Green New Deal confirms conservatives’ suspicions

The first major policy intervention from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the noted social-media personality and future dictator-for-life of the Americas (I believe she’s also a congresswoman of some sort), is a quite-extraordinary document: a blueprint for fighting climate change that manages to confirm every conservative critique of liberal environmental activism, every Republican suspicion of what global-warming alarm is really all about.

The suspicion is that when liberals talk about the dire threat of global warming, they’re actually seizing on the issue to justify, well, #fullsocialism — the seizure of the economy’s commanding heights in order to implement the most left-wing possible agenda.

A conventional liberal, up until now, would dismiss that belief as simply paranoid, the product of Fox News feedback loops. But the Green New Deal that Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey are sponsoring responds by saying: “Yes, that’s absolutely correct”.

It isn’t just that the Green New Deal proposes a 10-year plan for decarbonizing the U.S. economy that would involve the kind of “war socialism” unseen since, well, World War II. It isn’t just that it dismisses all worries about deficits or inflation with a Venezuelan insouciance, or that it seems lukewarm about any policy or technology that might be tainted by capitalism or disliked by progressive interest groups.

It’s also that the list of proposed policies for fighting climate change is filled with what even David Roberts of Vox admits are “eyebrow-raising doozies,” with everything from universal health care to a job guarantee draped under the mantle of environmentalism.

So there’s a pretty easy story to tell here about why, if the Democratic Party makes the Green New Deal vision its own, that shift will empower climate-change skeptics, weaken the hand of would-be compromisers in the GOP and put the kind of climate-change package that could win at least 51 votes in the Senate even further out of reach.

But let me temper this critique by finding two positive things to say about the Green New Deal.

First, in moving somewhat away from the long-standing centrist emphasis on pricing carbon — via carbon taxes or a cap-and-trade system — toward a focus on direct spending, the left might be moving away from theoretical efficiency toward political feasibility.

The experience of the developed world is that carbon pricing schemes look really good in theory, but tend to either get compromised toward inefficiency in practice or else inspire populist uprisings like the gilets jaunes in France. And buried inside the sweeping command-and-control vision of the Green New Deal is the material for a more modest alternative: basically, an emphasis on research and resilience, which would spend more money on the communities most likely to be affected by storms and tides and heat.

This would point to a different zone of compromise from the one often debated up till now. Instead of centrist elites compromising to raise energy taxes that often fall heavily on the working class, you could imagine left-populists and right-populists compromising on adaptationist public works, on “big, beautiful” infrastructure projects (to borrow our president’s rhetoric) that don’t pretend to solve climate change but do mitigate its consequences.