I heard that the presumptive Democratic candidate for President had co-sponsored the Green New Deal legislation, back when she was a U.S. Senator.
And now, she’s being pilloried for that, by the usual suspects.
So I got kind of excited. As in, cool, maybe somebody in the Federal government has a well-thought-out plan for dealing with climate change. How did I ever miss this dramatic step forward in Federal climate policy?
Unfortunately, instead of doing the normal thing and reading what people say about the Green New Deal, I actually read the Green New Deal legislation.
Only, there was no legislation. It was a resolution, not a piece of legislation. That is, an expression of some noble sentiment. It’s the kind of document that starts off with a bunch of “whereas” paragraphs. So you know it doesn’t really serve any serious purpose.
Here’s a Google link to the Green New Deal resolution, as-introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2019 (link). Turns out, the 2019 Green New Deal resolution had about 80 co-sponsors.
It has been re-introduced in various forms since that time. I can only assume that (now) Vice-President Harris was one of many co-sponsors of one of the later, re-introduced version of it. She was not a cosponsor of the 2019 House version, as she was a Senator. Presumably, she was a cosponsor of a similar resolution in the Senate, at some point.
I checked out the 2023 version, and at least the first couple of pages were every bit as breathtakingly overblown as the original. So I’d say it’s fair game just to quote the original.
There’s no there, there.
It’s an empty shell. You may or may not consider it a nice-looking shell. But it’s empty.
As soon as I started reading it, I realized there’s no there, there. In the main, it’s platitudes, strung together, seasoned with grievance. And it ends up being everything but the kitchen sink.
It’s not properly “a manifesto”, that is, a mere declaration of goals. And least it didn’t sit that way to me, because a lot of those goals were given specific timelines.
But that’s it. No details. No hint of how to pay for it. No hint of where to start.
Worse, to me, it seemed to call for miracles. That is, things that appear to me to be absolutely technically infeasible, now, at least, no matter how much money you throw at them. For example, converting the U.S. electrical grid to 100% renewable energy within ten years. I’m pretty sure that no informed person thinks that’s possible. I could be wrong. I will eventually look to see if anyone has seriously asked and answered that question.
(Do I hear a voice complaining that Vermont’s grid is already there? See Post #1952).
Edit: I stand corrected. Maybe. Turns out, the National Renewable Energy Labs studied what it would take to make the grid carbon-free (not the same as 100% renewable, due to nuclear power), in response to the Biden Administration’s bills investing in clean energy. Near as I can tell, they consider it feasible to have a carbon-free electrical grid by 2035. That’s not so different from what the Green New Deal calls for. The cost appears to be well under $1T. Call it under $100B a year for a decade.
But, if you read the detail, you see phrases like ” Nuclear capacity more than doubles”,” … the potentially important role of several technologies that have not yet been deployed at scale, …”, and so on. I think they also assume, in some scenarios, a more-than-doubling of electrical transmission capacity.
If there were just one cutting-edge assumption, that would be one thing. But I think if you look at everything that has to come together, my take on it is that, yeah, you could do it, maybe. The notion that we’d have double our current nuclear generation capacity, on-line, in ten years, seems particularly far-fetched.
But the point is, NREL is a serious source, and they have a serious analysis that says it could be done. And they say it would cost well under a trillion dollars. Call it $100B a year for ten years, and done.
Plus, apparently the Biden Adminstration has a stated goal of a carbon-free grid by 2035. So the Green New Deal isn’t the only place where that’s been called for.
And it kind-of calls for miracles routinely. It’s full of little-bitty (/s) one-off items. Like this one:
(E) upgrading all existing buildings in the
5 United States and building new buildings to
6 achieve maximum energy efficiency, water effi-
7 ciency, safety, affordability, comfort, and dura-
8 bility, including through electrification;
All? Sure, we’ll just upgrade all the buildings in the U.S. Just by-the-by. I don’t see any problems with that. (/s)
Or, even better:
(O) providing all people of the United
13 States with—
14 (i) high-quality health care;
15 (ii) affordable, safe, and adequate
16 housing;
17 (iii) economic security; and
18 (iv) clean water, clean air, healthy and
19 affordable food, and access to nature.
So let’s create national health insurance and a government-guaranteed annual income (?). As an afterthought? While we’re at it?
OK, in fairness, they did lean on the Depression-era New Deal when they thought up a name for it. That said, it’s not clear why you need to guarantee affordable food, if you provide economic security. But I don’t think that logic is the strong suit of this document. Or I don’t understand the cant.
