We Don't Need a Green New Deal (GND) ?

SOURCE Responding to the RIGHT - Nathan J. Robinson

The Anti-GND Arguments

The only thing certain about CO2 is that it's necessary for life on Earth, " lt's plant food".
 NASA satellite images have charted the greening of the Earth since the early 1980s.
The notion that climate change is necessarily bad is an assumption, and possibly an unfounded one.
     -Steve Milloy' "The Case for a Green 'No Deal"" Wall Street Journal

The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive
     -Donald Trump' Twitter' November 6, 2O12

With all of the hysteria, all of the fear' all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?
     -Jim lnhofe (Senate speech' July 28,2003)

-Marc Morano, Green Fraud

Progressives love to prophesize doom about the environment.
They tell us that global warming will be apocalyptic. But their predictions have always been wrong.
To the extent that there is global warming, and to the extent that it is caused by humans, its consequences will not be so serious as to justify all the panic.
Humans can adapt to changing climates. We certainly do not need the "Green New Deal", an incredibly costly proposal that will destroy the economy.
The Green New Deal is not about stopping climate change, it is about forcing socialism on America by manufacturing a phony crisis.
The policy has many components that have nothing to do climate change and are just pet issues of the left.
The climate scare is just a way for leftists to sneak their policies through by making people afraid and trying to get them to blame capitalism.

The Response

There are a number of different conservative claims made on Climate.
Some downplay the extent of it or try to absolve humans from responsibility.
Others admit the facts of climate change but suggest that leftist proposals for dealing with it are unnecessary and counter-productive.
At the very extreme end, there are those, like Trump, who simply insist that human-caused climate change is not happening.

Few people fall into this category anymore.
In fact, toward the end of his term, even Trump seemed to shy away from repeating his allegation that climate change was a "hoax" peddled by the Chinese.
Instead, he simply didn't mention it.
This is far more common on the right these days: just not bringing up climate change at all, spending far more time talking about whatever the latest "cancel culture" flap is instead.
Its understandable that conservatives don't really want a major public debate about what to do about climate change, because so few people with any expertise on the subject sympathize with the right-wing approach.
Some are perfectly willing to admit that human-caused climate change is happening, but downplay its potential risk.
We can find this kind of approach in books like Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never  and  Fomborgs False Alarm ¹ .

These books are insidious because they appear credible and insist they accept the consensus among climate scientists. But a closer look reveals that in order to support their claim, they have to twist the facts in ways that can easily fool non-experts.

Let us look at an example.

When the horrific 2019 wildfires occurred in California, many on the left mentioned climate change as a contributing factor.
 But the right pushed back.
Trump said the fires had everything to do with "bad forest management".
Tucker Carlson ran a segment claiming that anyone who blamed climate change was doing so for "political" reasons and exploiting a tragedy.
 "It took no time at ali for the usual vultures and parasites to swoop in and try to make a political advantage," Carlson said.
Showing clips of Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom saylng that climate change was responsible, and an MSNBC anchor calling the fires the
"direct result of climate change",
Carlson said that these people were "lying on television" and that there's "no evidence" climate change is responsible.

Carlson then brought on Michael Shellenberger to provide support for the claim.
Shellenberger said the fires on the West Coast happened because there are
"more people and more electrical wires that they've failed to maintain because we've focused on other things like building renewables"
and we've been
"so focused on renewables, so focused on climate change",
 He further tweeted that
"it is gross misinformation to blame climate change for our fires."²
(Elsewhere Shellenberger chastises those who show "pyrophobia"  ---  fear of fires --- like, I suppose, the residents of Paradise, California, which burned to the ground in the 2018 wildfire.)

Carlson and Shellenberger were just lying.

