Our view: Green New Deal deserves mockery and respect
The knives are definitely out for the Green New Deal. The sweeping plan to fight climate change has been called immoral, a socialist manifesto and suggestive of Stalinist Russia. “They want to take away your hamburgers!” declared former Trump administration aide Sebastian Gorka at last week’s conservative action conference.
So chaotic is the controversy around the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, DMass., that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to schedule a vote to embarrass Democratic supporters running for president.
The resolution’s progressive overreach makes it a ripe target. It calls for nothing less than a complete overhaul of the American economy, with guarantees for jobs, high-quality health care and higher education that go far beyond fighting global warming.
Potential government costs for infrastructure, research and housing upgrades to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to zero through “a 10year national mobilization” are through the roof, certainly requiring higher taxes or deficit spending. Estimates for even a portion of the agenda run well into trillions of dollars. And even some architects of the resolution say midcentury is a far more realistic target for reaching emission goals.
Even before any of these ideas are debated, however, the resolution has shown success. If nothing else, it has people talking about climate change, a true crisis facing the world. Opponents are producing their own plans in response, as it should be.
The public is growing impatient. The past four years were the four warmest on record. Seventy-three percent of Americans now believe that climate change is real. A study released last week found the chance that humans are the primary cause of global warming is now 99.999 percent.
Last year, a landmark scientific report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that nations are not acting quickly enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions from industry, agriculture and fossil fuels, to avoid a temperature increase that will generate increasingly intense wildfires, storms and droughts as well as rising seas.
The IPCC report called for dramatic emission reductions by 2030 to avoid the worst, and Green New Deal authors used the IPCC findings as a basis for their economic overhaul. But the resolution, even if passed, changes nothing. At this stage, it is only a resolution with a list of goals aimed at generating policies to be vetted and approved by congressional consensus.
What would a more specific, realistic Green New Deal look like? Its features would include:
❚ A carbon tax set high enough to level the playing field in power generation so green-energy sources can gain traction. That won't happen if fossilfuel polluters keep using the atmosphere as a free waste dump. Proceeds from the tax should be rebated to consumers to prevent political blowback.
❚ A recommitment to nuclear power, which generates 20 percent of the nation’s energy without producing greenhouse gases.
❚ Remaining in the Paris climate accord. Global warming is a global problem that requires a global solution.
❚ Government-promoted research and development, aimed not just at curbing greenhouse gases but also at adaptation to, and mitigation of, the amount of warming already baked in.
Republicans in the White House and Congress are having a grand old time mocking the Green New Deal. Parts of the plan lend themselves to mockery. But critics owe future generations more than scorn; they have an obligation to put better ideas on the table.