The talk of the nation is the “Green New Deal” put forward yesterday. It has no policy implications or tangible real world impact whatsoever, since it is (pick an adjective), infantile, fantastic, intellectually lazy and impossible. However, the fact that the current political system could belch up such a noxious hairball and not immediately be greeted by universal expressions of horror or hysterical laughter is significant.
In case you missed it, here is the overview of the “bill” (it isn’t a bill, but a resolution, and it isn’t really a resolution, but just a statement of stream of consciousness extreme leftist ideological cant that appeared yesterday morning. The thing attracted enough expressions of horror and laughter to be pulled off the web shortly thereafter, but it is still one of the smokiest guns you are ever going to see. I’m going to put up the whole thing. You are obligated as a citizen to read it. I’ll argue that you are obligated as a citizen to force the knee-jerk progressives in your life to read it as well, and to give you an honest response.
In many respects it is a gift. This is the level of thought and seriousness one entire political party is willing to present to the American public as it argues to be given the power to determine the nation’s course and welfare. Such transparency is rare. This document reveals one party’s respect for the intelligence of the American people: none. It helps explain the deteriorating skills of critical thought among our rising generations, since this is what passes for rational discourse at the highest levels of government.
The document is also a test, indeed many tests–an IQ test, a confirmation bias test, a test of faith and trust in a group doing everything it can to show it is untrustworthy, a test of competent citizenship and ignorance. Let me be uncharitable and diplomatically blunt: Anyone who reads this and immediately says, “Wow! This is great! Make perfect sense to me!” is either cognitively disabled, too gullible to be trusted to buy a car, or 12.
Read it. It’s long, but the periodic giggles and the sound of you bashing your head on the table will make the time pass quickly. This is a res ipsa loquitur document, so much so that almost feel like it will insult your intelligence for me to point out what’s wrong with it. In Part II, I’ll try to concentrate on the ethical implications, and not belabor the fact that the thing is bonkers, compelling the question, “How can Americans elect people who would be capable of this?” The most positive development is that somebody in charge had the sense to take this off-line.
LAUNCH: Thursday, February 7, at 8:30 AM.
Overview
We will begin work immediately on Green New Deal bills to put the nuts and bolts on the plan described in this resolution (important to say so someone else can’t claim this mantle).
This is a massive transformation of our society with clear goals and a timeline.
The Green New Deal resolution a 10-year plan to mobilize every aspect of American society at a scale not seen since World War 2 to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and create economic prosperity for It will:
- Move America to 100% clean and renewable energy
- Create millions of family supporting-wage, union jobs
- Ensure a just transition for all communities and workers to ensure economic security for people and communities that have historically relied on fossil fuel industries
- Ensure justice and equity for frontline communities by prioritizing investment, training, climate and community resiliency, economic and environmental benefits in these
communities. - Build on FDR’s second bill of rights by guaranteeing:
—A job with a family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security
—High-quality education, including higher education and trade schools
—Clean air and water and access to nature
—Healthy food
—High-quality health care
—Safe, affordable, adequate housing
—Economic environment free of monopolies
—Economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work
There is no time to waste.
- IPCC Report said global emissions must be cut by by 40-60% by 2030. US is 20% of total emissions. We must get to 0 by 2030 and lead the
world in a global Green New Deal. - Americans love a challenge. This is our moonshot.
- When JFK said we’d go to the by the end of the decade, people said impossible.
- If Eisenhower wanted to build the interstate highway system today, people would ask how we’d pay for it.
- When FDR called on America to build 185,000 planes to fight World War 2, every business leader, CEO, and general laughed at him. At the time, the U.S. had produced 3,000 planes in the last year. By the end of the war, we produced 300,000 planes. That’s what we are capable of if we have real leadership
- This is massive investment in our economy and society, not expenditure.
o We invested 40-50% of GDP into our economy during World War 2 and created the greatest middle class the US has seen.
o The interstate highway system has returned more than $6 in economic productivity for every $1 it cost
o This is massively expanding existing and building new industries at a rapid pace – growing our economy
The Green New Deal has momentum.
- 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the
Green New Deal - Nearly every major Democratic Presidential contender say they back the Green New deal including: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkeley, Julian Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Jay Inslee.
