In May 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act establishing the nation’s largest public utility and setting in motion an ambitious New Deal policy to provide electricity and jobs to some of the poorest Americans in the midst of the Great Depression.
Nearly 86 years later, a new proposal aims to sharpen the Tennessee Valley Authority into the speartip of a so-called Green New Deal, a nascent push to radically shrink greenhouse gas emissions and give good-paying clean energy jobs to every American who wants one.
In a 10-page report published Wednesday, the People’s Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank, detailed how tweaks to the law governing the Tennessee Valley Authority could transform the federally owned utility into “a renewable energy juggernaut that pushes at every margin to install as much clean energy capacity as possible across the country.”
The idea comes amid fierce debate over how a patchwork of legislation could culminate in a Green New Deal that mobilizes the entire United States economy to all but end fossil fuel use over the next decade and prepare for the violent storms, droughts and sea-level rise already happening as a result of centuries of burning oil, gas and coal. Zeroing out emissions from the biggest federally owned utility in the country cannot alone comprise a Green New Deal, but it offers a starting point as Democratic lawmakers begin drafting bills.