From a paper by six climate scientists:

Since the early 1970s, California's annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 20l7 and 2018.
This trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest-fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human-induced warming.³

A recent paper from seven climate scientists was called
 "Climate change Is Increasing the Likelihood of Extreme Autumn wildfire Conditions across California" ⁴,

UCLAs Daniel Swain says there's been a
     "really big increase [in high fire-risk days] over a relatively short period of time that can be attributed directly to the changes in climate."⁵

Friederike Otto, then director of the university of Oxford's Environmental Change Institute, says:

 "There is absolutely no doubt that the extremely high temperatures are higher than they would have been without human-induced climate change.
A huge body of attribution literature demonstrates now that climate change is an absolute game-changer when it comes to heat waves, and California wont be the exception."⁶

Then here's Jennifer Balch, director of the Earth Lab at the university of Colorado Boulder, on the connection between that heat and the fires:

"As a fire scientist, I can say fires are really responsive to warming.
With just a little bit of warming, we're seeing a lot more burning.
We have twice as much burning now as we were seeing in the early 1980s". ⁷

Sometimes, then, conservatives just pretend that expert opinion says something other than what it actually says.

But sometimes the distortions are a little more clever:
someone trying to convince you that we spend too much on renewable energy might tell you a large sum of money that the government has paid in renewable energy subsidies, but not note the even larger sum of money that has been spent on fossil fuel subsidies, ⁸
This is what's known as "paltering".
 It is essentially "lying with facts", saying things that are all true but giving a wholly misleading picture of reality.
 It is important to learn how to spot this, because at first it can be hard to even accept that
"lying with facts" is possible -- if everything you've said is true, how can what you're saying be false?

But by cherry-picking only small pieces of reality,

one can make it seem as if things are the opposite of what they really are.
Dinesh D'Souza, for instance, gleefully tweeted a CNN news story about a glacier that had unexpectedly grown rather than shrunk. ⁹
For D'Souza, this was evidence that the "melting glacier" problem is a myth.
But the actual CNN article pointed out that the trend was still the same.
Only presenting outlier events or choosing an unusually hot year in the past to show that there has been
"no warming since that year" has Iong been common among climate change deniers.

But I don't feel the need to spend too much time here de-bunking right-wing dishonesty on the fundamentals of climate change, ¹⁰
because there is such an overwhelming consensus at this point about the problem's urgency. ¹¹
(This does not prevent shameless pundits like Mark Levin from writing things like "suffice to say, there is simply no consensus.")¹²

Trump may see it as a "Chinese hoax" ¹³ but thirteen of Trump's own administrative agencies put out a major report during his presidency discussing the urgency of climate action.

The report

"details how climate-fueled disasters and other types of worrisome changes are becoming more commonplace throughout the country and how much worse they could become in the absence of efforts to combat global warming,"
and shows that we are
"more certain than ever that climate change poses a severe threat to American's health and pocketbooks, as well as to the country's infrastructure and natural resources." ¹⁴

Even fossil fuel companies Shell and BP have now switched to accepting the reality of climate change and promising (dubiously) to become net-zero emissions companies.¹⁵
 

We then get to the position of those who accept the reality of climate change,
but do not believe that a Green New Deal is needed in order to deal with it.
Take the American Enterprise Institute's report on the Green New Deal, which warns of the following:

The GND at its core is the substitution of central planning in place of market forces for resource allocation,
in the US energy and transportation sectors narrowly and in the broad industrial,
business, and housing sectors writ large. . .

While the effect of the inexorable increase in government authoritarianism resulting from the GND will be difficult to measure, its costs will be very real.
Given the tragic record of central planning outcomes worldwide over the last century, the GND should be rejected. ²⁰

Here we see a classic case of the conservative "speculative story" about negative unintended consequences.
We have a few tropes here, such as the invocation of planning as inherently scary,
and intimations that Stalinist tyranny will result from too much state investment in renewable energy.

What is the Green New Deal?

It is a large-scale plan to address climate change and social injustice that has been proposed by progressives as a sensible way to tackle some of the most crucial challenges currently facing the country and the world.
Its clearest articulation currently exists in the form of a congressional resolution whose primary sponsors are
 Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey.

That resolution Iays out a very general argument:

This is an important aspect of the GND, because it would be very easy for solutions to climate change to be economically unfair. For instance, if we simply impose a high gasoline tax,
in the recognition that driving a car has a cost to the climate that we wish to discourage,
we may well reduce emissions, but we will do so in a way that hurts low-wage workers who have to drive to work.