- 45 House Reps and 330+ groups backed the original resolution for a select committee
- Over 300 local and state politicians have called for a federal Green New Deal
- New Resolution has 20 co-sponsors, about 30 groups (numbers will
change by Thursday).
FAQ
Why 100% clean and renewable and not just 100% renewable? Are you saying we won’t transition off fossil fuels?
Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases. Anyone who has read the resolution sees that we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy. Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it –
this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically. We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast
as possible. We set a goal to get to net-zero, 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, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing andpower production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul
transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.
Is nuclear a part of this?
A Green New Deal is a massive investment in renewable energy production and would not include creating new nuclear plants. It’s unclear if we will be able to
decommission every nuclear plant within 10 years, but the plan is to transition off of nuclear and all fossil fuels as soon as possible. No one has put the full 10-year plan
together yet, and if it is possible to get to fully 100% renewable in 10 years, we will do that.
Does this include a carbon tax?
The Green New Deal is a massive investment in the production of renewable energy industries and infrastructure. We cannot simply tax gas and expect workers to figure out another way to get to work unless we’ve first created a better, more affordable option. So we’re not ruling a carbon tax out, but a carbon tax would be a tiny part of a Green New Deal in the face of the gigantic expansion of our productive economy and would have to be preceded by first creating the solutions necessary so that workers and working class communities are not affected. While a carbon tax may be a part of the Green New Deal, it misses the point and would be off the table unless we create the clean, affordable options first.
Does this include cap and trade?
The Green New Deal is about creating the renewable energy economy through a massive investment in our society and economy. Cap and trade assumes the existing market will solve this problem for us, and that’s simply not true. While cap and trade may be a tiny part of the larger Green New Deal plan to mobilize our economy, any cap and trade legislation will pale in comparison to the size of the mobilization and must recognize that existing legislation can incentivize companies to create toxic hotspots in frontline communities, so anything here must ensure that frontline communities are prioritized.
Does a GND ban all new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear power plants?
The Green New Deal makes new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear plants unnecessary. This is a massive mobilization of all our resources into renewable energies. It would simply not make sense to build new fossil fuel infrastructure because we will be creating a plan to reorient our entire economy to work off renewable energy. Simply banning fossil fuels and nuclear plants immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it – this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically.
Are you for CCUS?
We believe the right way to capture carbon is to plant trees and restore our natural ecosystems. CCUS technology to date has not proven effective.
How will you pay for it?
The same way we paid for the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailout and extended quantitative easing programs. The same way we paid for World War II and all our current wars. The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit. There is also space for the government to take an equity stake in projects to get a return on investment. At the end of the day, this is an investment in our economy that should grow our wealth as a nation, so the question isn’t how will we pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity.
Why do we need a sweeping Green New Deal investment program? Why can’t we just rely on regulations and taxes and the private sector to invest
alone such as a carbon tax or a ban on fossil fuels?
The level of investment required is massive. Even if every billionaire and company came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient. The speed of investment required will be massive. Even if all the billionaires
and companies could make the investments required, they would not be able to pull together a coordinated response in the narrow window of time required to jump-start major new projects and major new economic sectors. Also, private companies are wary of making massive investments in unproven research and technologies; the government, however, has the time horizon to be able to patiently make investments in new tech and R&D, without necessarily having a commercial outcome or application in mind at the time the investment is made. Major examples of government investments in “new” tech that subsequently spurred a boom in the private section include DARPAprojects, the creation of the internet – and, perhaps most recently, the government’s investment in Tesla. Simply put, we don’t need to just stop doing some things we are doing (like using fossil fuels for energy needs); we also need to start doing new things (like overhauling whole industries or retrofitting all buildings to be energy efficient). Starting to do new things requires some upfront investment. In the same way that a company that is trying to change how it does business may need to make big upfront capital investments today in order to reap future benefits (for e.g., building a new factory to increase production or buying new hardware and software to totally modernize its IT system), a country that is trying to change how its economy works will need to make big investments today to jump-start and develop new projects and sectors to power the new economy. Merely incentivizing the private sector doesn’t work – e.g. the tax incentives and subsidies given to wind and solar projects have been a valuable spur to growth in the US renewables industry but, even with such investment promotion subsidies, the present level of such projects is simply inadequate to transition to a fully greenhouse gas neutral economy as quickly as needed. Once again, we’re not saying that there isn’t a role for private sector investments; we’re just saying that the level of investment required will need every actor to pitch in and that the government is best placed to be the prime driver.
