by Robert M. Traxler
The third in the ongoing series concerning the Green New Deal, as posted on the Green Party’s web site.
Exactly how the Green New Deal will be enacted is anyone’s guess, but the cost can be quantified. Arguably $93,000,000,000,000 (ninety-three trillion dollars) is the estimated cost.
That is a lot of money, nearly five times the total amount made by all the American people in a year, $60,000 per year per household for ten years. It’s more than the entire globe’s gross domestic product. Is that a fair number? It is, if and only if you take the Green New Deal at its word and do all it calls for. The number may even be a bit low. The objections to the number include it is a 10-year cost, but the Green new deal calls for a 10-year program, all to be accomplished by 2030.
The Deal states “Implement a just transition that empowers those communities and workers most impacted by climate change and the transition to a green economy. Ensure that any worker displaced by the shift away from fossil fuels will receive full income and benefits as they transition to alternative work.”
So, if you have a $750,000 job plus benefits and the Green New Deal eliminates your job, they pay you at the same rate. So if you are in an industry that involves aircraft/trucking, the Green New Deal will pay you a full salary and benefits while they develop alternative transportation methods? Assuming they even can, exactly where do the New Deal folks get the money? If you feel the questions are unfair, please remember that the Deal calls for the immediate elimination of all construction of all infrastructure utilizing fossil fuels.
“End destructive energy extraction and associated infrastructure: fracking, tar sands, offshore drilling, oil trains, mountaintop removal, natural gas pipelines, and uranium mines. Halt any investment in fossil fuel infrastructure, including natural gas, and phase out all fossil fuel power plants. Phase out nuclear power and end nuclear subsidies. End all subsidies for fossil fuels and impose a greenhouse gas fee/tax to charge polluters for the damage they have created.”
All in 10 years, impose a greenhouse tax/fee on polluters? That is you and I — every aspect of our lives involves fossil fuel, so we will be taxed to have them put us out of our jobs? We will be taxed even more than we are now on propane/natural gas and non-electric heat? We will be taxed more on gasoline/diesel fuel? Farmers who use fossil fuels will be taxed for producing the food we eat, passing the cost onto us.
Just a thought, but don’t electric vehicles use oils and lubricants to reduce friction? Wheel bearings, drive shaft, door hinges?
Once again, how are the New Deal folks going to produce the new 200 million electric vehicles we need, one every 1.5 seconds for the next ten years, (we have 264,000,000 petroleum vehicles today) not using fossil fuels? Plastics and carbon fibers, petrochemicals so important to electric vehicles will be banned? Aircraft, life flights, air transportation for business and tourist air travel will be banned.
Where are the adults in the Green New Deal room? Anyone who reads the Deal and is not blinded by the religion/ideology of environmental worship should see how industrially strength unrealistic the Deal is.
The Green New Deal is preaching to the converted; the costal city dwellers who have no or very little idea or concern about how life works in most of the nation are for the Deal. After all, you can get every place you need to go by cab, bus or subway, can’t you? Where is the subway station in Hopkins? Dorr? Martin? Moline? Wayland?
You can feed the world without pesticides, fossil fuels, chemical fertilizer or herbicides? Of course you can, it says so in the Green New Deal.
To the good Democrat folks reading this, keep in mind that the eight who announced (or fixing to announce) for President pledged allegiance to the Green New Deal along with ninety House Members/Senators. Common sense? We don’t need no stinkin’ common sense.
To the media: if you are not terrified into silence by the Socialists, please ask for detail, any detail, like how we replace large trucks in the supply chain? Would cobalt, vital in battery production, need to be mined from the oceans? If oil is not sustainable, are nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, lithium and other rare earth metals used in electric vehicles? What would mining do to indigenous peoples in the few areas with the rare earth metals?
Will we fight wars over the rare earth metals or food? Leave the intellectual black hole that fear of being branded an environmental heretic has put you in, and ask.