Among the prime economic factors vaulting Donald Trump to power was the extreme concentration of wealth and influence in a handful of large and growing metros—chiefly on the coasts. The 2016 electoral map forced a geographic reckoning not unlike that which gave rise to the New Deal programs of the 1930s. While the Great Depression compelled the Roosevelt administration to rush federal resources throughout the country to put the unemployed to work, the New Deal also targeted specific regions that cried out for greater investment. The Depression-era South was in need of electrical “modernization,” the Dust Bowl–ridden Lower Plains were in need of stronger wind and soil erosion controls, and the West was in need of new water and forest management infrastructure. Tending to these regional deficits primed the economy for roughly balanced participation in war mobilization and postwar prosperity.

Likewise, the climate crisis has given rise to various proposals for a Green New Deal that, in its final form, should also tackle regional disparities. One region in particular stands out: the industrial and agricultural Midwest and northern Mid-Atlantic—the industrial heartland. Not only is this region rich in water and land resources that will be essential to battling climate change, but much of the area has endured staggering levels of policy neglect and private-sector disinvestment as its people have struggled to compete in the re-engineered global economy over the past 40 years. In spite of the howls of resentment that have long rung from “flyover country,” stagnating wages, overseas outsourcing, and the cultural elevation of “smart” digital knowledge work over that of manual labor proceeded obliviously apace, fueling the conviction that neither political party supported the interests of working people. Not surprisingly, a rhetoric of ethno-racial grievance, never entirely dormant, filled the political vacuum.

It didn’t help either that, just as cities came back into favor with the new millennium, our most influential urban economists doubled down, arguing that public-investment policy should be “people-based” not “place-based,” providing individuals with the resources to follow the wiles of the market wherever it might lead rather than to restore their home communities. University of California, Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti put it most bluntly in his widely hailed 2012 book The New Geography of Jobs. A “Great Divergence” has been under way in the U.S. economy with no signs of letup, he argues, dividing the country into “three Americas” with geographic markers. “At one extreme are the brain hubs—cities with a well-educated labor force and a strong innovation sector,” he observes, where there is also plenty of work in service industries. “At the other extreme are cities once dominated by traditional manufacturing, which are declining rapidly, losing jobs and residents.” A number of other cities “could go either way”—to heaven or to hell. Equipped with this passive economistic analysis, “thought leaders” from the groves of academe to TEDx conferences, from the political, pundit, and donor classes, could content themselves with propping up the margins. Until the denizens of hell, as it were, finally felt heard by Donald Trump, who vowed they would be “forgotten no longer.” Paired with this reckoning was another: It became ever more clear that climate change is under way. And given the Trumpian view that climate change is a hoax, the two were poised for collision.

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The Case for Regional Rebalancing

It has been said that regions, which lack clear jurisdictional boundaries and institutional accountability, are “poor substitutes for states.” Yet there are some challenges that elude the limitations of formal state and local governance. What regions lack in jurisdictional authority, they possess in reflecting social, economic, and ecosystem relationships that amount to shared interests and contributions to the broader commonweal. Students of large-scale regional planning speak of its importance in establishing “regional balance” in “underdeveloped” places, or where natural or man-made disasters or overuse of natural resources threatens localities without the means to restore their equilibrium. On the national scale, regional governance can play an as-needed temporary role in meeting historical exigencies, of which climate change surely counts as among the most extreme ever faced.

Consider the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the most ambitious multilevel regional economic development project of the New Deal, where all the above conditions prevailed. Recognizing that the still-impoverished post–Civil War South—a lingering man-made regional disaster—didn’t have the resources to take advantage of technological advances in electricity, flood management, inland water navigation, crop yields, and car-worthy road building, New Dealers called for the large area’s regional integration into the modern economy. Ushered through Congress by populist-Republican Senator George Norris of Nebraska and eventually led by Midwestern public-utility advocate David Lilienthal, the TVA built 16 hydroelectric dams with flood control capacity and a transmission line network that extended through most of Tennessee and parts of Alabama, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia during its first 11 years alone, between 1933 and 1943. It also introduced soil and forest conservation practices in this largely agricultural area that had been over-timbered and poorly farmed, and took public-health measures to combat a vicious malaria outbreak that afflicted 30 percent of the population. TVA public works projects employed union labor and, all together, put tens of thousands of people to work during the depths of the Depression.

