 The presidency of Joe Biden, so we're told, marks the return of the United States to a position of global leadership on climate change, and with two stimulus packages already delivered all-in-the-works on COVID and jobs and a third one on the way, many pundits now say that Biden, who ran from the center when seeking his party's nomination, has exceeded expectations. But do Joe Biden's actions go far enough to tackle climate change and American decline? Or are these measures, however superficially impressive, merely a sticking plaster? With me to discuss that today is Adam Tooze, professor at Columbia University and author of Crash How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World. Adam, welcome back to downstream. Pleasure to be here. We've wanted to discuss Biden for a while. I think you're the outstanding, I'd say anglophone person to talk about it, but also you happen to be a Brit. We've wanted to mount for a while, of course, his first 100 days, I think comes in on Thursday, but it was the Global Climate Summit last week on Earth Day, which saw some really impressive rhetoric from the president. So we're going to watch that now. It's about a minute, might seem a bit long, but actually really important words that are being said by the president. So we're going to go to that and then come back and I'll ask a few questions on that. And make bold investments in their people and clean energy future will win the good jobs of tomorrow and make their economies more resilient and more competitive. So let's run that race. Win more, win more sustainable future than we have now overcome the existential crisis of our times. We know just how critically important that is because scientists tell us that this is the decisive decade. This is the decade we must make decisions that will avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis. We must try to keep the Earth's temperature and to an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius. You know, the world beyond 1.5 degrees means more frequent and intense fires, floods, droughts, heat waves and hurricanes, tearing through communities, ripping away lives and livelihood. So alongside that rhetoric, we've got some impressive numbers. So it seems, or maybe you might disagree, Adam, what that's what we'll talk about in a second. The US pledged to cut carbon emissions by 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. Japan set a new climate goal promising to cut its emissions by 46 percent by 2030 compared to 2013. Canada upgraded its plans to reduce emissions by 40 to 45 percent by 2030 relative to 2005. And Britain, perhaps most ambitiously, plans to reduce CO2 emissions by 78 percent come 2035 when measured against 1990 levels. Not all good news. India, China, Russia and perhaps most surprisingly Australia didn't make any new comments, but this seemed like a big breakthrough. And of course, we've had the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. We've now got this jobs bill, $2 trillion bill going through the American legislative system. It's going to no doubt be subject to a great deal of change. But that's where it is right now. Adam, you've written a flurry of really, I think insightful articles on the Biden presidency, changes more broadly in terms of what we might think of as the American center. We'll go on to discuss those shortly. But after almost 100 days of the Biden administration, has he exceeded expectations? Well, in certain respects, yes, I think the most dramatic aspect was clearly to do with the immediate COVID related rescue plan at the beginning of the year. This is a direct descendant of the life support packages that were passed last year. This is the $1.9 trillion one. And the other domain where the administration has clearly exceeded expectations is on vaccine rollout. And I think one has to take those together, because the strategy that Biden administration is to make a credible bid to not lose the midterm elections in 2022. That's actually a tactical objective, you might say, but it's strategic, because if they lose those, they lose Congress, they're basically dead in the water in terms of legislative action. The GOP is just the big old bad beast that it was on the Trump, possibly in some ways, even more embittered than before. So those political objectives are key. And getting a grip on the COVID crisis, avoiding the sort of second, third wave that we've seen in Europe was crucial to the Biden presidency. And that's the fundamental thing where they have quite dramatically exceeded expectations. There is a big divide now in the life experience of Americans to the vast majority of the rest of the world as a result of the speed of the vaccine rollout. The UK is a bit of an exception, but in the US case, the vaccines are coming from domestic production and the UK is, you know, heavily reliant on imports. So that's as it were, the upside of the Biden presidency so far. On climate, it was a little bit hard to know what to expect to be clear, because America's climate policy debate in recent years has been very confused and very confusing. And there isn't, as it were, the one big policy that everyone clearly had in mind. And that in itself is the legacy of defeats. I mean, the Americans invented the idea of carbon pricing, of cap and trade. And that was what they pushed in the Clinton administration of the 90s and the Obama administration after 2009. And both time around, even though the Democrats at the time had congressional majorities, they couldn't get tax price based decarbonization strategies in place. And in a sense, the entire debate about climate policy in the US since, including most importantly, the Green New Deal, is an answer to that dilemma. What do we actually do if we're not going to use price mechanisms? And the answer was, of course, a very large-scale investment. And that was the Green New Deal plan combined with a just transition. So linking this together to be a real structural transformation of American society along those lines. And if that was what you were expecting, then the Biden administration is dramatically under-delivering because the package that we've seen so far, I think even if one includes the wildest hopes for the family package that's due out this week, another 1.5 trillion perhaps, more on child care, which is urgently needed. Don't get me wrong, all of this stuff is good stuff and long overdue, and better than nothing. Does it meet, as it were, the expectations of the American left? Clearly not. That's not unsurprising. Sanders lost after all. But there was a moment, and around the rescue plan, it seemed as though there had been a really quite fundamental breakthrough in policy thinking. And what we've seen so far about the investment plan, to be honest, doesn't really bear that out. I was one of the people that was cheering the rescue plan because of its sheer scale and its political ambition, which I think is entirely appropriate. We shouldn't get bogged down in the technocratic details here. It's all about ensuring the GOP doesn't sweep Congress again in 2022. But if you look in detail at the jobs plan as a climate plan, it falls woefully short. It's just not big enough, because the numbers are large, but they're spread over 8 to 10 years. And that means that it cashes out at far less than is necessary. So let's try and contextualize some of this. I want to talk more about particularly the green R&D element of that plan. It's a great statistic. I won't spoil it. People have to stick around to hear it. Walk us through these three bills, and then maybe put it into some historic context. We've got the COVID relief plan. We've got the jobs plan. We've got the family plan. How big are these all put together in terms of historic perspective? Are we looking at something that's comparable, for instance, to the New Deal under