Earlier this year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., jointly proposed a resolution outlining a broad strategy for dealing with climate change. The proposal, billed as the Green New Deal, was laughed off the public stage. The background materials providing its specifics proved so embarrassingly unfeasible — high-speed rail, elimination of “farting cows,” and all — that both Ocasio-Cortez and her chief of staff tried to save face by claiming, falsely, that their own documents were actually a clever Republican forgery.
The Green New Deal is a profoundly embarrassing and politically damaging proposal for Democrats. That’s why, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., forced a vote on it Tuesday, not a single senator from either party voted for it. Democrats cried foul, acting as though a free vote on their own climate change resolution somehow constituted a dirty trick against them.
Heaven forbid they should look in the mirror. Heaven forbid they should blame their own colleagues for sending up this $93 trillion pie-in-the-sky measure. But then, they are hardly in any position to admit how stupid this proposal was, given that no fewer than five Democratic presidential candidates in the Senate already endorsed it.
Faced with a day-of debate on their own embarrassing resolution, Democrats spent their floor time trying to blame Republicans for not taking global warming seriously enough. But if Democrats took it seriously, and didn’t just view it as a potential source of donations from gullible millenarian millennials, they would not have fallen in line behind this ludicrous unicorns-and-rainbows proposal in the first place.
If Democrats cared about global warming as anything more than a political issue, they would not be wasting time with useless and impractical proposals like this one. Instead, they would start by creating policies more conducive to fracking for natural gas in the short run. This technology has done more in 10 years to reduce American carbon emissions than all the efforts of all environmental activists in history combined. Cheap natural gas is rapidly devouring coal in the electrical industry, dramatically reducing U.S. carbon emissions to the levels of the early 1990s.
Beyond that, Democrats who fear a warming planet should endorse and legislate toward the long-term expansion of nuclear energy, which safely and effectively freed France from its carbon footprint long ago. In coming decades, existing nuclear technologies will give way to the energy technologies of the future, still in development, such as waste-free thorium reactors and nuclear fusion. Mere conservation will not solve any problems, and there are no other feasible sources of reliable energy on the horizon that don’t have large carbon footprints. Note that the word “reliable” rules out solar and wind.
So far, only Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has shown the courage and sense to back nuclear power. He deserves credit for that. But he and his colleagues who aspire to the presidency — Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. — are obviously all ashamed they backed the $93 trillion Green New Deal. Why else would they have lacked the courage to vote for it?
