What To Read About The Green New Deal
On Thursday afternoon, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) unveiled the text of a Green New Deal resolution laying out the overarching goals for the would-be climate legislation. The resolution calls for a 10-year plan to shift America's power demand entirely over to renewable energy and for investments in building and transportation upgrades. It also calls for some policies that are not obviously related to climate change, such as a jobs guarantee and universal health care.
What should we make of the first major national policy proposal to fight climate change? Here's what analysts and commentators are saying.
The Resolution Centers People Rather Than Businesses Or Technologies
David Roberts, Vox's energy and climate change reporter, does a close reading of the resolution's language. His entire analysis is worth reading, but particularly of interest is his take on how the Green New Deal resolution frames climate change as a justice issue rather than simply an economic or environmental issue.
Of the 12 GND projects, three, including the very first, are focused on community-level resilience and development. And something like two-thirds of the GND requirements, depending on how you count, direct political power and public investment down to the state, local, and worker level, safeguarding environmental and labor standards and prioritizing family-wage jobs.
The resolution makes clear that justice is a top progressive priority. It is fashionable for centrists and some climate wonks to dismiss things like wage standards as tertiary, a way of piggybacking liberal goals onto the climate fight. But progressives don't see it that way. In a period of massive, rapid disruption, the welfare of the people involved is not tertiary.
[Vox]
The Focus On Social Justice Might Be An Obstacle For Getting Conservatives On Board
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the resolution's focus on social justice makes it unpalatable to the National Review's David French, who self-identifies as "climate-concerned" but thinks "it often looks as if the climate argument is pretext for justifying a host of other progressive policies."
This isn't environmentalism, it's intersectionality. And it's intersectionality supplemented with a giant dose of income redistribution and economic populism. As part of the Green New Deal, the resolution laments the concentration of wealth in the hands of the top 1 percent and seeks to "guarantee a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States."
Oh, and the Green New Deal also includes a pledge that the federal government will make sure that "all people of the United States" receive "high quality health care, affordable, safe, and adequate housing, [and] economic security." The fact sheet even pledges to provide economic security for all those who are "unable or unwilling to work." (Emphasis added.)
To fight climate change, we have to make sure that Bubba never has to leave his Xbox.
The Green New Deal Text Doesn't Address The Crucial Issue Of Urban Sprawl
Ambitious as it is, the Green New Deal resolution doesn't have much to say about urban planning. That's a shame, argues Alex Baca, because reducing urban sprawl is absolutely crucial to reducing America's dependence on cars, which is itself absolutely crucial to reducing fossil fuel demand.
Sprawl is made possible by highways. This is expensive — in 2015, the Victoria Transport Policy Institute estimated that sprawl costs America more than $1 trillion a year in reduced business activity, environmental damage, consumer expenses, and other costs…
Environmentalists know transportation is the elephant in the room. At first blush, the easiest way to attack that problem is to electrify everything, and that's largely what the Green New Deal calls for, with goals like "100 percent zero emission passenger vehicles by 2030" and "100 percent fossil-free transportation by 2050." The cars we drive feel more easily changeable than the places we live.
But electric vehicles are nowhere near ready for widespread adoption—and even if they were, "half of the world's consumption of oil would remain untouched," Bloomberg reports. A Tesla in every driveway just won't cut it.
[Slate]
Markey And Ocasio-Cortez May Have Learned Their Lessons From Obama's Failed Green Jobs Initiative
The Washington Post's Philip Bump observes that the Green New Deal comprises a sweeping overhaul of the entire American economy, a step that will be necessary to address carbon emissions and the effects of climate change. Bump compares the proposal to President Barack Obama's ill-fated green-jobs plan, which never got off the ground.
Obama's green-jobs plan was, true to form, a piecemeal approach toward bolstering clean-energy production and providing quality employment by fostering new markets focused on addressing the problem of global warming. The Green New Deal proposal is not that; it is, instead, a sweeping vision of how an economy seemingly already poised for significant change should be formed. Obama's efforts included attention paid to job quality; the Green New Deal predicates its efforts on universal, quality, unionized employment.
It's a vision of what the economy should look like, predicated on the changes that global warming will necessitate. It's framed as being about the environment. It's much, much more than that.
Young People Already Strongly Support Many Of The Proposals In The Green New Deal
Data for Progress researcher Sean McElwee and YouGov Blue analyst John Ray look at the polling around the policies in the Green New Deal — including some of their own polling — and find that there's strong support for them among millennials.
Even with a potentially large set of costs in mind, millennials continue to support rather than oppose the Green New Deal by nearly a 30-point margin, though Green New Deal proponents have their work cut out for them with other generations. (Following Pew Research, we define millennials as ages 18–37, Generation X as 38–53, baby boomers as 54–72, and Silent as 72 or older.)
Our research shows that age strongly predicts support for the Green New Deal, even controlling for several variables like party, ideology, and race. One wonders if this is because young people, unlike older generations, must contemplate living through the worst effects of climate change a few decades down the line.