FDR? Maybe not in terms of impact, but just in terms of sheer size, proportion of GDP and so on. Yeah, there's a whole variety of complex metrics to judge. And also, we have to disentangle ourselves from, as it were, our fantasy New Deal of the FDR era. I mean, economic historians have gone back and done a hatchet job on that entire experience. And though the New Deal was quite important in putting people back to work, it was very labor intensive. And though it transformed key pieces of American infrastructure, viewed as it were, the cold eyes of a macroeconomic analysis, it wasn't very big. It was difficult for it to be big because the American federal government at the time was tiny. Low single digit percentage points of GDP were going through the federal government at the time. So you couldn't really enact the sort of stimulus you can do now because the structure wasn't there. It's World War II that really creates big American government, 20, 30% of GDP, on the basis of which you can then launch the Marshall Plan, the Great Society programs of the 1960s, or the Cold War long-term military spending of between five and 10% of GDP. So that's one limiter. The other limiter is did the FDR people understand about deficits, not just spending plans, but deficits as being the key drivers of macroeconomic stimulus? And the answer to that is flat out they didn't. FDR in particular was leery of them. So let's just as it were, bracket that. But let's imagine what we mean by the New Deal, like fantasy Keynesian program is the Biden program that. Well, the rescue plan, the thing that was launched immediately to deal with COVID really is that's extraordinarily dramatic. 1.9 trillion on top of 900 billion at the end of last year and two and a half trillion plus in March, April last year. That's the biggest fiscal stimulus we've ever seen in peacetime. And it's delivered immediately like those checks went out within weeks. They were expedited out the door. They didn't even bother to check the records very much. I think there was a story at one point that they were sending out checks with Donald Trump's name on because they didn't want to hold things up to replace the ex-president's name. So that was that was rushed. That was really dramatic. The infrastructure program is much more ambiguous. I mean, the media and the, you know, the liberal media, the New York Times, even bits like the Financial Times, the Roosevelt Institute are touting this as a transformative program. And it may be transformative in the sense we haven't had a big investment program in the US since the 60s. But if you look at it, it just isn't big enough, right? So 2.2 trillion over eight to 10 years. Let's give it round numbers, like 200 billion a year, 250 billion a year. That's 1% of American GDP because America's economy is massive. It's 22 trillion in a good year, right? And it's growing fast now. So 1% of GDP. What does that buy you? Well, it's not nothing, of course, and much of this spending is urgently needed. And some of the priorities are really interesting, like, you know, best part of half a trillion dollars on the care economy, like right on, that's this is a great priority. It's not conventional infrastructure, but in terms of the cohesion of American society, this is a top priority. If you break it down, though, to the sorts of things which most immediately matter to the green energy transformation, the numbers are just not there. Now 80 billion on the railway system over eight years, that's 10 billion a week, we know from cost overruns that will fix, you know, the worst, the worst deterioration in the Amtrak corridor between New York and Washington DC. But the plan is touted as an answer to China's lead in high speed rail. So it's sort of it's really cognitive dissonance at that level. It doesn't add up. There's much more money there on on rebuilding America's road infrastructure, which we know is ambiguous from the point of view of green energy transformation, because the more roads you build, the more people will drive on them. Then there's a bit in there for EV charging stations, which is crucial, but it's only half a million charging points for a country the size of the United States, whereas China is currently aiming at 3 million. The Germans are aiming considerably higher than America, just in absolute terms, setting aside the fact that America is a far bigger country. So the ambition just doesn't seem to be there. School buses, you know, those ghastly yellow buses, the Americans are so nostalgic about belching out fumes out behind. They want to replace 20% of them by 2030. It's difficult for me to even conceive the meeting at which a bunch of political advisers sat down with them and said, you know what, what we a good number would be 20% and one in five. So the fantasy, I think, has got to be the idea has got to be to be more concrete, that other measures are going to do the work. If you talk to people friendly to the administration, that's the message, right? This isn't just about spending. This has got to be about other things as well. And then you say, well, pricing, no, pricing is political poison. We can't do carbon taxes. That's not happening. So some of its internal to the administration, they're going to do a shadow price internally. So for all government action, you have to figure on a carbon price of X. And that's supposed to, through cost benefit analysis, shift things in the courts, it will change things. But the big push is going to come through regulation. So they're going to use some sort of federal government mandate to mandate the electricity supply be carbon neutral in the US by 2035, which is not super ambitious. But that's with the global standard, right? That's what most Europeans, the Asians are aiming for too. And the Americans so far have had all the easy wins because they've used gas to replace coal. But they've got the technology, they've got the momentum. But the gamble there is essentially a private sector gamble. In other words, you put a little bit of government money in, then you change the regulatory envelope, and then you expect, as it were, private capital to do the work for you. That's very much in tune with Jean-Pon Zan politically correct talk on Wall Street right now, whether it will actually add up to a reality, I think, is another question. Going back to the point you said about, you know, the money being spent on rail would barely be enough to sort of just update Amtrak. And, you know, I think in one of your pieces, I think it's the New Statesman piece, which is outstanding. You talk about how the United States present has 500 kilometers, I believe, of high speed rail China has in excess of 19,000. Inverted. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, high speed rail is a moderately straight track, which maybe doesn't have a wood sleep as it sits on. Most American railway runs in wood sleepers. This is not a French or a German or Japanese, you know, Taisho. We're not talking maglap here. No, we're talking and it goes maybe 150 miles an hour at top speed. And the thing rattles like a death trap. You're afraid for your life after time. It's not sitting, it's not like sitting on a Taisho bay with your coffee, like, you know, dead level in front of you, going at 300 kilometers an hour. It's a completely different experience. So that 500, they really don't have any world class standard high speed rail. So that 19,000 plus kilometers in China, that's almost all been built since 2007, 2008, you use the word cognitive dissonance a moment ago. Do you genuinely believe that amongst the sort of policy makers around Joe Biden, I was listening to an interview between Brian Dees, I think it is, and Azure Klein, do you think amongst those people, for instance, do you think it is cognitive dissonance or are they just genuinely wary that anything bigger than this is simply unpalatable to the American electorate? Because like you say, there's of course the calculus first and foremost here is the midterms in 2022. Or do you think they think in their heads, this is enough for America to restore, you know, leadership on the well stage, technology wise, climate change wise? They can't believe, they're expert enough and they have great advice. They can't believe that this is enough to actually get a well specified rail program done, that that's not an option. What I do think is the case is that they will have extreme difficulty getting anything bigger through Congress. So at this point, politics is binding as well. And this is a political package too, but we're seeing as it were the dark side of political constraint, which is that America's fundamentally divided on the climate issue that has not gone away. And the packages we're seeing from the GOP, which are presented as it were as compromised packages, then moving towards the Biden administration, acts the rail element. One of the GOP packages that's being touted right now takes the rail element down to $20 billion, at which point it's just literally fixing a couple of stations. So there is no broader commitment to a transformative transport agenda. And despite, I mean, the striking thing about, even though the business lobby in the United States is actually getting on board, right, GM Ford, what's left of big auto in the United States knows that the future is EV, but the Republicans aren't on side with that. In Texas right now, there's a battle of oil going on over the response to the energy crisis they had there at the beginning of the year with local GOP folks trying to impose penal charges on solar and wind. And Wall Street and Amazon and so on are weighing in saying, you're crazy, you're out of your mind, Texas could be a leader in renewable energy, but the local GOP doesn't buy that necessarily, and some of their fossil fuel donors don't buy it either. So that's the fundamental constraint here. And the pivot player is Joe Manchin of West Virginia, right, this centrally sort of conservative in democratic drag who is the key swing player in the middle of Congress, and he basically dictates to the Biden administration what they can and what they can't do to a large extent. So do you think this idea of this assertion of American leadership on climate change, do you think that's just leadership, I mean? Is that impossible so long as the GOP and the sort of Republican base maintains these sentiments on climate and, you know, the green economy? Do you think that that notion of leadership is just kind of an empty word fundamentally? Yeah, I mean, I think most people agree, in fact, that the most retrograde, regressive element of the Biden administration is its foreign policy and the rhetoric associated with this foreign policy. And it really just seems beyond cognitive dissonance, just out of touch with reality almost completely. I mean, Anthony Blinken gave this speech, his first big speech as secretary, where he where a sage secretary where he started by saying, you know, like it or not, the world does not organize itself. And, you know, you sort of stand back and think about the implication of this. And we don't do it like either chaos ensues or quote, our place at the table is taken by a rogue actor. So, I mean, these are just, you know, counterfactual ideas about on the issue of climate, of course, the world's problem is the United States and its disorganizing impact on the entirety of global climate politics has been working around the fact that America refuses to engage seriously on the problem. That remains true. And so those interfaces, when we're talking about these, you know, was a black rock was in the Obama administration is a serious thinker about the practicalities of doing climate politics. That's one thing. When you go out into the State Department, you really find yourself regressing back into 1990s West Wing rhetoric about leadership, whereas all the world really wants from America is that it stops being obstructive as far as possible and leading as it were the bandwagon the wrong way. And there are people out there who want to go that way. You mentioned Australia, not making any commitments. Australia, Canada, Brazil, these are all, you know, these are Australia and Canada in particular are the problem within what we might think of with the Western camp. You can see why Russia and China won't handbide in any kind of diplomatic victories. But the tough nuts to crack within that Western camp of places like Australia and Canada. So the most one can hope for, I think, on the American leadership here is that along as it were, Chiv is the other recalcitrance along from behind. This would be leadership from behind. And the message to simply be, look, if we can do it, you can do it too. That I think should be the sum total of the claim. The risk is that as it were America's lack of movement on pricing means that we then end up in, you know, various types of interference where carbon border adjustment, which is crucial to making the European carbon pricing systems work, causes trade friction with the US. That's hugely interesting what you just said there about on the one hand, one of the big obstacles to progress by the US is the Republican Party, its support base, its politicians, its donors. But then you're also saying there's a broader issue elsewhere just within the American sort of state apparatus, particularly the State Department, I'm sure there are other areas too, where there's just the sort of hegemonic default common sense isn't engaging with the post 2008 world or climate change as is, I think, inarguably true for many people around Joe Biden. So is that is that another kind of source of sort of political friction that we should probably keep an eye on longer term? Yeah, it is. And I mean, some of us worried about it in the alarmist sense that, as it were, this would explode into a huge issue within climate politics because the American Jobs Party, if you read the whole fact sheet that they gave us says, you know, is this is a historic plan to unite America against, you know, to face the existential challenges of the moment, what the words the President was repeating. And then he goes on to say climate and an assertive autocratic China. So it looked as though we were going to get a package that truly was a sort of Sputnik era, space race kind of program. And then, as it were, it gave birth to a mouse. So having as it were pitch this as America's answer to China, if America's answer to China on high speed rail is 10, you know, 10 to $20 billion a year, the Chinese are just going to go shrug. It's like, you know, bring on a bring on a real program. What I think is in fact happening is that as they work out what they're doing, what Kerry in particular appears to be pushing is that they want to silo climate away from the other issues. So they're still juggling these things in their heads, I think. And what they're realizing is you play China, not on the primacy line, which is where the President originally pitched it, China wants to be number one, they won't complain them, it's not going to happen on my watch, right? Just a denial of the logic of exponential growth. But that's moving now towards the more human rights existential commitments of the West type language where they hope to find common ground with the Europeans. And on climate, I think what they are claiming quite explicitly is they want to silo it. In other words, they can agree with China on certain climate issues. Technical cooperation are the really big things here, maybe carbon pricing, those sorts of issues, and separate it from the great power competition value clashes, all that kind of agenda, the trade, the tech sanctions. And as the Europeans have discovered, what we mustn't forget