Resolution Summary
Created in consultation with multiple groups from environmental community, environmental justice community, and labor community
5 goals in 10 years:
- Net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers
- Create millions of high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all
- Invest in infrastructure and industry to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century
- Clean air and water, climate and community resiliency, healthy food, access to nature, and a sustainable environment for all
- Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of frontline and vulnerable communities
- National mobilization our economy through 14 infrastructure and industrial projects.
Every project strives to remove greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from every sector of our economy:
- Build infrastructure to create resiliency against climate change-related disasters
- Repair and upgrade U.S. infrastructure. ASCE estimates this is $4.6 trillion at minimum.
- Meet 100% of power demand through clean and renewable energy sources
- Build energy-efficient, distributed smart grids and ensure affordable access to electricity
- Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency
- Massively expand clean manufacturing (like solar panel factories, wind turbine factories, battery and storage manufacturing, energy efficient
manufacturing components) and remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing - Work with farmers and ranchers to create a sustainable, pollution and greenhouse gas free, food system that ensures universal access to healthy food and expands independent family farming
- Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle
- Mitigate long-term health effects of climate change and pollution
- Remove greenhouse gases from our atmosphere and pollution through afforestation, preservation, and other methods of restoring our natural
ecosystems - Restore all our damaged and threatened ecosystems
- Clean up all the existing hazardous waste sites and abandoned sites
- Identify new emission sources and create solutions to eliminate those emissions
- Make the US the leader in addressing climate change and share our technology, expertise and products with the rest of the world to bring about a global Green New Deal
Social and economic justice and security through 15 requirements:
- Massive federal investments and assistance to organizations and businesses participating in the green new deal and ensuring the public
gets a return on that investment - Ensure the environmental and social costs of emissions are taken into account
- Provide job training and education to all
- Invest in R&D of new clean and renewable energy technologies
- Doing direct investments in frontline and deindustrialized communities that would otherwise be hurt by the transition to prioritize economic benefits there
- Use democratic and participatory processes led by frontline and vulnerable communities to implement GND projects locally
- Ensure that all GND jobs are union jobs that pay prevailing wages and hire local
- Guarantee a job with family-sustaining wages
- Protect right of all workers to unionize and organize
- Strengthen and enforce labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards
- Enact and enforce trade rules to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas and grow domestic manufacturing
- Ensure public lands, waters, and oceans are protected and eminent domain is not abused
- Obtain free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous peoples
- Ensure an economic environment free of monopolies and unfair competition
- Provide high-quality health care, housing, economic security, and clean
air, clean water, healthy food, and nature to all
Ethics Alarms 
When I read the GND yesterday, I thought it was a parody account. In my defense, it mentioned cow farts, talked a circle around how to pay for it, had spelling, grammar, and wording errors, AND mentioned supporting those unwilling to work. I couldn’t see how it could be real.
I later realized it was in fact serious, and co-written by Kamela Harris. There is a level of insanity here unrivaled by anything I’ve seen from the far right fringe crazies. It would seem either socialism causes brain damage, or only those with brain damage can be socialists. Good job NY voters!
You must mean NY City voters, because I’m from New York and I didn’t vote for Gillibrand in the past election. Both senators, Schumer and Gillibrand probably won the popular vote due to NYC alone. I’m in the 23 district and my Representative is Tom Reed II (R).
I mean, we’re not all as crazy as AOC here in NY – it’s just very difficult to pull up and move out of state. 🙂
And, the cow farting paragraph was so disjointed, I could not figure out if they were banning cows, or oil, or neither. Plus, I kept thinking Jack was jumping in with a sarcastic comment, only to realize it was all part of the resolution.
You have to agree, the GND defeats sarcasm.
Now here’s a question: Am i correct to assume that even the self-exiled progressives here, like Charlie Green, Chris, valky, et al., would agree that this monstrosity is Cloud Kuckoo Land stuff, and damaging to their cause? Would any of them defend this. I assume they are all smarter than that.
