> The Green New Deal moves us in the right direction. You can raise questions about the specific form in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey introduced it. But the general idea is quite right.<p>I really wish the "Green New Deal" wasn't mentioned in these pushes for the future. I don't think there was ever agreement on what the "general idea" of it was, and I don't think it deserves any credit for the few good ideas that it did contain. Sure, it's recognizable, but not necessarily in a good way.
But it probably won't fix the climate:<p><a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964" rel="nofollow">https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13563467.2019.15...</a>
I just don't understand the rhetoric here. The climate disaster scenario is<p>> everything is expected to change: the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the landscapes we see, the oceans, the seasons, the daily routine, the quality of life. Our children will have to adapt or become extinct. They will have to dress differently, behave differently, live differently.<p>Sounds bad! I'm open to ideas on how to prevent such radical disruptions. But the author suggests that we need to end fossil fuel consumption, reconfigure our economic system, reconsider what it means to have a decent life, and eliminate our desire to consume lots of goods and services. Shouldn't we expect a comparable amount of disruption from these huge changes?
Bernie Sanders would have been so good for the American capitalist economy. He is the only one who would have after the monopolies, which would help level the playing field that is currently just consolidating into big companies. The social safety net would also spur a lot of new business creation.<p>I am not very confident about America's ability to handle global warming disasters in ten years.
>If you eliminate the massive subsidies that are given to fossil fuels, renewable energy is probably already more cost-effective.<p>Because there is a lot of subtlety in the way we contrast subsidies with normal tax deferrals, it may be clarifying to consult this fact sheet from EESI, which is a successor of the Environmental Study Conference caucus originally in the US Congress:<p><a href="https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs" rel="nofollow">https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs...</a><p>>Well, what’s the difference between the Green New Deal of today and the New Deal from the 1930s? Several things. One thing that’s different is large-scale labor action.<p>It wouldn't be a Chomsky essay without a paean to the labor movement.<p>I think that the "Green New Deal" is the wrong name. The "New Deal" was a principally economic initiative. Climate change affects the economy, but climate change is really about physics. The appropriate analogy would be to the Manhattan Project, not the New Deal. (Nuclear technology has also had a massive effect on the economy!)<p>One unfortunate consequence of the naming trend "Green New Deal" has been an excessive focus on economic remedies which overshadows the most important scientific advances. Recently the most important advances have been in the production and price of lithium batteries.<p>There are approximately 500 trillion pounds of lithium in the ocean, as well as many cheaper sources on land. The lithium iron-phosphate chemistry is not dense enough for use in cars or portable electronics, but on a cost basis it is quickly eclipsing all other forms of energy storage. At present, the development of this technology is limited mostly by low demand, which is utterly ridiculous when you consider that the widespread adoption of grid-scale energy storage is absolutely essential to there ever being a near-zero-carbon electricity market.<p>The other key technology that needs to be developed further is the heat pump. Heating buildings with gas accounts for a large fraction of our carbon emissions and can't be easily replaced by Joule heating because the electricity requirements are so large. Therefore the near-zero-carbon replacement for gas heating must be some variety of heat pump, be it vapor-compression, magnetocaloric or otherwise. The current commercially available air-source heat pumps are limited to a minimum outdoor air temperature of about -20 C, which means that they are not viable for year-round heating in many large global cities, including e.g. Chicago, Moscow, Harbin, et cetera. Ground-source heat pumps by contrast have high installation costs which increase with the desired power output. Improvements in one or the other are needed to reach the necessary endpoint where nearly all of the human population can stop relying on gas heating.
I find it incredibly unlikely that we are going to be able to avoid the brunt of climate change. Mass flooding is going to happen and countries like Bangladesh will be swallowed up by the sea. Refugee crises are going to happen at unprecedented scales and there will likely be wars. Even the paltry GND, which is almost certainly not going to be instituted, would not prevent this.<p>This was inevitable under capitalism. As a system that requires constant growth, it is incredibly brittle and does not lend itself well to long-term, sustainable planning. The only question for me now is: how do we best prepare ourselves for the upcoming crisis, such that we might be able to construct an equitable, sustainable society out of it? Crisis doesn’t guarantee revolutionary change — but it can if we're organized properly.
The New Deal has such a ridiculous glorified position in the view of the left. Of course it was a total failure and thankfully rules unconstitutional. The US had the deepest Great Depression, deeper then countries that didn't do a 'New Deal'.<p>You can pin-point the start of the recovery to the leaving of the gold standard (literally in the month by month producing you see it jumping). It was actually the New Deal that stopped the bounce back.<p>The politicians behind the new deal saw the Great Depression as an opportunity for social revolution, not as an economic recovery program. It is no secret that many of the primary architects behind the New Deal were strongly inspired by early socialism and fascism.<p>Further I would say Noam Chomsky has absolutely zero credibly in any topic related to economics. He is a weirdo socialist and we could go down 3 levels deep of what type of socialist exactly he is, but needless to economics and political science would agree that his ideas are not practical. So why take a advice from him on this.<p>You don't need a 'New Deal' you need to apply your budget and countries strategy with the long run goals you have and make good investments. The New Deal was the exact opposite, it was the embodiment of 'lets throw shit on the wall and hope for the best' often doing massive damage in the process. Mass slaughtering of pigs and destruction of other foods being the most absurd examples of such idiocy. The Blue Eagle program might be the worst regulation ever passed in American history. The list goes on.<p>Depending on what exactly you want to achieve, their are far, far better solutions then having the government bureaucrats blow billions of 100s of billions on politicians pet projects. Its totally contrary to how good government contract is done.<p>Just as with the original New Deal this Green New Deal is not about achieving results. Its is about achieving social and governmental revolution along the principles that the authors believe in.
Give me billions of dollars to hire people to dig holes in the desert and I’ll create a lot of jobs, and you’ll get, a lot of holes in the desert.<p>The “job creation” benefit myth needs to die. Some jobs are bad jobs, some have little or no economic value. Green New Deal advocates need to focus on the economic benefits of these plans, such as a healthier population due to less pollution, saving economical important properties from flooding, maintaining healthy fish stocks, etc, etc.