is that ultimately, it's China that decides whether the Europeans or the Americans get to play the strategy that they prefer. Because what China has demonstrated to the Europeans is it won't allow that segmentation, right? If you sanction their folks over Xinjiang, they'll sanction you back. And then the Europeans won't be able to get their investment treaty through the parliament. It's not obvious that the Chinese will allow Kerry to take this climate issue and silo it either. So there are three players in this game, and they all really have full autonomy. And that, by itself, of course, invalidates the fundamental premise of the American position that basically there's a kind of world that's disorganized and is waiting for them to arrive to play the game. And I think you can see, as it were, the realities of this kicking in. Because there's thousands of super smart people working, cranking day and night on these problems. And in the face of realities that really don't conform, they will rapidly adjust. But the starting premises and the rhetoric in which this is dressed is at times just strikingly odd for the reality. And the fiscal realities are, it just doesn't get us to where we need to be. So the premise we hope is that they're counting on private sector mobilization, which is no one's perhaps first best choice here. But if what we need to do is get rapid decarbonization by 2030, that's the best bet the Biden administration is offering. So that's adding to the skeptic because you're sort of comparing the rhetoric to the facts. But I want to maybe shed a bit more of a favorable light on this, because comparing what we're now seeing with these these three bits of legislation, particularly the Jobs Act, comparing those to what we saw with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 with Obama, this does mark a pretty big shift in terms of industrial policy, in terms of just the fundamental role of the state and the economy, the ability of non-market actors to oversee innovation and so on. It's nowhere near as far, you know, as far moved as it should have. But it does seem like a bit of a paradigm shift in terms of how, you know, progressive technocrats within the Democratic Party think things should be done. Is that a fair assessment? Are we looking at the package that Obama should have basically done 13 years ago? Absolutely. There's a benchmark problem here, right? If your benchmark is the global challenge of decarbonisation and then an American pretension to leadership in that, then your conclusion has got to be fairly devastating, I think. If your benchmark is the progression of Democratic Party policy thinking and its adequacy to the moment in that respect and the comparison to Obama, though I think it's important not to be unfair to the Obamians. They're the people who invented the idea of the Green New Deal. Van Jones was pivotal to doing that and he was, you know, left out to hang by the Obama administration in due course. And then they failed on cap and trade. But the ideas were there. They also did the auto bailout. So they did below the surface industrial policy. But what's different now is that, as it were, the rhetorical inhibitions have gone. The strategic blueprints are beginning to be developed. Yes, there is far less inhibition. And to re-emphasise, the rescue plan, the first response to COVID, the combination of those three packages, that's off the charts. It's completely unlike anything we've seen before. There, I think, if you want to make criticisms there, the fact is that what you're basically opting for is a quick hit. And that's not by itself a bad thing. But the question is, as it were, does handing out $1,400 checks do anything for child poverty beyond alleviating it for the next six months, which it certainly does and all hell for them for doing it. And building out various types of child benefit, which they are beginning to do, it's totally the step in the right direction. And heaven knows, elder care and childcare in the United States are chronic problems which need massive intervention to just bring them up to advanced economy standards. So all of this is absolutely essential. And it does indeed. I mean, there's been a generational transformation, I think, that has also been a lot of learning. I mean, I'm pre-temperamentally by politics, essentially, some sort of left liberal. And so I find this very confirming of my sense that you can move and that people do move. But that always has to be checked against the left critique, which is to say, no, look at the structures that limit this, look at the balance of power that constrains this. And the Biden administration could also be seen as a vindication of that. But that's the constructive space that we're in, right, in which we are in fact probing what the limits are, pushing against them. Certain things that we used to think of as absolute constraints, American fossil capitalism, for instance, turns out to be something that's much more porous and much more open to shifting the pieces around. That doesn't give you a revolution. It doesn't give you a radical transformation of American circumstances, but it may accelerate our move towards at least addressing the most urgent dimensions of the climate problem. So that is, you know, all of this shift is literally being enacted. It's a historic laboratory. The best description for the Biden administration's efforts is definitely as an experiment. They don't rightly know what the trade-offs between inflation and unemployment are, but what's interesting is that they're willing to give it a shot and deceive to find out by learning and doing how hot we could run the economy and what the social and racial justice's implications of that might be. And all of those logics are now front and center. If you make an argument for a more conservative monetary policy wanting to raise interest rates, you have to answer to the critics who say, well, you know the people who will suffer most from that tweaking of interest rates are black men, and especially those with relatively less educational qualification. There are people in the Fed who will put that in front of you and say, right, that's what you're opting for then. So that's a huge step forward in terms of the sophistication of the debate and its ability to address some of simultaneously, as it were, the big macroeconomic parameters, big in the sense that they're general and abstract, and the streaming, you know, insistent needs to address the profound inequalities along social and racial lines within the United States right now. Gender as well. I mean, the whole package, because we know that, you know, the principal women, the principal victims of the labor market shot last year were the T-next women above all in the service sector, in the service sector economy. So that's where these policies are hitting. They've said, you know, Jay Powell and Kerr have said we're going to keep the pedal to the metal until the low wage element of the labor market is back somewhere close to full employment. We've never had a rhetoric like that before, and he's a conservative. I mean, he's a mainline conservative. So it is a very significant transformation for sure that the problem is the scale of the challenges, right, which is absolutely immense. And the rhetoric of realism that creeps back in, like, who are the realists here? And the thing one has to, I think, anchor on, everyone on the progressive side of politics has got to anchor on, is that the Green New Deal scale was the realistic scale, the $10 trillion over 10 years, the $1 trillion a year, to 2 to 3% of a GDP investment every single year. That's realism. Everything else is a recipe for high risk, very uncertain future, because what we're basically, as the President himself said, like, his strategy is not optimized to avoid the two, three, four