it.” Actually, “people” – congressmen and senators, most importantly – asked precisely that question about the system when it was first proposed. And it’s a good question, one that people should ask more often in Washington. Back then, their answer, and Ike’s, was a gas tax and tolls. Still the skeptics persist. They point out that the GND’s elimination of fossil fuels would mean that all those devices powered by carbon today – from airplanes to boilers to cars – would run on electricity. This in turn would require, by some estimates, increasing our nationwide electrical output fourfold. At current levels, after a decade of generous subsidies, roughly 15% of our electrical production comes from renewable forms of energy. Let us stipulate that in the GND future, we’re going to be looking at a lot of windmills and solar panels. The question is whether there will be room for anything else. And as the Berkeley scholar Steven Hayward has pointed out, the supply chain to mine, transport, manufacture, and maintain the minerals and materials to make all the batteries and solar panels to replace fossil fuels could, in its environmental impact, easily match the present environmental impact of harvesting coal and oil. The explainer, as informative as it is, caused some embarrassment when it was released (that line about paying people “unwilling to work” didn’t go over too well, and a reference
Its proponents see the Green New Deal as the Swiss Army Knife of political programs – or perhaps the policy equivalent of those plastic gadgets that Ron (“Veg- O-Matic”) Popeil used to hawk on late-night TV.
to “farting cows” was dropped from later GND literature). But in fairness to the Green New Dealers, their magical thinking of print- and-spend isn’t much different from the way the government’s finances have been run since the 2008 recession. Still, when a mischievous Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, insisted on bringing the AOC-Markey resolution to a vote of the full Senate, nearly every Democrat, sensing they were being set up, refused to cast a yea or nay vote. Then Markey went before the cameras to declare that “we must act now.” “For too long,” Friedman wrote not long ago in a column on AOC’s Green New Deal, “’green’ was viewed as a synonym for a project that was boutique, uneconomical, liberal, sissy and vaguely French.” There he goes, phrase-making again. He seems to think that at last the day has arrived when “green new deal” has become a synonym for “scalable, feasible, nonideological, robust, and even
vaguely American.” My guess is he will have to wait a while longer.
Andrew Ferguson is the author of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course on Getting His Kid Into College . He is a former speechwriter for President George H. W. Bush and was one of the founding editors of The Weekly Standard.
American Consequences
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