Finally, there’s this:
(E) to promote justice and equity by stop-
23 ping current, preventing future, and repairing
24 historic oppression of indigenous peoples, com-
25 munities of color, migrant communities,
1 deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural
2 communities, the poor, low-income workers,
3 women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with
4 disabilities, and youth (referred to in this reso-
5 lution as ‘‘frontline and vulnerable commu-
6 nities’’);
Those are all noble sentiments. But a) do they really think that there’s not enough on our plate just trying to deal with climate change, and b) how, exactly, do they propose to do that?
But my negative reaction to that closing paragraph may be leaning a bit too hard on the green part of Green New Deal. That’s where my focus is. So to me, the purely non-environmental parts of the document often come across as just so much extra baggage. Just something else to be objected to. But that’s at least in part a product of my bent, and clearly not the intent of the drafter(s).
The fact that this document is so heavily laden with such items tells me exactly what this is: It’s a feel-good document. That’s it. The Green New Deal is not and never was any sort of practical plan for moving the U.S. forward in terms of climate policy.
Not that I can see.
But Democrats can say they’re for it, and Republicans can say the opposite. So it gives us yet another meaningless thing to squabble over, without accomplishing anything. As if we didn’t have enough meaningful things to fight over.
Conclusion
Sometimes, the Christmas present looks better before you tear off the wrapping paper. The tree of knowledge is not necessarily the tree of happiness.
Before I read it, I could at least imagine that somebody in the Democratic side of the Legislative branch of government had a plan for dealing with climate change. Now I’m sure that nobody on Capitol Hill does.
I was hoping for a shiny new bike. I got underwear.
On a more serious note, anyone who treats the Green New Deal as a blueprint for anything — e.g., a way to address climate change, a way to create millions of jobs, or whatnot — is being just being dishonest. It is no such thing.
The next time I hear somebody tout the Green New Deal as “a plan for creating millions of high-paying jobs”, I’m going to mark that person down as an outright liar.
Because this isn’t a plan for anything. It’s an expression of some noble sentiments, some of which you may agree with, some of which you may not. Amalgamated into a document.
If that’s the extent of thinking, of the only major U.S. party that even admits that climate change is real, we are in some deep, deep shit.
Addendum: Clean Up Your Own Damned Mess.
So, put up or shut up. What’s my plan?
1 Whereas Adults of all races, creeds, national origins, sexual orientation, and economic status realize that cleaning up after yourself is a necessary part of being an Adult.
2 Whereas the exhaust gasses from fossil-fuel combustion are making a mess of the earth, via global warming and climate change, in ways that will be fairly important to future Americans, such as (say) being able to eat, and having a coastline that stays in roughly the same place …
3 Be it resolved that the Federal government’s response to climate change is to require all Americans act like adults and clean up their own damned mess. And to use all tools at our disposal to encourage other nations to do the same.
4 To enforce this new CUYODM policy, the Federal government will:
4.1 Solicit bids for industrial-scale removal and sequestration (permanent removal from the biosphere) of atmospheric carbon.
4.2 Use those bids to find the market-determined price of carbon removal, per ton.
4.3 Impose a tax on fossil fuels and other sources of greenhouse gasses, per ton of carbon content-equivalent, in that market-determined amount, so that each new sale of fossil fuels automatically generates enough funds to clean up the mess that combustion of those fuels will create.
4.4 Dedicate the resulting funds exclusively for paying for actual removal of carbon from the atmosphere.
4.5 Sequester any unspent funds until such time as carbon-capture-and-sequestration capacity increases to the point where all such funds are used.
4.6 Re-bid additional rounds of carbon capture at five year intervals, and adjust the amount of the carbon tax accordingly, until the U.S. has put in place adequate capacity to clean up all of the mess that we are creating. (That is, carbon-neutrality.) Any natural, provable carbon sinks, within the U.S. shall be included in the net-carbon-neutrality calculation.
4.7 Anybody who wants to extract and burn fossil fuels in the U.S. is free to do so. As long as they pay enough to clean up the mess that creates.
Commentary:
When you step back from it, much of the history of U.S. environmental policy is just a case of asking that you clean up your own mess, rather than dump it in a public space.
There was a time, in the U.S.A., where anybody was free to dump pretty much anything, in any river or lake, or into the air. I can recall, for example, that as a child, I attended a Catholic grade school that incinerated its own trash, on site. This was private, industrial-scale garbage burning, in the middle of a large city (Philadelphia). That was, apparently, a completely normal thing for the 1960s.
But, collectively, that any-mess-you-care-to-make policy led to such bad outcomes (reference Cuyahoga River fire), that we got the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, passed with bipartisan support. The EPA, as I think I recall, was created under President Nixon.
In any case, if it’s not feasible to create that much carbon sequestration, at least we’d know that, and could quit pussyfooting around this issue. If we literally can’t pull it back out of the atmosphere, the only real option, in the long run, is not to burn so damned much of it in the first place.