My leftie friends have said things like “Sure it’s flawed, but it’s ambitious”, “the GOP has nothing, so this is better”, and my personal favorite, “We have to do something!”.
These were in response to my post, where I explained the GND as “Unicorns! Unicorns for everyone!” I don’t think it’s safe to assume anything at this point.
“Do something” is the classic. Never mind that the “something” is stupid, and can’t be done anyway. Morons.
I have been following this eventual end game for decades. I will not buy myself a yellow vest.
I must ask how carbon taxes were supposed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Pigovian taxes work by raising the price of the unwanted commodity which at the margin allows for substitution to reduce use. For example, if you are building a new commercial plant and you have a choice of multiple different systems which trade off between electrical costs and labor costs, i.e. use more electric and less labor or use less electric and more labor, the relative prices of electric to labor will impact your decision. So raising the cost of electric can change that relationship and shift some decisions, at the margin, into lower electric usage, thus lowering carbon consumption. The devil is of course in the details, but in principle Pigovian taxes are one area of economics with very little controversy.
And yet, so many of the same people who advocate carbon taxes deny that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment.
Worse still, they claim that raising the minimum wage will lead to more employment because all those extra wages will be spent on new goods and services, thus increasing demand. At that point I like to ask, why $15 per hour, why not $30, or $50, or $100! Normally they stop talking to me, but it seems like AOC would be nodding along with me…
This question was originally devised and circulated as a talking point, a rhetorical question intended for the use of those who, like jesting Pilate, would not stay for an answer. But it actually serves as a jumping off point for a real understanding, if it is used that way. Once you do that, you find that there is an underlying mechanism being claimed, in which there is a market imperfection; if that claim is accurate, then the size of the mechanism and of its effects determine just how much burden can be carried by reversing the mechanism – and asking that first question (“how much can be carried”) seriously, rather than rhetorically, helps tease out the workings of the mechanism, including whether it really is there and really is at work.
However if the taxes imposed to engender a substitution effect raise the cost of capital, such that the marginal efficiency of investment is less than its marginal cost, no investment will be made and the available cash will be hoarded until such time that the rate of return on investment exceeds the costs of capital – Keynes liquidity trap.
“Upgrade or replace every building in US for state-of-the-art energy efficiency”.
I look forward to seeing solar panels on Grant’s Tomb.
Well my head just exploded. I hadn’t heard of this yet and now I keep hoping you are joking that this was actually put out there. I could compile a bigger collection of ridiculous BS, but it would be a lot of work to do so.
Do these people want to starve, freeze, and eliminate the poor or are they just dumb. I have spoken to many people about how just the eradicating of the internal combustion vehicles would utterly destroy our nation, especially those of us out in the mountain West where growing seasons are, if we are lucky, 90 days, and our communities are very small and widespread, making feeding people much beyond steak and potatoes a struggle. We require people to grow food somewhere else as we cannot eat anything like a modern balanced diet out here without help. Yes, pioneers made it happen, but with high mortality rates and they were allowed to shoot any deer they wanted, when they needed. Also, there were a lot less people living off of the land. If we use organic farming, the amount of food available from any given tract of land will greatly decrease. (I am assuming that organic farming, with all the data against it actually being so, is what they mean by pollution free.)
Another point, do people not realize how much gets shipped by semi, food and otherwise? Forcing people to give up consumerism is all well and good for totalitarians, I guess, but what schools want to no longer be able to get their replacement textbooks because it is hard to ship that kind of weight? Screw any new hospital equipment for rural communities. What about pharmaceuticals? My mother requires a shipment every month, and it has to be shipped very quickly in a refrigerated vehicle. This is life-saving stuff. (Which requires fossil fuels to produce, but what the heck…) My ER can barely afford to keep most required medicines on hand as it is.
Air travel becomes unnecessary? So now we will have a fully equipped trauma center and ICU in every single locale in the nation, huh, despite the last paragraph? I realize they seem to be claiming this in the social justice section, but how do we do this without the diesel powered vehicles getting these products to the remote locales? While we are at is, life flight helps people who are too far from a hospital, in too remote of location, or too bad of roads (but not too windy to land a chopper) to safely drive them in. Of course, lacking gasoline/diesel powered vehicles, the distance ambulances can handle, the amount of stuff they can carry, and the conditions they can reliably operate in all decrease drastically. No one will ever be allowed to travel somewhere where they might need flown out if they are hurt, or are people who like to hunt and camp just expendable? But that goes against “access to nature.” What about those people who live 100 miles from a hospital, in a town of 50 people? Do we just say, too bad, you don’t get the health care, or do we allow for greenhouse emissions to get them what they need? Oh, and where are we getting these doctors and nurses when rural hospitals are closing due to a lack of practitioners?