degrees worlds. And that is the price that they're paying for their political realism in what they think they can get through Congress. Yeah, I mean, just going back to the clip at the start of this, like you say, he's quite open. We can't go beyond 1.5 degrees warming. I mean, we almost certainly already are. So unless we get what, you know, widespread efforts at carbon sequestration, there's a kind of empty words anyway. But as you've said, the kind of money you just discussed there, that was the program coming out from Bani Sanas and Bill McKibben, which was just, I think, eight times bigger. I mean, we were talking about $16 trillion in terms of addressing climate change. So for you, that's the realistic approach, if we're serious about climate change, rather than what we're seeing from the Biden administration. Yeah, you start with the climate problem. Yeah. How do we rapidly get down from that? You can specify it out for an economy the size of the US. It's a perfectly sensible investment. This is not cost after all. This is a spend it largely on ourselves within the economy. And what we're doing is taking, you know, shitty polluting cars that destroy the environment and are a hazard to pedestrians and replacing them with vehicles, which aren't. So that program had this great cash for clunkers element in it, you know, $2.5 trillion to enable lower middle income Americans to rapidly shift to EV. That's the sort of scale on which this problem should be addressed. That would really give us a fighting chance of maybe not 1.5 but two, any other strategy is not inconceivable that other strategies will work, but you are betting on capital. You really are betting on the fact that and what the debate you're involved in is an interesting one, right, from the point of view of critical theory from Marxist political economy, what you're gambling is that there is in a sense within capital in the large a rationality encompassing enough to recognize their own interest in the stabilization of climate 30 years out from that. Now, I'm not saying that's an implausible idea. It's quite, I mean, you know, if you were running a seven nine, what is it, $9 trillion portfolio Black Rock has now, like some of that stuff is going to be highly exposed if we don't stabilize. So that is the wager that you're engaged in. You're engaged in the claim that within private capital accumulation, there is a logic large enough to encompass that transition because you are not making the maximum effort from the public side. And you're claiming also that you believe that like, you know, various types of regulatory environment applied to the outside to that massive capital will get you where you need to go. And that to me is a pretty high risk. Yeah. It's a pretty high risk capital. I don't think we can rule it out but but it's it's a high risk gamble. Talking about tax and you write something I believe again it was in the new statesman piece which is particularly pertinent to the debate here in Britain because the conservatives raised corporation tax over here. Kia Stama said he wouldn't do it and there was a big hullabaloo over what was the genuinely progressive position. I think I can discern what your position is. You write, if the top priority is to drive forward the energy transition with maximum speed and minimal resistance, raising corporate taxes which is bound to face house or process from big business is not advisable. So just wondering, you know, obviously in the U.S. Corporation tax is a bit different to here. It's both in the federal levels at the state level. So you think is that a universal kind of principle for you like an axiomatic principle that whether it's Britain, whether it's France, whether it's United States, if you want to decarbonize as quickly as possible, it's not universal but of the big sort of, you know, G7 economies, if you want to decarbonize as quickly as possible you shouldn't increase things like corporation tax. I think it has to be a tactical judgment, right? And what I find very disappointing about the Biden administration's logic is it goes something like this, right? So we did the rescue plan. We did that without tax finance. That was a short-term immediate stimulus. You did that all on deficit. When we come to climate investment, precisely the sort of thing you think you would fund through debt, right? Because it pays back over time. That's how we fund things. No, there we're going to do it with pay falls. We're going to do it with pay falls because conservative centrists in the Democratic Party are asking for that. Okay, so then the social justice coalition kicks in and says, okay, so what sort of pay falls should we use? Well, evidently, and with very good reason, we should use, we should claw back some of the gains that American corporations have made. And then you feed that back into the engine, you know, the calculating engine. And it says, well, the absolute maximum we think you can probably get is about two trillion in extra revenue. And then you say, well, that'll be the size of our investment program then, right? So rather than with Bill McKibben-Sander's program, it says, okay, what does America need to get to net zero? You say, what is the maximum progressive tax increase we can get through? And both of those, you know, the maximum progressive tax increase we should definitely do, but we should be doing the climate investment independently of that. I mean, this, you know, I'm no huge fan of MMT, but about on this, they are, you know, very lucid. Like this makes perfect sense. Separate out your fiscal policy decisions. Prioritize your spending according to what it is that you think collectively. The mission, as it were, that you're trying to accomplish. View that as cold-eyed as you possibly can. Then think about the social coalitions that will enable you to get there or not. And then figure out your other agenda, which is creating a just society in the various tools that we've got. And you've got to solve the equation, which allows you to do both those things at the same time. And then you've got to rank order them in terms of temporal priority. In other words, what kind of a socially just society will it be if we're at three degrees temperature warming? Right? As opposed to the trade-off when we try and stabilize climate really urgently, and then work on other priorities at the same time, or possibly in that world, which is more stable. I'm not saying any of these questions are easy to resolve. But the particular train of logic that appears to have operated in the US this spring results in an investment program which is historically inadequate to the scale of the challenge. But squares those other problems. In other words, we're going to do it by way of a progressive tax increase. And I think that that for me encapsulates the the weakness of that approach. That has always for in a sense been, to me, the question of the Green New Deal. Like what is, you know, what's your what's your model of change fundamentally? What is your social model of change? I can see the attraction of the so-called front line communities coalition that the original Green New Deal envisioned. The question is, is it powerful enough? If it's not powerful enough, which other bits of other coalitions do you need to mobilize behind your program? And then the question simply becomes, is a corporate tax increase at this particular moment favorable to that or not? That will be the question. If you think you can run it, as I think they do, because basically that's vastly popular. The corporate tax increase is popular as is, you know, this thing on, you know, capital gains. Like it affects 0.3% of the American population and the helps them, you know, helps to pay for childcare. You're a pretty poor politician if you can't sell that proposition. Yeah, it's an interesting one. It's a