Anthropogenic climate change is happening. The jury is still out on how quickly and how badly its effects will devastate the planet, but the climate is changing.
And the public overwhelmingly opposes most of the major measures to combat it.
Carbon taxes disproportionately harm the poor and culminate in a deadweight loss to the economy. This led Robby Mook to conclude that if Hillary Clinton embraced a carbon tax during her 2016 bid for the presidency, it would be “lethal in the general” election. Although dark blue states like California have been able to implement a semblance of a cap-and-trade system, former President Barack Obama’s attempt to implement the program at a federal level failed miserably, and all six states that attempted to join four Canadian provinces in the Western Climate Initiative and develop an emissions trading system ultimately withdrew.
So have climate activists called on more subsidies for clean energy companies or sustainable technology firms like Tesla? Or have they called on President Trump to refocus his trade war on China’s carbon dioxide emissions, which total nearly as much as all of the U.S. and Europe’s emissions combined? Or best yet, have they taken a stand for the U.S. to embrace nuclear power, the only sustainable and viable form of carbon-free energy available?
Nope. Instead, the new climate change warriors have demanded a so-called “Green New Deal”, a loosely defined set of legislation touted by the likes of progressive newcomers Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. The socialist superstar has called climate change “our World War II,” warning, without any scientific basis, that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
The really important thing to point out here is that this “Green New Deal” will do absolutely nothing to combat climate change.
First of all, no part of the latest iteration of the “Green New Deal” involves sanctions, a trade war, or a literal war against China or India, two nations whose rapidly growing carbon emissions make the American contribution to climate change appear negligible in comparison. The”Green New Deal” only demands that the U.S. transition to 100 percent renewable energy in the next 16 years and decarbonize the economy completely. Even such an impossible transformation would be more than compensated for by anticipated increases in Chinese and Indian emissions.
The “Green New Deal” expressly forbids “all combustion-based power generation nuclear, biomass energy, large scale hydro and waste-to-energy technologies,” which is a clear sign that those who drafted it aren’t serious. Although technology has rapidly made modern living more energy efficient, it’s scientifically improbable, and probably impossible, for wind and solar alone to satisfy market demand if only because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Consider that states like California have made concerted efforts to shut down nuclear power plants, yet nuclear still provides half of the country’s carbon-free power. And hydropower provides about the same amount of energy as biomass, geothermal, solar, and wind combined, even though solar and wind receive massive subsidies and their use is mandated in many cases by federal law.
Furthermore, of the six total topics covered by the early proposal of the “Green New Deal” — which, might I remind you, its proponents say is intended to fight the single greatest threat to planet Earth — one is to “Uphold Indigenous Rights.” Under his statute, the “Green New Deal” forbids any “corporate schemes that places profits over community burdens and benefits,” including cap-and-trade and carbon capture and storage. So to paraphrase Ocasio-Cortez: We’re like: The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is that you are hung up on dams, nuclear power, and any scheme that makes carbon-free energy remotely viable?
Ocasio-Cortez’s Deal also promises to include a federal jobs guarantee and may include “additional measures such as basic income programs [or] universal health care programs.” This has nothing to do with green energy, although it could be viewed as an attempt to help the millions of people in multiple industries who stand to be thrown out of work if anything like this scheme is put into effect.
And so if this sounds like an extremely expensive Trojan horse to socialize the American economy rather than feasibly decrease greenhouse gas emissions, that’s because it is.
The “Green New Deal” would cost billions of dollars just in decarbonizing steel, cement, and other alloys and manufacturing materials. A federal jobs guarantee would add trillions to the national debt. And before even considering those, the most conservative estimate for “Medicare for all” predicts that the program would add $32.6 trillion to our federal debt in the next decade.
Furthermore, between effectively nationalizing both the healthcare industry (one-fifth of our economy) and the energy industry (8 percent of our economy), the “Green New Deal” could socialize more than a quarter of our economy overnight. And it would do it without even substantially reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
[Related: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggests 60, 70 percent tax rate for the rich to pay for ‘Green New Deal’]
The long-term ramifications of climate change still threaten the future. Conservatives ought to adopt a plan that involves slashing prohibitive regulations on nuclear power. (Even the United Nations has admitted that nearly every pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 involves increasing the use of nuclear power.)
And if climate change is really going to kill us all before we even have a chance to see the end of the Mueller investigation, then perhaps we really should be playing hardball with China and India. But this New Deal won’t slash anything except for economic growth, national sovereignty, and individual rights.
