The Green Standard

April 22, 2021

By Matt Hughes, Sonya Gurwitt

The economic opportunity of net zero.

The Roosevelt Rundown is an email series featuring the Roosevelt Institute’s top stories of the week.

Note: The Rundown will be on hiatus next week, but stay tuned for analysis and insights on the first 100 days of the Biden administration from Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong.

Climate-Forward

At today’s virtual Earth Day conference, President Biden pledged that the US would halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to 2005 levels—a decarbonization trajectory that would get us to net zero before 2050.

“The countries that take decisive action now to create the industries of the future will be the ones that reap the economic benefits of the clean energy boom that’s coming,” he said. “I see an opportunity to create millions of good-paying, middle-class, union jobs.”

So does Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, who outlined the opportunities of green investment before the US Senate Committee on the Budget last week.

“The investments themselves will create an enormous number of jobs, stimulating the economy and banishing to the past discussions of secular stagnation that have abounded for the past two decades,” he explained.

“The number of jobs that will be lost in the old fossil fuel industries are dwarfed by those that will be created in the new industries. The value created in the new industries will also dwarf the value of the stranded assets in the fossil fuel and related sectors.”

Read Stiglitz’s remarks, and catch up on Roosevelt’s latest climate work with these three fact sheets:

Join the Conversation

“A wealth tax is popular among voters on both sides of the aisle, and that’s for a good reason: because they understand that the system is rigged,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in the opening remarks of this week’s Roosevelt webinar, Fair Share: How Wealth Tax and Progressive Taxation Can Create Equity. “We need to make real investments in this country. That’s how we build opportunities going forward for our children and for young people. It’s how we narrow the racial wealth gap. And it’s how we level the playing field.”

For more from Warren, moderator Lindsay Owens, and speakers Kitty Richards, Darrick Hamilton, and Amanda Fischer, watch the webinar.

And on Tuesday, April 27 at noon ET, join the launch event for Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions, and Strategies for a Progressive Future, a book co-edited by Roosevelt Fellow Deepak Bhargava.

Learn more and register.