What the DSA's Popularity Means for Climate Policy

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC and with Democratic Socialists on the Rise in New York, Colorado, California, elsewhere. One little noticed story seems to be their changing relationship with the issue of climate change, or a term we actually haven't heard very much for a few years, the Green New Deal. Here to walk us through that evolution and where he sees the DSA today is Robinson Meyer. He's the founding executive director or executive editor of Heatmap News, a climate and energy news organization. He wrote a piece called How Pot-Hole Socialism Solves the New Left's Biggest Challenge. Hi Robinson, always good to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Robinson Meyer** (0:50)
Thank you so much for having me. It's always great to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (0:53)
Just to set the historical foundation of this, Zeran Mamdani and AOC, for example, had very early climate focus as one of their main things as they were coming up, right?

**Robinson Meyer** (1:08)
Yes, exactly. I want to be clear that I think I want to expand the ambit a little bit to say, the DSA, it's a very New York and urban focused institution. In this, I'm thinking about the New Left or Millennial Left or Online Left, whatever term you want to use for the post Bernie and Bernie kind of faction in the Democratic Party broadly. But yeah, exactly.
AOC and Zoran both, at the beginning of their political careers, defined themselves in part by their strident and very aggressive and ambitious climate politics. I think even Zoran described himself as an eco-socialist at the beginning of his time in the state legislature.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:53)
Eco-socialist, and you remind us in the article that AOC cemented her national profile by joining an activist group called the Sunrise Movement for a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office and demanding a Green New Deal. Some people may remember that particular sit-in, which made a lot of news at the time, but that was a decent number of years ago by now. But then you're right, the Green New Deal, which was vague, evolved into a focus on industrial policy, a term that people don't think about very much, but is really key to your argument. What is industrial policy the way you mean it, and what's the Green New Deal version of that?

**Robinson Meyer** (2:34)
Yeah, exactly. If you think back to the 2018 midterm, a number of candidates on the left, including AOC, campaigned for a Green New Deal, but it didn't get a ton of attention. I think climate was becoming a more salient issue in politics then, but not where it would get to in 2021 or 2022 or 2020
It didn't get a lot of attention and it wasn't a very well-defined policy. Then on a week or so after the 2018 midterms, AOC and the Sunrise Movement also group at the time, nobody had really heard of, just wasn't that prominent, did a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office, demanded a Green New Deal. I was a climate reporter at the time, and I remember calling up environmental NGOs and being like, what's a Green New Deal? What is entailed? What is implied by this?
What does this mean? There actually wasn't a great sense of what this mean. The journalist, the New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman had used this term, a Green New Deal in a 2009 book, and it was very vague. It was like a vague plan to revitalize America and build a lot of clean energy. And then eventually I found the group that was at that point working with Sunrise and working with AOC's office. It was called New Consensus. It was a relatively recent think tank, and they were tasked with writing the Green New Deal. And they said, we're going to write it. It's going to be out in a year. And their vision of the Green New Deal was like a very muscular state-building vision. It was all about industrial policy. It was all of which is this idea that the government shouldn't just allow industries to form as they form. It shouldn't just allow companies and sectors of the economy to develop as they develop. It should affirmatively set a direction for how sectors of the economy should develop and how industries should form and what technologies companies and industry and the academy should pursue. I think back then it was a bit exotic. It took a minute to realize that this is actually something the US has done periodically through its history. We had industrial policy around semiconductors. We had industrial policy around the interstate highway system, around rockets and space, around, of course, all the technologies that were developed during World War II as well.