Headline: Poll: Majorities of both parties support Green New Deal - Timothy Cama/The Hill; December 17, 2018
The poll in question was conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, in which respondents were shown a brief description of what is being called the “Green New Deal”, followed by the question, “How much do you support or oppose this idea?” Here are the first few sentences of the description:
Some members of Congress are proposing a “Green New Deal” for the U.S. They say that a Green New Deal will produce jobs and strengthen America’s economy by accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. The Deal would generate 100% of the nation’s electricity from clean, renewable sources within the next 10 years…
Note how the wording of the description makes it hard to distinguish opinion from fact, guesswork from certainty. Will the Green New Deal produce jobs, strengthen the economy and transition the US electricity system to 100% renewables within the next 10 years? That’s highly debatable. Also note how the description uses “they say”, instead of, say, “supporters claim”. Per the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, “they say” means “what people in general say or think”, which carries more weight than the opinion of a particular group of partisans. Later, the description lists a bunch of great things the Green New Deal will accomplish, neglecting to mention that these things are already being done in the US, e.g. “increase energy efficiency”. For more on the survey, see Part I of this series.
So, what is the Green New Deal? The Deal referred to in the survey is one championed by Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, available here. Some pertinent excerpts*:
Purpose: Transition of the United States economy to become carbon neutral and to significantly draw down and capture greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and oceans and to promote economic and environmental justice and equality.
Objective and Goals: The Plan for a Green New Deal (and the draft legislation) shall be developed with the objective of reaching the following [partial list of] outcomes within the target window of 10 years from the start of execution of the Plan:
Dramatically expand existing renewable power sources and deploy new production capacity with the goal of meeting 100% of national power demand through renewable sources;
Build a national, energy-efficient, “smart” grid;
Upgrade every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety;
Eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacturing, agricultural and other industries, including by investing in local-scale agriculture in communities across the country;
Eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from, repairing and improving transportation and other infrastructure, and upgrading water infrastructure to ensure universal access to clean water;
Rationale for Large Government Role: Why should the government have a big role in driving and making any required investments? Why not just incentivize the private sector to invest through, for e.g., tax subsidies and such? Two main reasons:
First - scale. The level of investment required will be massive. Even if all the billionaires and companies came together and were willing to pour all the resources at their disposal into this investment, the aggregate value of the investments they could make would not be sufficient. [Ocasio-Cortez does not provide a cost estimate for the Deal but notes that $1 trillion over 10 years would be “wholly inadequate”].
Second - time. The speed of investment required will be massive. Even if all the billionaires and companies could make the investments required, they would not be able to pull together a coordinated response in the narrow window of time required to jump-start major new projects and major new sectors.
Time-horizons matter in another way - by their nature, private companies are wary of making massive investments in unproven research and technologies; the government, however, has the time horizon to be able to patiently make investments in new tech and R&D, without necessarily having a commercial outcome or application in mind at the time the investment is made.
Major examples of government investments in “new” tech that subsequently spurred a boom in the private section include DARPA-projects, the creation of the internet - and, perhaps most recently, the government’s investment in Tesla.
We’ve also seen that merely incentivizing the private sector doesn’t work.
In subsequent posts, I’m going to address the above objective, goals, and rationale of the Green New Deal, asking such questions as: Is this feasible? Is this optimal? What are potential drawbacks? Is this better or worse than alternative approaches? What are some of the trade-offs? What might be some unintended consequences? …And so on.
Next: The Objective of the Green New Deal
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*Except for the bracketed comments, these excerpts from the Green New Deal were all copy/pasted from https://ocasio2018.com/gnd on 12/14/18. However, I note that today - 12/18/18 - the URL I used now redirects to https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/edit. Apparently the Deal is a living document (or moving target, depending).