In Congress, Representative Jamaal Bowman has been leading the charge to think of care work as climate work. Bowman recently released a Care for All Agenda and $1.6 trillion plan to retrofit every K-12 school in the country. “Care is going to be even more essential as we cope with and solve the climate crisis. We cannot have a flourishing economy of any kind if our loved ones—children, older adults, people with disabilities, and all Americans—aren’t getting the care they need,” he told me over email. “Our country does not guarantee care as a human right. And care workers, who are disproportionately women of color and immigrants, are often extremely underpaid and exploited. These have to be high-paying, unionized jobs, and we need to create millions more of them—including with public jobs programs,” which so far have not been raised as an option in the American Jobs Plan.
Especially in the U.S., infrastructure tends to be treated by politicians more as a handmaiden to economic growth than as a way to build the foundation of a good society. This can lead to all sorts of imbalances. Economistic thinking, for instance, suggests that a low per-capita gross domestic product in poor neighborhoods makes them less worthy places for public investments like replacing lead pipes than a highway that—properly updated—can more ably deliver commuters to work and Amazon packages to homes within just a few hours of online checkout. This kind of cold, dollar-based cost-benefit analysis also explains why there is no shortage of public support behind infrastructure devoted to helping fossil fuels flow freely: from the roads and railways required to transport coal, to oil pipelines and ports for exporting fracked gas.
So far, the Biden administration has presented a different theory of growth and who benefits from it than its past few predecessors—one that in fact reflects recent shifts within the economics profession, which is beginning to focus more widely on concerns like climate change and racial and gender equity that have for decades been voiced from the field’s fringes. With that comes a different definition of infrastructure, including not just roads, bridges, ports, airports, and mass transit, but also broadband, clean water, and a clean electrical grid, as well as child and eldercare. Infrastructure, Biden said in a speech earlier this week, “depends on investing in ‘Made in America’ goods from every American community, including those that have historically been left out—Black, Latino, Asian American, Native Americans, rural communities.” In Building Back Better, he hopes to “scale to win the industries of the future,” including the critical minerals and battery technology essential to a clean energy economy and to giving the U.S. a leg up over China. “America is no longer the leader of the world because we’re not investing,” he added.
April 09, 2021 at 10:52PM
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Care Work Is a Climate Change Investment - The New Republic
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