By its own rebalancing standards, the TVA was a success. It not only provided desperately needed employment but, in providing a comparatively cheap public utility—electricity—it also attracted private business to the region, notably in textiles, wood processing, chemicals, and armaments manufacturing. It was hardly without critics, from contemporary local communities displaced through eminent domain and private-utility interests opposed to public power, to environmentalist opponents of the TVA’s later embrace of coal-fired and nuclear plants. And like virtually all New Deal programs, it was saturated with Jim Crow and racial discrimination. But as intended, the TVA stabilized a critical subregion of the South and paved the way for what came to be known as the Sun Belt.

The TVA also marked a historic pivot. Influenced in its earliest years by the ecological regionalism of Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and other critics of metropolitan “monopoly” (including the Southern Agrarians), its focus had been on “river basin development” and the enhancement of rural communities. By 1943, when the affiliated National Resources Planning Board was shut down by a Congress resentful of its executive powers, the federal government’s pursuit of regional balancing had given way to a model of urban-industrial expansion favoring large metropolitan regions—including the regions covered by the TVA itself: population in its metropolitan counties grew by almost two-thirds between 1930 and1950. The TVA continued to serve as a model for balancing “underdeveloped” regions worldwide, supported by the international finance infrastructure hatched at Bretton Woods—the IMF, the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—but by the early 1970s, these institutions shifted course. Calling for “wage restraint” and an “open door” for transnational corporate and nonprofit enterprise, they promoted a “new international division of labor” in which developing countries would exercise their comparative labor market advantage in manufacturing and extraction while “developed” nations in the West would assume control over staple food production, high-tech innovation, and finance—to their great enrichment.

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All three conditions that call for regional balancing—lack of integration with “modern” technologies, proneness to natural and man-made disaster, and environmental degradation—justify bringing the industrial heartland into parity with regions rich with so-called brain hubs. Not only has the region’s economy been systematically weakened for many decades, but its resources are crucial to combating climate change. Repaired and upgraded after decades of neglect, it can contribute a disproportionate share of water, land, energy capacity, and productive know-how to decarbonization and adaptation to the perils ahead.

× Expand Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP Photo Algae bloom covers Lake Erie near Toledo, Ohio.

Water

Taken together, the Great Lakes comprise the largest body of fresh water in the world, and, man, have they taken a beating. The rapid 19th-century Anglo-American settlement of their shores coincided with the rise of manufacturing, modern plumbing, and later, industrial agriculture—a triumvirate of toxic sources that threatens the basin’s drinking water and contributes to flooding hazards. Lake Erie has been particularly hard hit by algae blooms affecting all five of the lakes, caused by phosphorous and nitrogen “nutrient” runoff produced by agricultural and residential fertilizer, human and animal waste, and pesticides. This cocktail of contaminants flows into waterways feeding into the Great Lakes during heavy rainfall, which is increasing with climate change. An especially severe algae bloom in the western basin of Lake Erie, in 2014, forced the City of Toledo to impose a nearly three-day ban on its lake-drawn tap water, with an estimated economic impact cost of $65 million. The blooms appear each summer, a particularly large one in 2019, and threaten to grow worse across the world with warming waters.

Prospect Illustration

One of the major conduits for contaminated runoff are the combined sewer systems (CSSs) that are concentrated in cities throughout the Midwest and Northeast. With industrialization came modern plumbing, along with this then state-of-the-art wastewater and sewer infrastructure, which cleared stormwater, industrial waste, and untreated sewage through one outflow piping system. Although a big improvement over the cesspool ditches that once lined city streets, CCSs were not designed to handle massive population growth, the spread of flush toilets, or the impervious asphalt road surfaces later used to accommodate automotive travel. Constructed as long as 150 years ago, their metal sewer pipes are also corroding and clogging, leading to leakage into the groundwater and reduced carrying capacity.

Another grave threat to the region’s water infrastructure was thrown into high relief five years ago with the Flint, Michigan, water crisis: poisoning conveyed through lead pipes, which is still far from resolved. Again, aging lead service pipes and soldering predominate in the Midwest, and somewhat less so in the Northeast. Since 2014, lead has been found to be contaminating drinking water in Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Newark, among other cities. Media outlets such as CBS News call this a “national problem,” but it is most acute and widespread in the industrial heartland.

