incentive to transition away from fossil fuels, public investment is necessary to rapidly build carbon-free alternatives, and to facilitate a transition in a just and equitable manner (Griffith and Calish 2020; Galvin and Healy, 2020). Public investment is necessary for retrofitting buildings, providing green public transportation, building a smart national grid, increasing R&D, retiring obsolete appliances and vehicles, and adapting to climate change that is already locked in (Paul et al., 2019). By defunding public investment, neoliberalism has hampered decarbonization. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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