So we want to get rid of nuclear and fossil fuels? Ok, where are we getting reliable power for hospitals and grocery stores? What about the people who need CPAP machines at night? Fridges, freezers, 24-7 operations and other things that need power at night? Solar panels don’t work at night and have trouble functioning with a couple inches of snow on them or during rainstorms. Wind turbines require huge amounts of (refined fossil fuel based) lubricants to run and only work when the wind blows…but not too much or the turbines burn up or blow over. Hydroelectric is mainly tapped out in this nation, without extended use of government power forcing people out of river valleys and sinking cities. What about the pollutions each of these solutions creates? Are we going to completely revamp every single technology in ten years? Electricity grids do not have, and under anything suggested in the latest technology papers I have read cannot have, power storage adequate to handle these things. What about when peak power demand increases over what the generation can handle? Right now we use natural gas turbines, which can easily be turned on to avoid black and brown outs. However, when we have black and brown outs, most businesses with electricity needs keep diesel generators to make it through. Now those are out. Heating? Do we go to full electrical now, and get rid of natural gas heat? That will require a huge increase of electrical generation. What about these great EVs? How many wind turbines/solar panels are we adding for their charging? Where are they putting these? On the land we need for the “pollution free farming” On wildlife preservation land?
I could go on, but this comment is already too long and I need to feed my kids.
It’s worse than that. They are talking about eliminating ALL combustion engines, whether internal combustion or not – and that means barring not only old fashioned steam locomotives but also all fossil fuel OR renewable fuel powered, steam driven OR Stirling cycle (OR thermionic OR thermophotoelectric) electricity generation. So no clean, wood chip or lawn clipping fuelled home generator for you, even if it makes sense in your own personal situation. They’ve ended up ruling out a lot of “green” options, too – which means, shooting themselves in the foot even in their own terms.
But I should tell you that many of the constraints you describe only apply when things get done in today’s ways. For instance, the industrial revolution got started using quite other lubricants than ones obtained from fossil sources. There’s still an opportunity cost from using other ways, but that’s not the same as today’s ways being absolute constraints; they aren’t.
In general, I put together today’s constraints because we have a time frame of ten years, according to the GND. However, many of the constraints run up against practical considerations. Lubricants are made of hydrocarbons. There is almost no exception to this rule, especially not in turbine usage. Liquid hydrocarbons are required for the kind of stress a turbine is under as powders cannot be used as a heat transfer mechanism and if there is a single mistake in application, they can become a friction source, not a lubricant. Until we learn how to handle clathrate extraction (specifically methane hydrates from the ocean), that means plants and animals, either ancient or new. (Even clathrate extraction ends up with liquid hydrocarbons from ancient plants, but the supply is humongous.). The amount of lubrication needed would require significant crop land that would otherwise have to go toward food production in this wish list. Of course, that doesn’t even go into the PM that is released due to wind energy and the fact that wind turbines are harmful to wildlife which also directly goes against the wish list. Without some Star Trek level technology changes, some of which violate the laws of thermodynamics, we aren’t going to handle all of the issues on this list, and rushing any of them will put us in a worse situation than we are now, which is what most “green” initiatives actually do, on a life cycle analysis.
Those are among the opportunity costs of (say) switching back to using castor oil in petrol engines and palm oil in large machines. That’s still not the same as saying that today’s solutions are the only ones available, even in the next few years, just that it would cost a lot to switch (or switch back).
There is a time and a place to rule options out when making plans. That time and place are after laying the options out, not before thinking them out. That is so you don’t miss things.