really, really interesting one. I haven't got the quote here, which is a shame. It's in the LRB piece you wrote about the sort of journey of Paul Krugman, who, you know, going back to what you said five minutes ago about sort of the vindication of the left liberal position that actually people like Paul Krugman over time perhaps can see sense in, you know, failures of sort of empirical evidence can mean that they change their mind on things, which is obviously somewhat reassuring. But you said, and it's a wonderful line about actually the sort of policing of the boundaries of political possibility. People talk about capitalist realism and the Montpelerin society and the neoliberals, but actually it was the New Keynesians who were the real arbiters of whether or not something was quite and quite politically pragmatic or deliverable or sensible. Do you think that's still kind of to some extent infecting the Biden administration's thinking? I think they're caught a little bit between the stools, to be honest, unsurprisingly, because, you know, history is complex that way. It doesn't change all at once in some sort of, you know, massive comprehensive revolution. And there's also obvious pitfalls in going down the route of total politicization, right? Because that then does just expose you to the balance of force. And if you're going to go for a strategy of radical politicization, you better be pretty certain that the balance of force is in your favor, because otherwise you're going to be whipped by people whose politics is radically other than yours, and you will have no means of recourse. You won't be able to say, well, the science or the technology or my assessment of reality is what tells you you can't do that to me, because we've forsaken that ground. And so there are indeed many people I'm sure within the Biden administration whose answers to Larry Summers is not shut up, Larry, we're going to do this because we need to win the next election. And that's all that matters here. They actually want to argue with him about the shape of the Phillips curve and whether there's any real risk of inflation and whether the output gap estimate that he's using is actually biased in favor of his argument. And they can't, and quite, you know, they can't aid, they can't help themselves temperamentally. These sociologically they're shaped by that same environment that Larry Summers is, and see, frankly, if you forsake that ground of argument, it's a huge risk. But I think what's interesting about Krugman and his itinerary over the years is that faced with the increasing recalcitrance, and one has to say, I think, unreasonable fact-free quality of Republican politics, he has come around to the view, as he puts it, you know, that in 21st century America, everything is political. And that includes your estimate of the output gap or the salience you accord to an estimate of the output gap, which will, you know, decide the trade-off between inflation and unemployment. That's the, that's why that, that number matters and why the wonks have been arguing about it. So I think within the Biden administration, yes, they're caught between different, different positions and outright embrace of we must prevail politically at all price to, frankly, to save the American Republic. And, you know, what actually and what we're doing is probably, you know, technocratically sound to and, you know, going back into that position, they're not, they're not fully reconciled to either position. And I, again, I have, I have deep sympathy for that because, because any other, any other position is, is truly risky. And you really, if you are, in the full politicization, mode, you really do have to believe that you've got no choice, which I think is where most Democrats are, right? That there's no alternative, given how the GOP behaves. And be then, you have to have the courage of your convictions. You have ultimately to believe that you're going to win politically. Because otherwise, I mean, avoiding the space on which you could constrain political argument and choice any other way. I'm going to come back to the GOP in a second. Before I do, I'm going to do something very irritating at it. I'm going to say to our audience, maybe not, I don't know, maybe, maybe our guests are sort of, you know, they're lucid as Adam is, and they're giving these wonderful thoughts. And I sort of just reduced the conversation. I say, do two things for us right now at Navara Media. Like this video, because it'd be great to get Adam's take to as many people as possible to reach as broad an audience as possible. And of course, click the subscribe button. Super easy. Doesn't cost a thing. And it makes all of us here at Navara Media. Talk about it. You should do it. Really happen. There you go. You know, this is, this is something which would make all of us here. It's a great deal of utility. And it doesn't cost you a thing. This doesn't make any sense under neoclassical economics. Right. I'm sure it does. I'm just sort of being silly. Right. So the GOP thing, actually, this is, this is, this is again, something you sort of, you touch upon repeatedly in a couple of these pieces. And I think it's a really good point. And it's something that it's becoming clearer and clearer. I think as the Biden administration surprises people, which is that whatever shortcomings with Biden, one of the big differences now between the people around Biden and the people around Obama is just there's, there's a recognition now that, you know, so anything like a bipartisan consensus on the big challenges facing America is kind of impossible. Whereas people sort of around Obama in a way, we're kind of holding out for that. They maybe not on Medicare, but on other areas they, they thought they could build, you know, consensus. And that seems to have sort of just evaporated, particularly not just with the Trump presidency, but the manner in which he was removed, the events around the Capitol and so on and so forth. And so I think returning to your point previously about the Biden presidency is very much an experiment. I suppose, you know, we, we, we've perhaps been a bit pessimistic, a bit negative so far, but surely that's, that's cause for, for optimism. If we're now in a space where the Democrats recognize that the Republican Party, the right, aren't really interested in solving the big problems, they're intellectually more open than they've been really for decades, I think, probably since the 1970s, frankly. Do you think those create quite, quite fertile conditions for the left? Because it feels to me that, you know, I don't just mean Joe Biden, but I mean, the sort of the, the complex American politics around the Democratic Party, around the labor movement, within the media, within the culture more broadly, it does feel like that could move quite left, quite quickly. And that's not to say that the left drags the center that. I mean, I mean, the, the center goes there almost of its own volition in, in some respects. What do you make of that kind of analysis? I think that's a very plausible reading of the first couple of months of the Biden administration. We're going to have to see how it plays out. But that was part of, you know, Larry Summers' indignation was that he sees the policy as being driven by two factors. He doesn't focus on the Democrats' own conservative centrist, because they're broadly in line with his own thinking. But what he says is basically, that the obduracy of the GOP is no longer really available for government in the United States, unless they have their own president in the White House. And even then, it's not certain that they are. Creates a situation in which, given the narrowness of Biden's majority, he has to listen to all wings of the party. And rather than previously focusing almost to the exclusion of all else on the centrist and