This is deeply unfair, especially because we know that
 oil and gas companies have reaped
immense windfall profits from the sale of a destructive product.
They manipulated public understanding by casting doubt on the science of climate change in order to continue to make vast sums of money.

 If the costs of trying to undo this damage are borne by the least wealthy,
 then repairing an environmental problem is creating a new kind of economic injustice that will make people angry.
 It will also make them less supportive of efforts to mitigate climate change,
as we saw in the case of the "yellow vests" protests in France, which objected in part to rising fuel costs. ²¹

This is important to understand:

the GND framework is often derided as a "left-wing wish list" because it includes ideas,
like a federal job guarantee, that do not look climate-related.
But an important part of the theory behind the GND is that
addressing people's economic needs has to happen at the same time as addressing climate policy;
otherwise, they are unlikely to get on board with climate policy.
For instance, if there is new federal funding for retrofitting a school building to be environmentally sustainable,
but kids are still coming to school hungry, both parents and teachers might find climate policy to be an absurd and infuriating priority.

So what does the Green New Deal propose?

 It aims to give people

while

It will do so through new government spending on:

 It would involve funding:

The economic justice components of the Green New Deal

are achieved, in part, by making sure that the jobs created through these initiatives will be high-quality, well-paying union jobs. The GND is meant, in part, to address the fairness problem facing those who currently work in the fossil fuel industry and who face the prospect of losing their livelihoods.
Realizing that coal miners do not deserve to suffer through the transition,
the GND emphasizes the importance of treating the energy transition as a jobs program.

This aspect of the GND has been derided by Bill Gates as communistic, ²²
 but it means that people will see a real material benefit from climate policy,
and thus will be more likely to get on board with something that they otherwise
might feel would only affect future generations. ²³

GND proposals are easy to caricature, in part because they are deliberately sketchy.

 When I talked to GND policy architect Rhiana Gunn-Wright, she told me that the specific programs that would be funded by the plan are intentionally left slightly vague because the GND needs to be developed through a democratic process:

"I love a detail. I have not found a detail yet that I do not love.
I talk about service delivery and public goods way more than anyone should. . . .
 But I m actually glad, right now, that we aren't talking about prescriptive policy details, because right now we have to get consensus around these goals, and we have to actually listen.

This is going to be such a big transformation,
and the GND, even in resolution form -- it's an economy-wide transition,
so everyone is going to be affected, so we actually have to take the time to talk to people,
to listen to different groups, to hear the debates, to try to build consensus, and then move forward to try to figure out prescriptive policy details from then. . . .

I think it actually shows that we're being more judicious than less judicious because racing to have details right now; that's about nothing but impressing the press.

So why not just take the time, talk to people, try to get folks on board, and have a truly participatory policy design process? "  ²⁴

This means that climate policy should not be put forth in a completed form by elite policy wonks who have gotten together and decided what is best for the country and asked us to give it an up or down vote.
 Instead, it should be a statement of what the goals we are trying to achieve are, and then there should be an inclusive process to decide how exactly they are best achieved.
What we need right now is a consensus around the values and targets.

A city, for instance, should not be told how it is going to achieve zero-emissions public transit;
 it should come up with a plan and the federal government should support it.

This democratic aspect of the GND's development means it is quite the opposite of the conservative caricature,
which treats it as a plan by centralized bureaucrats to seek power.
In fact, the whole reason that the plan has yet to be fully fleshed out is that its designers do not want centralized bureaucrats to have too much control and want to emphasize the importance of local participation in the plan.

The GND is not opaque or arcane or a sinister attempt to seize power.
It is grounded in a simple recognition that we face, as a country, a series of major problems, many of which are linked together and can be addressed together.
It asks us to make a commitment to a series of goals.

It is interesting that Marc Morano in Green Fraud asks "what criteria" will be used to decide when enough is enough.
The criteria are actually laid out quite explicitly:
We are trying to

When the country is powered by renewables and its people are taken care of, the need for the GND ceases.