This sounds a little too close to:
“We are in a race. We are from 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must run through the distance in ten years. Either we do this, or they will crush us.” (Stalin, justifying turning the USSR into one huge forced labor camp)
“When an opponent declares, “I will not come over to your side,” I calmly say, “Your child belongs to us already… What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.” (Hitler, confident that once he had the young generation, what the other generations said or thought didn’t matter)
“I have seen the future, and it works.” (Lincoln Steffens, after a visit to the early USSR)
“Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try.No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people Living for today… Aha-ah… You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.” (John Lennon’s ode to magical thinking)
And, by 1943, everyone could see that things really had worked out like that. It’s just that none of that considered the price, even though what it did cover was spot on.
Unwilling to work. Can I sign up for that?
I’ve never read one of these things before. Is there normally this much pandering?
Sure. Even the U.S.S.R. provided that. Of course, such so-called parasites got … transferred to other arrangements … whenever they were detected. And even in French Guiana’s “dry guillotine”, unwilling prisoners were still looked after and never had to work; they were just left manacled in the humid heat with their wrists hoisted up behind their backs through the cell bars while other prisoners worked their shifts (and weren’t grateful later for the extra work, and showed it).
After graduating with my BS in Economics I joined a community economic development corporation in Baltimore; I lastest less than 9 months. It was painfully obvious that economic development meant increase the visibiity and power of a few.
The GND relies heavily on making decisions by what they call Democratic decision making by frontline and vulnerable communities which translates to give us the money without strings and our low income/low education communities decide what is best.
As I went through each bullet point I felt that I was reading a list of wants of a group without any basic understanding of cause and effect relationships, negative externalities, or even fundamental human behavior.
What is interesting is the big push for generating modalities that require storage devices that require production methods that create huge negative externalities as a byproduct of production but the cleanest generating method that requires no storage at all, nuclear, is to be phased out.
What is not being asked is who will decide what training and education each person will be afforded. It stands to reason that any plan with a legislated outcome will require a workforce that conforms with the needs of the plan. That suggests that the government will conscript people to be trained based on general aptitude. This will eliminate the possibility of personal choice relegating our workforce will be a throwback to field hands, overseers, and bosses as we tend to the acres of photovoltaic cell farms that crowd out the available greenspace.
This is the Fyre Festival as national policy.
I’ll call attention to a couple key passages:
Clear goals and a timeline are important, but they’re still the easy part. The hard part is a plan you can successfully execute.
That is not a plan that spells out how to do anything “technically.”
Like the Fyre Festival, this is the product of a group of people who don’t know the difference between hype and substance. They probably don’t even realize, or else actively deny, that there is a difference.
”This is the Fyre Festival as national policy.”
Bingo!
Much of this is a borderline incoherent Occupy Wall Street gimmee gimmee Manifesto.
Thing is, the kind of person this attracts has no earthly idea how stupid the advocates are convinced they are.
Anyone still wondering why Lefty wants 16 year-olds to be eligible to vote?
“I have listened, and a bigger crock of shit I’ve never heard!”
-Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen) in the film “Time After Time”
Good grief.
IPCC Report said global emissions must be cut by by 40-60% by 2030. US is 20% of total emissions. We must get to 0 by 2030 and lead the
world in a global Green New Deal.
Never mind that the bulk of the world is clamoring for fossil-fuel based energy to pull them out of their extreme poverty. Never mind that we don’t have the authority to force other nations (like China, who is rapidly expanding its fossil-fuel consumption) to comply with this Global Green New Deal. What the IPCC essentially states is that the United States could immediately and entirely disappear from the globe, and we still would not be able to halt their doomsday scenario.
Americans love a challenge. This is our moonshot. When JFK said we’d go to the [moon] by the end of the decade, people said impossible.
Granted, to the GNDers, climate change is a global crisis on par with Nazism or Communism. The moon landing was not simply a challenge, but a vital step in the technological battle with the USSR. But there is no equivalence between “people said going to the moon is impossible” and “people say decarbonizing our economy is impossible.” Building a rocket to transport people to the moon was well within understood technology at the time. A transition to pure renewable energy requires technological breakthroughs, especially in battery storage, that we simply do not have, and have no idea if such breakthroughs are imminent or even possible. Furthermore, the scope of a moon landing is pitifully small compared to the transformation of the way of life of an entire nation of 330+ million people. Finally, this is not simply a matter of scale, but of kind.
If Eisenhower wanted to build the interstate highway system today, people would ask how we’d pay for it.