The estimated cost of addressing these health-menacing troubles is high but appropriate to the Green New Deal’s mission and scale of public investment. In 2004, the EPA put a price tag of $88.8 billion on upgrading CCS systems nationwide. Noting that some progress has already been made in reducing lead exposure from tap water, the American Water Works Association estimated in 2016 that it will cost some $1.3 billion to repair utility-owned lead-based drinking water mains and to replace lead service pipes over the following 25 years. Digital sensoring systems, now under development, could also monitor lead and nutrient levels, signaling priority investment over time. Utilities, homeowners, businesses, and state and local governments could share these expenses with federal subsidies provided by a wisely structured, regionally focused Green New Deal.

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Some have called for renaming the Rust Belt the Water Belt. It’s a good idea, one that elevates the region’s importance in a Green New Deal. Such reframing avoids sweeping the region into the dustbin of globalization, and lays stress on safeguarding its distinctive hydrological gifts for future generations.

Land

The industrial heartland has an abundance of poorly used farmland and underused urban land. According to the American Farmland Trust, 10 percent of the world’s arable acres lie in the United States. Most of the best of this land, suitable for intensive agriculture and crop production, is located in the American Midwest. The region’s prime farmland is afflicted in two senses. For one, it is particularly susceptible to suburban development pressure, or what a Brookings Institution study called “sprawl without growth,” in which development pushes outward without metro population growth to support it. This resource waste and fiscal recklessness stems from a legacy of racial discrimination, decades of urban disinvestment and depopulation, and the flight of manufacturing from cities—first to the suburbs, then to the South, and eventually overseas.

The abuse of farmland is also self-inflicted, with environmental consequences that extend beyond the Midwest. Excessive drainage and poor soil cultivation with heavy reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides leads to greater flooding (and drought) impacts along the tributary rivers feeding into the Mississippi River. The catastrophic rolling floods of 2019 demonstrated that, without altering our agricultural practices, the country’s interior river system cannot handle the more intensive, frequent precipitation induced by climate change. And the cost is high, not only to individual farmers, but in the form of taxpayer-funded crop insurance, higher food prices, and water contamination that culminates in the deoxygenated dead zone unfit for marine habitat that plagues the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi each summer. Most of this is, of course, in the service of subsidized big-industrial commodity agriculture, which also drives up land prices and inhibits food production by smaller farmers and ranchers.

A Green New Deal should target this region for farmland protection from both sprawl and agricultural practices that endanger the country’s—even the world’s—food supply and water integrity. This is not the place to lay out comprehensive policy proposals, but a powerful first step would be to dramatically increase funding for the federal Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, which enables farmers to put their land into permanent agricultural use without sacrificing their plans to retire on the proceeds of sale to developers. More controversially, programs such as British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve, which puts aside approximately 18,000 square miles of public and private land throughout the province for agricultural and forestry uses, should also receive serious consideration. Forests and well-tended soils, it should be added, have the additional advantage of acting as carbon sinks, a form of mitigation that will be indispensable in the years ahead. And for those who question where future development would go without access to so-called open land, zoning reform could actually take advantage of the region’s sprawl-without-growth pattern, which has created plenty of potential for infill housing and commercial development on vacant and distressed lots in heartland cities and inner-ring suburbs, and on large single-family properties.

Sprawl without growth has also devastated urban land values in our legacy cities—even in the more successful ones, where poor neighborhoods have actually grown poorer even as gentrification seized hold of others. As a result of downward property values, their predominately black residents are more deeply entrenched in intergenerational poverty, landlords and even homeowners have little incentive to invest in their properties, and those with middle-class incomes are compelled to move to the suburbs. In these neighborhoods, vacant or distressed properties are the norm, and roads, sidewalks, street lighting, and parks are in disrepair. This is what disinvestment looks like.

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As Alan Mallach has argued in his prudent, deeply learned 2018 book The Divided City, these neighborhoods may not be poised for dramatic turnaround, but they can be made more safe, healthy, and investment-worthy for their resident communities. As the sweeping mid-20th-century urban-renewal gambits demonstrated, in this arena federal planning should defer to local leadership pursuing as-needed incremental change. But a Green New Deal could do much to supplement cash-strapped municipalities in funding home repairs and public works improvements. These are not big-ticket items. Mallach estimates that $10 million could turn 1,000 borderline homes safe and livable, keeping residents in their neighborhoods. It could also assist in strengthening rental regulations to curb slumlords who take advantage of generous, federally funded Section 8 vouchers. These equity measures, and many others like them, also position legacy cities for a low-carbon future by keeping urban communities intact—patrons of public transit, city businesses, and local services—rather than suburb-bound.

