The Great Depression in America in the 1930s was a pivotal time in history for a number of reasons. It was the time of the birth of Keynesian economics which was the idea that the in order to get out of the recession, the government had to borrow money and spend to stimulate the economy rather than continue to try to save money which had the effect of shrinking the economy and therefore the tax base available to the government which turned into a vicious cycle of negative growth. The set of policies which successfully ended the vicious cycle of saving and recession were introduced by Roosevelt who famously introduced the agenda as a ‘New Deal’ for America.
In 2020 as the world is again faced with a crippling economic crisis and horrific income and wealth inequality, the idea of a New Deal is again coming into fashion except that the world is also faced with another major crisis in the form of Global Climate Change and environmental destruction. Humanity has almost run out of its carbon budget which cannot be exceeded if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided. Biodiversity loss is also at existential crisis levels in the natural history of the planet.
It seems that it is again time for a radical shift in environmental and economic policy to ensure the future of our species and global civilisation. Jeremy Rifkin is a famed economist who has published a number of books previously on the ideas which have informed the development of these policy ideas. In the book below, he has set out an intellectual framework for the Green New Deal around renewable energy, the internet of things and taxation reform which addresses the obsence disparities of wealth and income which have emerged in the past decades of unrestrained capitalism.