some centrist Republicans, what instead happened is that they actually have to balance the interests of the left wing of the Democratic Party against the center. And we've not, to be honest, yet seen how this is going to play out. I mean, the presumption is the investment program is going to get whittled down. But I know for a fact that the left of the party is weighing its options here. And they don't want to sink this because Robinsmeyer and the Atlantic in Lexland column pointed out, this is the one climate bill. It's not going to be any other climate bill. This is the one climate bill. So, you know, it's a huge deal if you choose to oppose it. But it goes utterly against the spirit and the content of any of the serious climate programs being launched from the left in the U.S. over the recent years. And so, over the next months, we don't think I think that this thing is going to finally reach fruition till August. There is going to be, I think, hard fighting within the Democratic Party on the left as well because as the inadequacy of the program becomes more and more evident and the compromises are made at the center, I expect and I hope the left will speak up and begin to dig in its heels because their votes count too. They need absolutely every single vote. They need them absolutely in the Senate but they need, you know, near solid whip in the House as well. So, yes, this is a moment where the left matters. And in fact, the left, you know, even inside the administration, there are folks that we never expected to see in government pushing the agenda in the administration itself. So, yes, all of this is true. And it's one of the ironies, really, of the last couple of years that the Green New Deal agenda in the broadest sense, you know, in its mapping of the relationship between the economic, the social, and the Anthropocene as the great challenges at the moment has been, you know, crushingly vindicated in its basic wiring diagram of how everything hinges together and, in my view, in its assumptions about the scale of the challenge. At the same time as it went down to political defeat, at least, you know, at the highest level on both sides of the Atlantic. And it'll be very interesting to see how the kaleidoscope shifts again with the, you know, upcoming German elections. And at this point, the likely, you know, it's quite conceivable that we might have the Greens actually winning. And then we would see another iteration of this because, of course, the Greens in Germany are a kind of Green New Deal party, but they've been it for so long that it now has a rather different flavour. But their investment pan, 50 billion is much closer to what, you know, I would not be in the critical mode that I am if the Biden plan looked as large as what the Greens are proposing. Because that's, you know, that's comfortably over one and a half per cent, something like that of GDP. That's where we kind of need to be. And, you know, they go as far as specifying their ideal carbon price, you know, the first third of their manifesto is about climate. So, yeah, it is an interesting moment for the left because the, you know, the Corbyn Sanders way broke, but I think one also should take courage from the fact that the force of the diagnosis itself has influence and the people that influence is most are, of course, not conservatives, but liberals. Those are the people you actually win the argument with. Yeah, the Corbyn Sanders thing is interesting because, of course, now the analogue is, you know, the Stammer Biden. And people say, well, just as Joe Biden won in the US, you know, that should be the strategy of the Stammer. I don't think it's in any way replicable because of constitutional challenges in this country. We don't have something like the GOP, but I suppose, you know, you're an observer of American politics, principally. It feels to me that there are a set of challenges, like you said, you've got the Anthropocene, you've got the post-2008 kind of economic context. You've got a bunch of challenges and then unique in America, really, you've got Trump and you've got the GOP just going, you know, just completely crazed in the last 18 months, really. And it does feel to me that of all the variables out there, you know, yeah, there are liberals who wanted to take climate change seriously and so on, but it feels like Trump and the manner in which he departed was a political, a formative political experience for people in the American center, which we don't really have here in the UK. And it does feel like it's given a certain amount of leverage to the left, whether in policy or movements or people that, you know, organized to get out the vote and so on, people like Stacey Abrams. You know, it feels like that's given a certain amount of leverage to the left that, you know, you can't really envisage here in Britain. Now, you know, that's probably, this might be an irritating question for somebody in New York, but to what extent do you think the lessons that, to what extent do you think there are lessons that are transferrable from what's happening in the US to the UK? You know, people are, people were perhaps active under Corbyn. They liked Sanders. They're seeing some of the Sanders agenda being adopted by Biden. They're seeing this opening up of possibilities. Could something similar happen with Stammer? I would hate to comment, to be honest, because I really, I don't follow Labour Party politics as closely as I should. What I have seen and I did a piece in The Guardian about it, which was a bit cruel. I mean, it sort of, it depresses me immeasurably because it seems to me that the Stammer agenda, at least in the earlier phases of this year, was, you know, flag waving, a kind of embrace of a patriotic nationalism and memories of the Blitz and so on that just seemed anachronistic and out of time. And it is not as though the Biden administration is devoid of that kind of nostalgia, but it functions in different ways in different contexts, right? And in the United States, it seems to me at crucial moments, one has to get one's left-liberal hang-ups about nationalism, you know, one has to get over those and embrace the mobilizing force of that kind of myth. It didn't seem to me that that was the mode in which Stammer's invocation of, you know, World War II was working in the UK context. And against the backdrop of Brexit, of course, it all takes on a very different feel anyway. And the fundamental difference, and it really is a fundamental difference, is that is the opposition. You know, the Tory party is, is, you know, if nothing, if not quicksilver in its ability to absorb agenda items that are current, that are important, that seem like they will sell and will work well and may indeed be fully compatible with a kind of market business driven vision of the UK's future for the minority that they represent and the interests associated with that. So, and that isn't, I mean, to the surprise of everyone, really, that that isn't where the GOP's at. The GOP is AWOL as a representative of what you might take to be the interests of American business. I mean, and the American business itself is waking up to that fact. Indeed, last year, that was one of the great shocks. And the other distinguishing feature, of course, and this is a heart-key concern for American business, and it's a particular challenge for the United States is China. No one else in the world has the declining hegemon, unipolar primacy problem. And it is a huge problem for American politics, whether or not, and in what terms, America can come to terms with its... It isn't even a retreat, really. It's just the effect of combined uneven development as a certain famous revolution we might once have said, across the world. And that will produce geopolitical shifts. And it's very difficult. And as we know, we know this also from