Renewable Energy and Technology

The industrial heartland’s energy system is as outworn as its once-storied manufacturing base. According to PV Magazine, the Midwest’s contribution to the nation’s renewable-energy mix is just 4 percent, and half of that comes from one state: Minnesota. The explanation is twofold. The region is disproportionately dependent on coal-fired power generation, and state regulations—particularly renewable portfolio standards (RPS)—have been neither as consistent nor as robust as elsewhere. The largely rural region is also wedded to fossil-fueled automotive travel—culturally and for lack of viable transportation alternatives.

That said, wind and solar are making some headway in the region, in part because of its plentiful open and working lands. Five of its states are among the top ten in U.S. installed wind generation capacity,, and in spite of technical difficulties, the Cleveland area is poised to install a 20.7-megawatt pilot wind farm, long under development, on Lake Erie. The newest entering wedge, however, lies in solar. Even in this notoriously cloudy region, at-par competitive pricing in the solar sector is putting utility-scale solar in the pipeline, most surprisingly in coal-dependent, low-RPS Ohio, also home to the Western Hemisphere’s largest solar manufacturing company, metro Toledo’s First Solar. And none of this takes into account community and rooftop solar and the extent to which farmers are supplementing their incomes with wind and, increasingly, solar installations.

× Expand Doral Chenoweth III/The Columbus Dispatch The Timber Road II Wind Farm in the northwestern corner of Ohio

Although markets, with minor regulatory intervention, are beginning to advance renewable energy in the region, the transition faces another obstacle: the limitations of the region’s privately owned grid. In the Midcontinent ISO, a federally approved nonprofit that manages electricity in 15 states, 14 have vertically integrated utilities, meaning that private utilities own everything from power generators to transmission and distribution lines. The arrangements vary significantly, but the point is that some states want greater influence over generation sources (mainly to bolster nuclear or renewables), even if it requires subsidies that distort market pricing, and that accommodating intermittent renewables and two-way “smart” energy flow will require major investment in transmission line upgrades. Development of the two-way smart grid will be especially important to developing the economically competitive charging infrastructure essential to transitioning to electric vehicles—where the Midwest hasn’t even made a dent.

The industrial heartland is hardly alone in facing these regulatory, technical, and market pricing issues. But it also has the largest share of coal-fired power and the greatest need to make strides in renewable energy. Again, a Green New Deal can provide targeted support here, subsidizing coal off-lining, transmission upgrades, and energy innovation, and returning at least parts of the grid to public ownership—taking shareholder pressure out of the system.

Finally, support for a low-carbon economy in this region will require substituting good jobs for those lost in fossil fuel production and manufacturing—even if some of the latter are recaptured. Most current and prospective jobs, however, require access to high-speed internet services, whether through cable-based broadband or state-of-the art wireless. The trouble is that the market economics require high-density use to support the expensive infrastructure buildout, which means that rural areas are grossly underserved. This leaves farmers without the digital access needed to engage in precision agriculture and off-farm work. It deprives rural populations of distance learning and small-business opportunities, as well as integration with high-tech industries. Silicon Valley has shown interest in teaching coding to displaced and underemployed workers in America’s backwaters, as Arlie Hochschild recently reported in The New York Times with a focus on former Appalachian coal miners. Their early programs have met with some success. Such initiatives can move this work out of high-priced cities, where the cost of living is prohibitive for middle-income earners, or back to the United States from, say, Bangladesh, while geographically distributing high-tech earnings across the country. But without high-speed digital access, those potential rural gains are likely to be minimal, arousing further resentment and deepening the region’s large pockets of rural isolation. The obstacles are entirely economic, and they are expensive. And the industrial heartland, along with the lower South, is the most deprived of these services. Here again, Green New Deal policy should work with the states and the private sector to prioritize rural broadband in the industrial heartland—as did the New Deal in bringing rural electrification to the South through the TVA.

