What's in the Green New Deal? David Harsanyi provides some details of the ambitious plan released this week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.):
- Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas — one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.
- Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable "clean" energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy generation so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.
- Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every "combustion-engine vehicle" — trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars — within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built "everywhere," though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.
- Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to "retrofit every building in America" with "state of the art energy efficiency." I repeat, "every building in America." That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with…well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.
- Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out "highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary." Good luck Hawaii! California's high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state's biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we'll see, trains that run on fossil fuels will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?
[David Harsanyi, "The 10 Most Insane Requirements of the Green New Deal," The Federalist, February 7]
The Green New Deal is really a plan for a massive tax increase. Jason Isaac writes:
[W]e are not going to figure out how to generate all the power we need and use in America from wind and solar in the next decade. We're not even going to get close. We do not possess the technology to do this, and current advancements in technology are not remotely on pace to accomplish this in 10 years. The Left dismisses these inconvenient truths by calling the GND their "moonshot." But the actual Moonshot took tremendous planning, time, money, and technological advances, none of which are present in this absurd proposal.
So if the Green New Deal won't prevent the end of the world, what is the point of the plan? Simply put, it's a massive tax on every American, now and in the future, to pay for the Left's wish list of enormous government programs.
The centerpiece of the proposal is for taxpayers to take on truly unfathomable amounts of new debt. It then adds equal parts "wealth tax" and a carbon tax. Because we need energy to make or do anything and, as discussed, 80 percent of our energy comes from carbon-based fuels, a carbon tax is a tax on literally everything. It won't matter if you're rich, poor, or in the middle; it won't matter if you're a big or small business, an individual, a student, or have a family; it won't matter if you live in Texas or California, New York, or Florida. Everybody pays.
The Green New Deal is a tax on everything we do, make, wear, eat, drink, drive, transport, import, export, and use. It will mean an enormous shift of resources away from people to the government for the express purpose of creating a massive new bureaucracy that will affect, if not control, nearly every aspect of our lives. It's all there in the plan.
[Jason Isaac, "The Green New Deal Is a Massive Tax Hike," Texas Public Policy Foundation, February 8]
Forget about diversity and localism. Chris Edwards writes:
A contradiction in left-wing politics for decades has been the professed support of community, diversity, localism, and democracy on the one hand with the advocacy of federal power to address society's ills on the other. The Green New Deal (GND) issued by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and co-sponsors illustrates the contradiction in spades.
The proposed scope of new federal authority under the GND is remarkable. The plan demands a "national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II" and a "10-year national mobilization.'' The use of the war-like "mobilization" is particularly aggressive when talking about peacetime domestic policymaking.
The plan would push the nation to reach zero greenhouse gases, upgrade all buildings, generate all power with zero emissions, overhaul transportation, and generate "massive growth" in clean manufacturing. It would supposedly provide all people education, training, a good job, high-quality health care, affordable and safe housing, economic security, clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.
It would do all this with spending, regulations, and government "ownership stakes." [...]
However, long experience shows that when the federal government subsidizes and regulates local activities, decisionmaking moves from local elected officials to unknown and inaccessible federal bureaucrats. The GND would replace local and voluntary interactions with top-down coercion.
The exercise of vast federal power under the GND would steamroll collaboration, partnership, diversity, localism, and participatory processes.
[Chris Edwards, "Green New Deal Would Crush Liberal Values," Cato Institute, February 8]
Local laws will get in the way of the Green New Deal. Christian Britschgi writes:
[T]he Green New Deal would likely require the renovation or replacement of close to 100 million residential structures. Add to that the roughly 6 million commercial buildings in the U.S., plus all the public schools, government offices, and industrial buildings in the country, and we're talking about a lot of retrofitting.
The price tag for all this would be astronomical. It's also somewhat beside the point. Even if the money were available (I suppose we could always print it), local and state land use policies would stop any such green development bonanza in its tracks.
"Current zoning absolutely stands in the way of allowing more people to live in high cost areas that are already close to transit," says Emily Hamilton, a scholar at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.
Most major American cities have imposed single-family zoning—which allows for a single dwelling per property to be built—on a majority of urban residential land, says Hamilton. This puts an artificial cap on the number of new homes that can be built.
It forces people to live farther away from each other than they might otherwise want to, making it harder to service all of them effectively by transit. That presents a problem when one's vision is so dependent on people giving up their carbon-spewing cars.
This restrictive zoning presents more problems still when one considers that the federal government is not going to be able to force people to rebuild or retrofit their homes—there's going to have to be some buy-in from the property owners themselves.
Yet if a property owner is prohibited by zoning codes from adding new units or more space to a building they own, then there're less likely to go in for the kind of retrofitting called for by the Green New Deal. [...]
In addition to single-family zoning, a host of historic preservation laws would make any attempt at even modest, energy-saving renovations either difficult or impossible.
[Christian Britschgi, "Zoning Makes the Green New Deal Impossible," Reason, February 8]
0.137 degrees Celsius. That, writes Nicholas Loris, will be the net reduction in global temperatures that the Green New Deal would produce by the end of the century:
Even if Americans were on board with this radical change in behavior and lifestyle, it wouldn't change our climate.
In fact, the U.S. could cut its carbon dioxide emissions 100 percent and it would not make a difference in abating global warming.
Using the same climate sensitivity (the warming effect of a doubling of carbon dioxide emissions) as the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assumes in its modeling, the world would be only 0.137 degree Celsius cooler by 2100. Even if we assumed every other industrialized country would be equally on board, this would merely avert warming by 0.278 degree Celsius by the turn of the century.
[Nicholas Loris, "Green New Deal Would Barely Change Earth's Temperature. Here Are the Facts." The Daily Signal, February 7]
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