What we are committing to is:

1. a recognition of the problems;
2. a shared set of goals;
3. the government action necessary to reach the goals and solve the problems.

This should be uncontroversial.
Debates over what to do should take place within the context of broad agreement that a GND should and will happen.

Further Reading

FOOTNOTES

l. Shellenberger and Lomborg do not self-identify, as political conservatives (in fact, they identify as environmentalists), but their books are direct attacks on left-wing climate politics.

2. Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD), "2M acres of California have burned so far this year", Twitter, Sept. 8, 2020, 4:07 p.m.,
https://twitter.com/shellenbergermd/status/1303424670398439424 .

3. A. P. Williarns, et al. "Observed impacts of anthropogenic climate change on wildfire in Californial", Earths' Future (2019), pp. 892-910.

4. Michaei Goss et al, "Climate Change Is increasing the Likelihood of Extreme Autumn Wildfire Conditions across California," Environmental Research Letters 15, no. 9 (2020),
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab83a7 .

5. Anne C. Mulkern, "Climate Change Has Doubled Riskiest Fire Day"s in California," Screztlic American, April 3, 2020,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-has-doubled-riskiest-fire-days-in-california   .

6. James Temple, "Yes, Climate Change Is Almost Certainly Fueling Californiat Massive Fires," MIT Technology Reuiew, Ang. 20, 2020,
 https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/20/1007478/california-wildfires-climate-change-heatwaves     /.
 

7. Darryl Fears et al., "Heat Is Turbocharging Fires, Drought and Tropical Storms This Summer", Washington Posr, Aug. 21, 2020,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/08/21/heat-climate-change-weather .

8. This is precisely what was done by "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, in
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor and Fails to Fix the
Planet.
See Bob Ward, "A Closer Examination of the Fantastical Numbers" in Bjorn Lomborg's New Book. Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, Aug. 10, 2020,
https://www.lse.ac.uk/grantharninstitute/news/a-closer-examination-of-the-fantastical-numbers-in-bjorn-lomborgs-new-book . 404 page gone
Lomborg has long been a favorite on the right, because while he is not a climate change denier, he insists that panic over climate change is unwarranted and the costs of addressing it in the way progressives want are too high to be worth it.
As this review shows, Lomborg does this by underestimating the damage that climate catastrophes will cause
 (he thinks it will be a small, manageable hit to GDP) and exaggerating the costs of transitioning to renewable energy.
Book publishers do not fact-check, and Lomborg is a very skilled manipulator whose deceptions can be difficult to spot, so he has become one of the most insidiously harmful pundits on the issue.
The eminent biologist E. O. Wilson lamented Lomborg's presence in the discourse thusly:
"we will always have contrarians like Lomborg whose sallies are characterized by willful ignorance, selective quotations, disregard for communication with genuine experts, and destructive campaigning to attract the attention of the media rather than scientists"
E. O. Wilson, "On Bjorn Lomborg and Extinctionl' Grist, Dec. 12, 200I, https://grist.org/article/point .

9. Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza),
 "Hahaha! It's 2020 and the glaciers are still here. If all of this is 'settled science' how come it can't make a single valid prediction?"
Twitter, Jan.8,2020,11:23 p.m., https://twitter.com/DineshDSouza/status/1215126884494778373 

10. If you would like to see the most common forms of bullshit debunked, this video is helpful:
"13 Misconceptions about Global Warming" posted by Veritasium, Sept" 22,2014'
YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWXoRSIxyIU.

11. Mark Lynas et a1., "Greater Than 99% Consensus on Human Caused Climate Change in
the Peer-Reviewed Scientific Literature" Environmental Research Letters 16, no.ll (2021)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 .

12. Mark R. Lein, American Marxlsrn (New York: Threshold Editions,20Zl), p.172.

13. Jeremy Schulman, "Every Insane Thing Donald Trump Has Said about Global Warming"
Mother lones, Dec. 12, 2018, https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/12/trump-climate-timeline .