Regional Development: the Case of Syracuse

Imagine what an infusion of Green New Deal funding could accomplish within the metros that ground the smaller regional economies dotting the industrial heartland. With a population of approximately 145,000, Syracuse, New York, is the eastern gateway to the Rust Belt. Like its sister legacy cities, Syracuse was once a manufacturing powerhouse, home to the likes of General Electric, Carrier, Chrysler, GM, and Crouse-Hinds, and blessed with prime farmland that has long supported dairy, fruit, and vegetable cultivation, and commodity crops. Also similarly, the city has lost more than a third of its population since 1950, while its metro footprint has sprawled outward with virtually no equivalent population growth. Unlike many of its peers, Syracuse is rich in medical and university research centers; Syracuse University has been an unusually effective partner in stabilizing a nearby neighborhood of concentrated poverty, increasing access to jobs and homeownership.

When the 2013 Brookings study featured the Syracuse metro region as a particularly egregious example of sprawl without growth throughout upstate New York (and the industrial heartland in general), state and local government took stronger action on urban land use. The Cuomo administration put in place regional economic development packages that incentivized smart growth and, in 2018, the country’s most generous state-level farmland protection subsidies—the second-greatest share ($7.7 million) going to Central New York. Most substantially, the CNY Regional Economic Development Council won a then-new 2015 Upstate Revitalization Initiative competitive state grant of $500 million to be distributed over five years. Among its winning strategies are the creation of a global manufacturing and logistics hub, a commission on government “modernization” to reduce fiscal inefficiencies caused by fragmented local services, and a program to improve food and beverage processing for global export. On its eventual to-do list, with further capital and funding support, are programs to develop geothermal HVAC systems and improve regional water infrastructure.

× Expand Mike Groll/AP Photo Workers from the Syracuse Water Department repair a broken main in 2014. (Mike Groll/AP Photo)

These efforts represent a start, but Green New Deal funding could achieve full buildout. Chris Carrick, energy program manager at the Central New York Regional Planning and Development Board, whom I spoke with by phone, put together a “wish list” of energy- and water-related projects he’d like to see funded by a Green New Deal. Using the $500 million revitalization grant as a benchmark, with a 90 percent federal match similar to that used for highway funding, he traces out what a $900 million pot might accomplish in Syracuse. He begins with “the basics,” obvious and easy projects that have been long neglected. With approximately 25 percent of Syracuse households, or 14,500, below the poverty line, the city has already begun using state funds to make these homes energy-efficient. At full scale, however, a $100 million low-income home energy retrofit fund would not only reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve the value of these homes while bringing cost savings to household budgets, it would attract job-supporting insulation manufacturers and installation companies to the city. After all, remarks Carrick, in these energy-inefficient homes the federal low-income heating assistance program is just another “fossil fuel industry subsidy.” Energy conservation measures in 35 city buildings would cost another $3 million.

The largest source of GHG emissions in New York state has moved in recent years, however, from buildings to transportation. Here Carrick proposes replacing the regional 250-bus Centro fleet with hybrid or battery electric buses, at a cost of $50–$70 million, and replacing the two most heavily traveled lines with bus rapid transit—with amenity and shelter upgrades—for another $35 million. And in spite of its reduced population, Syracuse remains the region’s predominant employment center, with a disproportionately large share of commuters. To reduce automotive use, Carrick calls for establishing several intermodal last-mile transit hubs, for a price tag of $30–$40 million. And to prepare for electric-vehicle use, installing charging stations would cost another $10 million. Upgrades to rail and port facilities, to displace polluting truck transport, would come in at $25 million.

Next up, grid and clean-energy upgrades. With funding from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the Central New York planning board conducted a successful two-year feasibility study of microgrid development in a city neighborhood. Microgrids offer resilient decentralized power, and are equipped to handle solar and other sources of renewable energy. Carrick estimates that bringing microgrids to other highly serviced neighborhoods would cost $10 million. Other projects, including a downtown district-energy system using either lake-source geothermal or Onondaga Lake wastewater treatment plant waste heat recovery and geothermal, would ring up at another $60–$110 million. The US EPA and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation are also pressing for installation of solar photovoltaic on brownfields and closed municipal landfills, which would amount to 50 megawatts of electricity generation at a cost of $100 million.