British political history. It's very difficult for a political class to come to terms with that kind of shift. And America has that problem uniquely as well. So, no, where that leaves the... Where that leaves the British Labour Party, I wouldn't... I'm really not the person to ask. Other than the sense that the current line doesn't seem promising. I was not, by any means, fully aligned with huge parts of the Corbyn agenda, but the... Not that that matters one way or the other, but they were, at least, a thriving centre of... It's very serious engagement with what were clearly the problems of the 21st century. And they were taking a leading role in pushing other bits of the British state apparatus, the Bank of England, and other entities like that into more constructive thought. The British left definitely deserves credit for putting very considerable weight behind that. The think tank scene in the UK is second to none in that respect in the kind of merger between left-progressive thinking and climate and environmental thinking and financial economics and macrofinance, all that kind of thing. I mean, the UK is hugely productive and the mobilisation around Corbyn had something quite considerable to do with that. So, for me, like many other people, I think, on the left in the UK, it's been a sort of sobering realisation of the limits of possibility with the question of the Union hanging in the background over it simply. Because there must be intolerable for many people in Scotland to imagine a future dominated by English conservatives. Final question. You know, there's an argument which says that the specter of communism of the USSR and so on for much the 20th century was one of the guiding reasons why we see so much progress, whether it's with the Civil Rights Movement, whether it's, you know, Labour unions and so on in the West. Do you think there's an argument to be made that as China's geopolitical rise continues, you know, it's GDP, I think it's tripled since 2008, which is remarkable. It might double again over the next decade. I mean, these are huge numbers. Do you think as that happens, that may itself impale the American ruling class to once more put workers' interests towards the front of the political agenda? Yes, and you can see that happening, but that's not the same thing as saying it's analogous to what happened in the mid-century moment because the difference is the agency of the working class and its countervailing power. It's one thing for, as it were, benevolent liberals in the Biden administration to say we should do something for low-wage American workers. It's completely different for the British ruling class to have to negotiate with Ernie Bevin. That's a very different game. Now, he's no revolutionary, but that countervailing power which comes out of the age of total war which emerged in the course of World War I was incredibly powerful in the Triple Alliance moment in the aftermath of World War I where an amazing sort of all-dimensional chess game was played out between organized labor, the Lloyd George Coalition, and with the historic defeat that in the 20s and the re-emergence of labor after that. All of that's missing. And it's analogs in the United States and it's analogs in Europe. A popular front which is basically the choice of indulgent upper middle class professionals is totally different from the kind of configuration of force that we had in the mid-century. That's not to say it's not preferable to crony capitalism or GOP-style sort of cosplay populism. I mean, obviously that mode, and I would say Blair was a progenitor of this, the statistics I think are fairly convincing that inequality stopped increasing in the UK in the late 90s. Child poverty began to improve under the Blair Brown administrations. And we should never forget that. If it was neoliberalism, it was a different type of neoliberalism. But it went hand in hand with the abyssalation or the long-term abyssalation of the organized British labor movement. It was therefore not anchored in countervailing force. It was not anchored in a mass mobilization of Labor Party members of the grassroots. It was, to that extent, shallow, technocratic, top-down and very vulnerable to being just overturned and shifted. And many of the institutional structures it left behind could be very rapidly re-inhabited by Cameron and Coe. So those are the stakes in the current moment, like rather that obviously than Cameron and Coe since. But I think we should be quite careful with the historical analogies. This isn't to say that, as it were, grassroots organization is therefore critical. Building that countervailing force is what ensures that it does take a genuinely progressive development. And that is what the American political system has enabled the American left to do, is actually build a kind of countervailing position that has to be listened to. And we know that, say, Chuck Schumer is distinctly worried about the force of the far left commas in New York City. That really matters. So that, you know, Brooklyn Marxism, as it were, and AOC, the genius of her political talent has very considerably changed the game. And, you know, New York City is an entity the size of a European nation state. So not a big one, but a Belgium and a Netherlands. So, you know, these are stakes worth playing for. But those are the, I think, that's where we should be very careful with the historical analogies. You've got to go back to the force field of, I mean, this is the wisdom of the left, after all, in its analysis. You have to understand that force field. A liberalism operating as it currently does essentially in a vacuum of class power is, or rather, an incredibly one-sided configuration is, you know, is better than the alternative, which is some sort of unhinged conservatism. But it shouldn't be mistaken for the, you know, genuinely complex social-democratically mediated compromises of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s. That's a great place to end, Adam. Do you have another book coming out soon? On that point, I do. I have a book called Shutdown How COVID Shook the World's Economy Coming Out in September. And it's all about precisely this issue, this question of what we make of a world diagnosed by the Green New Deal in which it was, in fact, then politically defeated. How one reads this sort of extraordinary scene of policy that has emerged, that emerged in 2020. Well, look forward to reading it. We'll get you back on. I'll let you get on with your day, Adam. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. Cheers. Bye. Great to be here. Look, we'll talk next chat. Great. Adam Tooze. Cheers. I love the guy. He's excellent. He's just written a couple of great articles. One for the new statesman and as regular viewers in Avara Media and I don't always pick up that publication. Really good, longer article. Another really great article on the changing politics of Paul Krugman in the London Review of Books. Of course, the author of Crash. If you want to read an outstanding overview of the post-2008 crisis, that is the place to start. This has been a great show and if you've enjoyed it, if you want to see more interviews like this, here on Avara Media help us grow, help us become the media we want to be. Go to UnivaraMedia.com forward slash support. Make a one-off payment or you can become a supporter. We recommend giving us the amount of money you earn for selling your labor for an hour as a monthly donation. So if you're earning £10 an hour or a £10 monthly donation, it makes the world a difference to us and really helps us make an impact. And like I say, two things that you don't need to pay for is to simply like and subscribe. Ash will be back with Downstream again next week. My name is Aaron Bostani. Michael Walker is here with Tiskey Sauer tomorrow evening. I'll see you later. Goodbye.