Itroduction:

In a similar vein, Robert Pollin develops a proposal for "Building the Green New Deal in the United States". The author starts his analysis by observing that the Obama Administration's economic stimulus programme that was passed into law by the U.S. Congress in February 2009 despite being too small and too loaded with tax breaks for corporations is still among the most progressive pieces of U.S. economic legislation since the 1960s. The green investment features alone stand as a major advance toward building a clean-energy economy. In the author's view, doubly significant is the fact that this legislation represents the first largescale attempt to combine protection of the environment with development of a clean-energy economy, job creation, and economic opportunity. For a generation, the opposite idea was assumed: You could protect the environment, or you could promote economic growth and job creation, but not both. It has been known since World War II ended the 1930s depression that large-scale government spending can generate millions of jobs and push the economy out of a slump. But of course, in the 1940s, it was the expansion of military spending, not social or environmental programmes, that served as the engine of job creation. The author raises the question: Can we expect that a green investment programme today can have an effect comparable to military spending in the 1940s? In other words, is it viable to think about building a Green New Deal today? And indeed, in Pollin's assessment, the most important and most clearly established economic benefit of such a Green New Deal is that cleanenergy investments can be a substantial source of new employment opportunities throughout the United States.