Further, as elsewhere in the industrial heartland, the Syracuse metro region’s stormwater and sewer infrastructure is “hopelessly decrepit,” says Carrick, due to deferred maintenance. Not only does the city itself have a combined sewer overflow system, to which its Save the Rain green-infrastructure initiative is alone unequal, but the 120-year-old system is ravaged with leaky pipes that waste water and weakens their capacity to capture water flow and waste heat energy and serve water pumping needs. Carrick suggests that addressing these water management issues, including extensive development of green infrastructure, would cost around $100 million in Syracuse and a handful of metro communities. Others put the figure much higher; much depends on what parts of this extensive infrastructure projected budgets cover.

All together, the price tag adds up to some $600 million. As we have seen, New York state has already teed up its farmland conservation, water infrastructure, and clean-energy programs. The state also established a Green Bank in 2014—the country’s largest—offering low-interest loans for private-sector investment in renewable-energy development. And just this summer, the state passed an aggressive Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, calling for complete zero-carbon electricity (including 15 percent offsets) by 2050, with a 40 percent reduction from 1990 GHG levels by 2030. With these state mandates and financing mechanisms in place, and local groundwork long established, regional Green New Deal funding could push Syracuse—and other kindred cities—across the finish line, recapturing the value of its many natural assets in a decarbonized future.

Reviving Regional Planning

National regional planning fell out of favor long ago, replaced by an urban-industrial growth model that, with later assists from the international finance system, led to the global division of labor that so gutted the industrial heartland. In the era of climate change, a Green New Deal should claw back these losses, incorporating some version of the TVA’s original river basin–based ecological regionalism into its policy framework. Just as the South received targeted attention through the TVA in an effort to establish regional balance, the industrial heartland today has a special claim to regional policy priorities. Among all U.S. regions, it lost out the most to the neoliberal global economy in manufacturing jobs, urban population loss and vacant properties, state and local fiscal distress, and agricultural degradation. It also has disproportionately more to contribute to a low-carbon economy, with its prime farmland, plentiful water supply, and land assets suited to wind, solar, and other forms of renewable energy. Today, the region’s states and localities lack the capacity to address its challenges and build on its strengths. It is fair to say that it is owed federal support to retool for the low-carbon economy and to prepare for climate migrants who will soon be moving away from the coasts and from warmer climes.

Getting there politically would be a tall order, of course. The emergency conditions of the Great Depression inclined the electorate to hand FDR executive powers unimaginable today, when the issue is not one of massive unemployment but of low-paid underemployment. As a result, the original New Deal distributed spending for programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Soil Conservation Service, and the Works Progress and Public Works Administrations throughout the country, which overlapped with more-targeted programs, including the TVA. Likewise, and perhaps more germane today, military spending during and after World War II effectively rebalanced the economy by moving large shares of defense contracts out of large industrialized coastal cities and into the more economically needy and lower-cost South and West, suburbanizing districts, and rural areas. Today’s seemingly permanent and more evenly distributed defense spending ensures that military appropriations—however bloated—get through Congress with bipartisan support. Congressional earmarking, banned in 2011, also helped even the field. Strange as it is to suggest, a Green New Deal might model the political workings of the American warfare state and restore the practice of earmarking to provide geographical balance to climate funding while also targeting resources to the industrial heartland.

At present, in the industrial heartland as elsewhere, some collaborative regional governance is already poised to put federal climate funding to use. These networks, now limited in number and scope, need to be expanded significantly if the region is to be revived and retooled to meet the disproportionate demands climate change will place on it. The Council of State Governments, itself a product of the New Deal, is hardly the robust vehicle for national regional planning it was when established in 1933. But its four regional subsections, including one for the Midwest, offer a skeletal framework for debating inter-regional climate priorities.

The Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, established in 2010, brought together federal agencies; state, provincial, and tribal governments; mayoral compacts; universities; and the private sector to promote the ecosystem health of these critical waters. Just recently, its federal funding received bipartisan support. The Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord, signed by six regional governors in 2007 and gutted three years later with the Tea Party revolt, is showing signs of life again. These are just a few of the coordinated state and local organizations positioned to mount a national regional approach to climate change.

There was a time when the industrial heartland grounded the U.S. manufacturing economy. Due to its bountiful resources, it is primed to ground the productive green economy too, if only our politics can find ways of bringing it about.