It’s a “lie” to say that the Green New Deal is prohibitively expensive, according to Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
“This is the lie that’s going on right now,” the 2020 hopeful said during a campaign stop Monday in Nashua, N.H.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., rolled out the “Green New Deal” earlier this month during a joint press conference wherein they unveiled their respective House and Senate resolutions.
The Senate version of the Green New Deal has 11 Democratic co-sponsors, including Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and, of course, Booker.
The New Jersey senator was asked Monday by a Fox News reporter to address concerns that the Green New Deal’s aim to reshape the entire U.S. economy into a greener version of itself would cost tens of trillions of dollars, easily dwarfing other ambitious projects including the moon landing, the highway system, and the New Deal itself, according to my Washington Examiner colleague Phil Klein.
In New York City, for example, it cost roughly $2,000 per apartment for the Housing Authority to upgrade buildings to comply with LED lighting standards, the Fox reporter noted, citing a recent Wall Street Journal report.
That was just to switch the building over to LED lighting. That enormous price tag will be nothing compared to the Green New Deal, which would require that every building in the country be upgraded or replaced to meet the proposal’s predetermined environmental standards.
Booker casually dismissed the figures cited by the Wall Street Journal and the Fox reporter, saying there are ways to “revive your economy, and create a bold green future.”
“We environmentally retrofitted our buildings. Saves taxpayers money, created jobs for our community and lowered our carbon footprint,” Booker said Monday, referring to his years serving as the mayor of Newark, N.J. “This lie that’s being put out, that somehow being green and responsible with the environment means you have to hurt the economy, a lie.”
Surely, he has given some thought to the idea that upgrading or replacing every last, single building in the country will have an adverse effect on the economy. Surely, he has considered that the building proposal in the Green New Deal alone would require an enormous and almost certainly negative financial investment.
Then again, maybe he hasn’t considered this. The New Jersey senator is committed to the ideal. For him, it’s a moral issue.
“Our planet is in peril and we need to be bold,” Booker said earlier this month during a campaign stop in Mason City, Iowa. “There are a lot of people out there pushing back against the Green New Deal, saying it is impractical, it is too expensive, it is all of this. If we used to govern our dreams that way, we would have never gone to the Moon. God, that’s impractical. That ball in the sky? That’s impractical.”
He added, “When the planet has been in peril in the past, who came forward to save Earth from the scourge of Nazism and totalitarian regimes? We came forward! Who came forward to save the planet, or continents, from financial ruin? We came forward with the Marshall Plan. Our history is standing up and saying, look, humanity is in crisis, America is going to be the light and the hope.”
Between 1941 and 1946, the U.S. spent the 2009 equivalent of $3.3 trillion on national defense, Klein also noted. Now, compare that to the tens of trillions that the Green New Deal would cost. Also, there was an end in sight for World War II. Many of the proposals continued in the Green New Deal are permanent.
Other than all of that, the senator from New Jersey makes some great points.
