Even without killing all the farting cows and eliminating every last car on the road, the Green New Deal will cost anywhere from 2.5 to 4.5 times the amount of the entire United States GDP, according to a study conducted by the American Action Forum.
The center-right think tank led by a former Congressional Budget Office director found that the resolution embraced by most Democratic 2020 presidential hopefuls would cost between $51 trillion and $93 trillion over its first decade.
As newly anointed Democratic thought-leader Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., once reminded us, “like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” So naturally the AAF delved deep into the minutiae of not just the costs, but the efficacy of the Green New Deal. And as it turns out, the resolution’s even more ineffectual and redundant than previously thought.
Sure, there’s the environmentally irrelevant aspects of the bill that we all love to hate. Nationalizing our healthcare system, currently one-fifth of the American economy, would cost $36 trillion in the first decade, according to the AAF, a few trillion more than the previous estimate by the Mercatus Center from the summer. The federal jobs guarantee is valued from $6.8 trillion to $44.6 trillion, and “food security” would tack on an extra $1.5 billion. But even the aspects that should theoretically lower greenhouse gas emissions would not only incur wild costs, but also contradict each other.
The GND calls for updating or retrofitting every single building in the country in a decade. But as the AAF notes, any environmental benefit that could posit even if it did go into effect would be vastly mitigated by the overhaul of the energy grid. And the energy grid overhaul itself would cost $5.4 trillion in initial investment alone in the first decade. For reference, that’s about a trillion dollars more than our entire annual federal budget.
Climate change is a real and urgent threat to global safety. But we’re not going to solve the problem by spending tens of trillions of dollars on socialist programs that won’t reduce a single iota of greenhouse gas emissions. Nor will any program that fails to embrace nuclear energy expansion and to strong arm India and China into reducing their emissions, next to which our own are a rounding error.
And while climate change will incur vast economic costs if not eventually dealt with, the cost of the Green New Deal is greater even than those costs, and by a vast amount.
Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, introduced the resolution with the warning from the United Nations that climate change could cost the country half a trillion dollars every year by 2100.
Half a trillion per year in 80 years is bad. $93 trillion over the next decade is a little bit worse.
[Related: Ocasio-Cortez to critics of Green New Deal: ‘I’m the boss’ until you try]
