Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’ Is Neither ‘New’ Nor ‘Green’ — It’s Just Socialist. By Joel Pollack.
Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has championed the “Green New Deal,” an idea rapidly gaining traction in Democratic Party circles.
The “democratic socialist” from New York has pushed for the policy in alarmist terms: “People are going to die,” she says, unless it becomes law. Or perhaps “Americans are dying” already. Either way, we face “cataclysmic climate disaster” unless Congress can “plan and implement a Green New Deal” in ten years.
But the “Green New Deal” has little to do with the environment. It is the latest incarnation of a “red-green” strategy, developed decades ago, which seeks to achieve socialist economic policy through the ruse of environmental crisis. …
The main demand: a shift to 100% renewable energy sources by 2030. The promise, as with Van Jones in 2008, is that the shift will create massive numbers of new working-class jobs. …
The “Select Committee” Ocasio-Cortez is demanding would draft legislation to achieve the “Green New Deal.” Along with 100% renewables, her plan also calls for “upgrading every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety”; and “funding massive investment in the drawdown and capture of greenhouse gases.”
By any measure, Ocasio-Cortez is calling for huge government intervention in the economy.
This is the modern version of Keynesian stimulus by useless activities. The classical standard is employing people to dig holes and others to fill them in.
It’s just the broken window fallacy in new clothes. No, breaking windows does not stimulate overall economic activity, even though it causes more work for glass manufacturers and glaziers. It merely transfers expenditure from something else to repairing windows, from useful activity to unnecessary activity. Breaking windows does not stimulate the economy, it just wastes time and money and thereby weakens the economy.
Spending our resources on expensive energy — renewables work out about three to ten times more expensive than coal and nuclear — just makes society and people poorer. Resources are wasted on unnecessary activities, instead of being spent on furthering human welfare.
hat-tip Scott of the Pacific
