The Green New Deal in the Shadow of Keynes – old ideas for new challenges?

Accelerating climate change has propelled the Green New Deal to prominence. But is it the right strategy for a green economic transition? In this presentation, I explore the Green New Deal’s coherence and suitability as a response to ecological catastrophe. Retracing the intellectual history of New Deal-era economic thought, I show how outdated Keynesian preoccupations create troubling paradoxes within contemporary proposals for the Green New Deal. These Keynesian legacies, the product of an era in which economy and ecology were treated as separate entities, may be unfit for the project of rethinking economy and society within the Anthropocene.