Sanders’ global Green New Deal

You may have heard of Bernie Sanders’ Green New Deal, his plan for a socialist makeover of the U.S. economy in the name of addressing climate change. But did you know that the independent senator from Vermont and Democratic presidential front-runner has also proposed a Green New Deal for the World?

It got little notice, but in his answers to a foreign policy questionnaire from the Council on Foreign Relations, Sanders announced that as president, he would “orchestrate a multilateral campaign — a Green New Deal for the World — to coordinate investment in green technology and make that technology widely available through long-term financing for the poor countries that currently depend on coal and other fossil fuels.”

This is apparently the first instance of Sanders publicly using the phrase “Green New Deal for the World.” Asked for details, his foreign policy adviser Matt Duss pointed me to the Green New Deal page of the candidate’s website, where Sanders promises that “in order to help countries of the Global South with climate adaptation efforts, the U.S. will invest $200 billion in the Green Climate Fund for the equitable transfer of renewable technologies, climate adaptation, and assistance in adopting sustainable energies.”

In this way, Sanders’ website says, the United States “can ensure that the developing world secures reliable electricity, reduces poverty and pollution-related fatalities, creates greater net employment, and improves living standards — all while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.”

We must spend this money, Sanders says, because “the global poor have borne and will bear” the burden of climate change “disproportionately.”

Compared with Sanders’ other spending plans, $200 billion may seem like a drop in the bucket. It isn’t. The entire U.S. foreign aid budget is less than $50 billion annually — spending $200 billion over 10 years would represent a roughly 40% increase in foreign aid. Elsewhere in the CFR questionnaire, Sanders extols “the extremely radical foreign policy initiative called the Marshall Plan” in which the United States spent “the equivalent of $130 billion just to reconstruct Western Europe after World War II.” His Green New Deal for the World would cost 54% more than the Marshall Plan did in today’s dollars.

Where would Sanders get the money?

The defense budget, of course. On his website, Sanders pledges to work with other nations to redirect “the trillions of dollars our nations spend on misguided wars and weapons of mass destruction to instead work together internationally to combat our climate crisis.”

He adds that “the Pentagon is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world” and that “the United States spends $81 billion annually to protect oil supplies and transport routes.” The Pentagon apparently would serve as a Green New Deal for the World slush fund.

With Sanders tightening his grip on the Democratic nomination, voters have yet to come to grips with the sheer magnitude of his spending plans. He has proposed a whopping $97.5 trillion in new government spending over the coming decade. To put that in perspective, U.S. households held about $98 trillion of wealth in 2018. In other words, Sanders plans to spend the equivalent of almost the total value of everything we own — all the cars, homes, retirement plans, college funds, savings accounts and other assets that U.S. citizens possess, minus liabilities.

That’s an ungodly sum. And it comes on top of the $60 trillion the federal government is already on track to spend, plus the $29.7 trillion state and local governments are set to spend. According to Manhattan Institute budget expert Brian Riedl, under Sanders’ plans, “total government spending at all levels would surge to as high as 70% of gross domestic product,” and “approximately half of the American workforce would be employed by the government.”

In addition to guaranteeing all Americans a government job, forgiving all student loans, guaranteeing free public-college tuition, providing paid family leave, free child care and free government health care for Americans and undocumented immigrants alike, Sanders is going to finance a Green New Deal for the World. There used to be a saying in Washington: A billion here, a billion there, and soon you’re talking real money.

Under a Sanders administration, change it to trillion.