14. I am quoting here from the following article summarizing the report, not the report itself.
 Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney,
 "Major Trump Administration Climate Report Says Damage Is 'Intensifying Across the Country' ",
Washington Post,Nov.23,2018,
 https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/23/major-trump-administration-climate-report-says-damages-are-intensifying-across-country .
 

15. '"Our Climate Target" Shell,
https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-future/our-climate-target ;

"BP Sets Ambition for Ne'i Zero by 2050, Fundmentally
Changing Organisation to Deliveri' BP, Feb. i2, 2020,
https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/news-and-insights/press-releases/bernard-looney-announces-new-ambition-for-bp.html .

ExxonMobil, too, has a portion of its website devoted to convincing the public that it cares about climate change, as well as a long series of denials that it covered up its knowledge of climate change and misled the public.
(which it absolutely 100 percent did).
See Shannon Hall, "Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago," Scientific American, act. 26, 2015,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-climate-change-almost-40-years-ago .)

16. Ben Shapiro, Bullies: How the Left's culture of Fear and Intimidation silences Americans
(New York: Threshold Editions, 2013), p. 204.

17. lames P. Kossir et a1., "Global Increase in Major Tropical Cyclone Exceedance Probability over the Past Four Decades"
 Proceedings of the National Academy of sciences of the United States l!7, no.22 (June 2020), pp. 1 1975- 1 1980,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920849117 '

18. Dana Nuccitelli,
"Why the Mail on Sunday Was Wrong to Claim Global Warming Has Stopped,"
The Guardian, Oct. 16,2A12,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/oct/16/daily-mail-global-warming-stopped-wrong

19.For a rebuttal to Svensmark, see "Henrik Svensmark," OSS,
http://ossfoundation.org/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/henrik-svensmark '

20. Benjamin Zycher,
"The Green New Deal: Economics and Policy Analysis (One Pager)"
American Enterprise Institute (2019).
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Green_New_Deal_One-Pager_Zycher.pdf

2l. Adrian Foong,
"Of Yellow Vests and Green Policies"
Climate Diplomacy, April 18, 2019,
https://climate-diplomacy.org/magazine/cooperation/yellow-vests-and-green-policies 

22. Specifically, Gates told Wired'. "I'm enough of a centrist to look at the Green New Deal and say, what world do you people live in that you're going to give everyone a job, and you stuck that in a climate bill? You must not be serious about climate. You must be singing the theme song of the Internationale and reading Marx".
 Bill Gates, "Bill Gates Is Upbeat on Climate, Capitalism, and Even Politics," interview by Steven Levy, Wired, March 18, 2021,
https://www.wired.com/story/bill-gates-is-upbeat-on-climate-capitalism-and-even-politics
Gates does not understand the basic theory of why it's important to make sure climate policies are
designed to address people's economic concerns as well so that there will be mass support for
climate policy. Because he is a technocrat, Gates prefers to focus narrowly on technological
solutions for climate change and shows little understanding of the political realities of solving
the problem. For example, in the same interview, he says that he believes Republicans should
be in power sometimes, because it is important not to have one party always in charge. But
he does not consider the implications of Republican rule, namely that anyy further governance by Republicans forecloses the possibility of doing anything about climate catastrophe.
To want Republicans in charge is to want climate change to go unaddressed.
Gates appears to see the Green New Deal and Republican climate denialisrn as equally pernicious, which they
are not. Gates appears to be advocating something sensible -- bipartisanship -- but is really advocating something inane -- the preclusion of meaningful climate action.
For a longer critique of Gates in particular, see Nathan J. Robinson and Rob Larson,
 "Humanity Does Not Need Bill Gatesl' Current Affairs, May 4,2A21,
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/05/humanity-does-not-need-bill-gates .
 

23. Rhiana Gunn-Wright has given a clear and persuasive answer to the question of 
why it is necessary to include more than just explicit climate policy in the Green New Deal:

Rhiana Gunn-Wright, "Rhiana Gunn-Wright on Insurgent Left Policy-Making," interview by Nathan i. Robinson, Current Afairs, ]une 5, 2020, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/06/rhiana-gunn-wright-on-insurgent-left-policy-making .

24. Ibid.