I can understand the parallel they are attempting to draw here. Supposedly this GND will ultimately end up paying for itself. But again, this parallel fails. The interstate system had very tangible and immediate benefits. It made transportation more efficient. The biggest problem with decarbonizing is that renewable energy is less efficient. For the amount of land required to build a wind farm, we could build twenty coal or natural gas power plants, each with greater generation capacity than the wind farm. And those plants could generate up to capacity, whereas the best long-term generation on wind plants is less than 33%. (I am playing a little loose with the numbers, so if anyone wants to correct me with more accurate values, please feel free.) Our current power plants can ramp up or down generation to meet demand, whereas renewable sources are dependent on factors we can’t control, and thus require massive backup storage to take power surges when the generation is too high, or to supply the grid when generation is too low. You don’t build wealth by moving to systems that are less efficient than where you started.
When FDR called on America to build 185,000 planes to fight World War 2, every business leader, CEO, and general laughed at him. At the time, the U.S. had produced 3,000 planes in the last year. By the end of the war, we produced 300,000 planes. That’s what we are capable of if we have real leadership.
Again, the difference of scale between the generation of several hundred thousand planes against revamping every corner of our economy for hundreds of millions of people should stagger the mind.
True, we did expand national debt during the war, and we emerged from the war with a thrumming economy. But we went into the war from a depression, when a great deal of our economic potential was left untapped because people didn’t have money. Thus lavishing money on the war effort did grease the economic engines. But how? Something to understand is that the war required a great deal of equipment that was likely to be destroyed, so there was, during the war, continued demand for that equipment. This was especially true in the first part of the war, when United States industry sold vehicles, equipment, and other supplies to the Allies. Furthermore, a great many men were pulled out of the workforce and put into the military, which opened up millions of jobs. Once the war ended and the demand for that equipment dropped and all those men came home, the economy did slump into a recession.
The thing to note is that during the war, people earned money but did not have much to spend that money on, so savings went up. When the war ended, suddenly everyone could afford a refrigerator, a toaster, a car, etc, and so demand for those goods meant that industry could shift from military production to domestic production. There won’t be such a shift at the end of the GND.
This is massively expanding existing and building new industries at a rapid pace – growing our economy.
If expanding existing and building new industries was all it took to create jobs and grow the economy, then we should be tearing down homes and rebuilding them every couple of years, because that would certainly put a lot of people to work. The problem is, expanding industries only work when there is a final product that will continue to be in demand after expansion. What do the GNDer’s envision as a final product that makes the expansion worthwhile? Wealth redistribution is not a product. The replacement of cheap electricity with expensive is not a product. Ultimately, there is nothing at the end of the GND that will generate greater revenue to justify the transition.
Ironically, I read at Paul Homewood’s blog today that a new study shows that cold weather can cost an electric vehicle 40% of its range. I don’t know about you all, but in Wyoming, our seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Road Construction.
No, all it takes is scaling back what is delivered. A thousand years ago, practically all energy used by humans was renewable; it would be a doddle to do it again, casualties regardless.
That’s like Canada’s winter, slush* and road works.
* The Russian front had a spring slush and an autumn slush (freely translated, the Russian name for that really does mean “slush”).
No, all it takes is scaling back what is delivered.
Sorry. I stupidly assumed that part of the equation was not reducing the entire world population down to 100 million or so. But as my wife continually reminds me, all these green efforts basically takes us back earlier than most medieval societies, and the greenies* don’t really seem to have a problem with that.
* I use the term “greenies” to indicate both proponents of “green” energy and Coloradans interchangeably.
I should also have mentioned, you don’t even need advances in battery technology to deliver practical amounts of dispatchable electrical power for realistic needs. You can get quite enough storage with nickel-iron (NiFe) batteries deployed at substation or household level, as those levels have enough physical space and those batteries have the right levels of safety and robustness. It’s just that it would take a lot of capital outgoings, though I am sure that those would be dumped on households if it weren’t for the vested interests pushing the sort of high power to weight, low bulk batteries that vehicles need but grid systems don’t.
Batteries have life spans. Batteries use fossil fuels (no choices) in their construction and make up. Recycling batteries requires fossil chemicals that cannot be made without the raw material to start with.
