Green fantasy

Why endorse the Green New Deal?

There’s an old joke about an egotistical politician whose disgruntled speechwriter, just before quitting, prepares a draft that promises the moon, and specifics for how to pay for it, on the first two pages. The third page is left blank, except for the words “you’re on your own now.”

That’s the position in which the “Green New Deal” package of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s, D-N.Y., co-introduced by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., has left several Democratic presidential candidates who had rushed to endorse it. AOC (as she’s often called) herself has tried to repudiate some of it as an early draft. Strangely, reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post have indulged this false alibi.

Someone wrote the document, someone whose goal is to “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and” — incidentally — “create economic prosperity for all” in just 10 years.

One representative plank: “Build out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Another: “Create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.” A third: “Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, system that ensures universal access to healthy food.”

Sounds kind of drastic. Especially if you sometimes fly several hours to vacation or visit relatives or if you drive an SUV or a pickup truck. Or if you eat meat from methane-emitting cattle or hogs.

But AOC’s folks, in the FAQ which they maintain was sent out by mistake, assure voters that their goal is “netzero, rather than zero emissions in 10 years, because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.”

So, these same people who say they couldn’t put out the right press release assure us that they “can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture” in 10 years.

By this point, it should be apparent that the “Green New Deal” is never going to happen. If you had any doubts, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this week that he was ditching his predecessor Jerry Brown’s controversial high-speed rail line which, as Mr. Newsom said, “would cost too much and take too long.” The latest estimates were it will take $77 billion until completion in 2033.

But it’s worth reflecting on what the “Green New Deal” tells us about American leftists. Far from encouraging 21stcentury technology, they want to abandon 20th-century technology (planes, non-electric autos) and go back to the 19th (trains). And far from accommodating individual choices, they want to boss everyone around.

Those family farmers they extol will have to wait to bring their products to town if their electric vehicles are out of juice because the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining and if they’re still waiting for the “affordable public transit” to reach their farm. (Maybe they can use bike lanes?)

It’s not at all clear that coastal sophisticates will be content to be stuck on slow-moving trains and stuck off on sidings for 20 or so hours out in what they like to call Flyover Country, until someone cleverer than Gavin Newsom can gin up the federal printing press to pay for high-speed rail tracks between Manhattan and Hollywood.

Those on the political left share a withering contempt and thinly veiled hostility toward ordinary middle-income people: the ones raising families and shopping at malls and navigating enormous SUVs (needed for the kids’ car seats) into the fast-food carryout lanes.

Leftists love to confine vulgar people to rail lines — high-speed rail or urban subways — and force them into high-rise apartments which they design. They hate single-family-home suburbs and the automobile which lets ordinary people go where they want to go, when they want to, with as many stops as they like.

Voters feel differently. In France, where most people live beyond walking distance of the Paris Metro, the Yellow Vests have led a successful rebellion against a carbon tax, i.e., a tax on driving. In Washington state, voters last fall, even in the county that includes Seattle, soundly rejected a carbon tax last November.

Now, Mr. Markey says it’s unfair for Republicans to bring his own “Green New Deal” to the Senate floor. That’s probably because even if the label polls well, he suspects that the substance won’t.

So, why have presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren endorsed this foolishness? Good question.