The Green New Deal is all the rage in liberal politics, and on Thursday it’s generating headlines as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., unveiled a resolution outlining the general aims of the project. But what everybody should be quite clear on is that the Green New Deal isn’t a plan, or even much of an outline. Instead, it’s the socialist equivalent of a Christmas list. It may as well have been written in crayon.
The Green New Deal, so far as it exists in the form of a nonbinding resolution, isn’t merely confined to addressing climate change; it also calls for tackling jobs, food, healthcare, housing, employment, infrastructure, transportation, education, and a whole host of issues. It may as well be a child asking for a Ferrari, a private jet, and a chocolate factory.
Here is a sampling of what the resolution says “should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization”:
- Achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions
- Create “millions of good, high-paying jobs”
- “[E]nsure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States”
- Invest in infrastructure
- Secure clean air and water and “healthy food”
- “Promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression …”
Attaining those goals, the resolution goes on to say, will require the following things:
- Government spending to build “resiliency against climate change”
- Repairing and upgrading infrastructure
- Moving to 100 percent renewable energy (note: renewables are currently only 17 percent of power sources)
- Building “smart” power grids
- Ensuring affordable electricity
- Upgrading all existing buildings in the U.S. so that they’re energy efficient
- “[S]purring massive growth in clean manufacturing”
- Backing “family farming”
- Creating “a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food”
- “[O]verhauling transportation systems in the United States”
- Investing in zero emission vehicles and high-speed rail
- Funding “community-defined projects and strategies” to deal with the effects of climate change
- Providing college and training “to all people of the United States”
- Creating more union jobs
- Providing everybody with “high-quality” healthcare
- Providing everybody with “affordable, safe, and adequate housing”
- Providing everybody with “economic security”
- Providing everybody with “access to clean water, clean air, health and affordable food, and nature.”
This list, which is based on the premise that the U.S government has an unlimited amount of money to spend and that lawmakers can bend the the world’s largest economy to its will within a decade, is so absurd that even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., referred to it Wednesday as the “green dream or whatever they call it.”