Loonacy.
Is it wrong to suspect that this sort of thing would likely produce results more in the order of a new “Great Leap Forward” than a green “New Deal”?.
Ooooh, should have thought of this quicker: We re-label this proposal the Green Leap Forward.
Yep.Absolutely Maoist, verging on Pol Pot-ist. I suspect education will be free because universities will be destroyed and professors made to install solar panels and new windows. Worker unite. Smelt your pots and pans. Get with the cultural revolution, or get dead.
In other words: Welcome to the Green World Order.
I would recommend that the co-sponsors of the GND read up on their economic history. See: https://www.mercatus.org/publication/economic-recovery-lessons-post-world-war-ii-period . Mercatus is part of George Mason University.
I would love to have some that lived through the second world war and were old enough to appreciate the sacrifices made on the home front would weigh in on the claims made in the GND. It is true that all government spending – Federal, State, & local represented 55% of GDP during that time but we should also note that a large portion of that spending was on bombs and munitions. We produced few autos and shortages of many consumer goods were the norm. Gasoline, butter, bread and other staples of basic subsistence living were rationed because government imposed a command economy on the nation during wartime. Factories built airplanes, jeeps, cannons, rifles, etc. because the government told them what to produce, how many to produce, and at created an entire scheme of price controls for most goods.
Here is why the GND will not work – besides all the rational reasons for it to fail. It will require the all the advocates to forego new annual upgrades in their social media devices because the resources needed to make social media devices will be commandeered by government to be used in the production of energy services. When the advocates of the GND learn that there will be no new cell phones or parts to repair existing ones because the resources will be reallocated that will be just a bridge too far for them.
Chris,
It will require the all the advocates to forego new annual upgrades in their social media devices because the resources needed to make social media devices will be commandeered by government to be used in the production of energy services
You are so absolutely right! And I can’t stop chuckling at the fact.
I… seriously question the stats that 64% of Republicans support the GND.
According to this, they just supplied a brief, vague paragraph about transitioning electricity production to “green” and a few related things and asked 966 people if they liked that idea (last December).
http://climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications/the-green-new-deal-has-strong-bipartisan-support/
Not exactly a bases for indicating support of AOC’s full load of nonsense.
Ya think???
“A ten year plan?
Why not a five year plan, Komrade Kortezki?
Wait, AOC want to “Enact and enforce trade rules to stop the transfer of jobs and pollution overseas and grow domestic manufacturing?” Whoa there, sweetie. Isn’t that kind of, you know, Trump sounding? You’re not a globalist?
Because they want things timed for the UN’s Agenda 2030.
This should be re-named The Utopian New Deal and Bovine Extinction Act of 2019.
-Jut
!!!
An apt new title, Jut, but bovine extinction ignores the elephant in the room. Well, the elephant, the buffalo, the gazelle, the hippo, and many other animals that produce methane. Yes, humans, too, and many insects. All will have to go to save the planet. Sounds bad, but as the elimination of farters progresses, especially human farters, there will be a lessening need (eventually zero need) for energy production.
After the late term issue I assume this will eventually be soylent green.
AOC is the gift that keeps on giving. May she be re-elected for 20 terms. What a blithering idiot! And she’s been talking about purging the Democrat party of “conservatives”. Paging Mr. Trotsky.
As noted, authentic frontier gibberish, written by the likes of those we see in school all the time. Big empty heads filled with dreams of grandeur but without the slightest basis from which to understand how the world really is. It’s a manifesto from teenage minds of what the world should be in their eyes, based on what they’ve been told by other, older, yet none the wiser individuals, without having spent any time in the real world to have a clue about what they are talking about.
I’d guess the older, established left is willing to let AOC and her entourage take the lead on this kind of thing to 1, keep up the distractions from other, bigger issues, and 2, ensure that AOC is a one-termer and is eliminated as a threat to more mainstream leftists.
People like AOC and her extreme liberal friends (cohorts, whatever) need to get away from their sheltered little dens and spend some time in the world where things that make modern life possible occur. Too bad she couldn’t tag along with Mike Rowe and do a season as crew with Dirty Jobs. Better yet, let her work with a construction crew out in the middle of nowhere and hand her a post hole digger or pick and shovel so she can burn off some carbon of her own.