The eagerly-anticipated Green New Deal resolution dropped last week. Suffice to say the policy platform aiming to transition the country to renewables in little over a decade, along with a suite of other intersectional policies, made heads explode across the political spectrum… but most especially on the right.
We’ll start at the center left. The Daily Caller and others were quick to pick up on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s comment calling the new plan a “Green Dream.” But when Green New Deal figurehead, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was asked if she was offended by that description--clearly meant to be a shot at the plan’s vagueness--she seemed to shrug it off. AOC pointed out that “all great American programs, everything from the Great Society to the New Deal, started with a vision for our future, and I don’t consider [Pelosi’s comment] to be a dismissive term. I think it’s a great term.”
It’s hardly surprising that the unflappable freshman representative was unphased by the comparison. After all, one of the most monumental political speeches in history invoked the rhetorical power of having a dream.
Moving on from Pelosi’s (hopefully intentional effort to) praise with faint damnation, one of the most realistic criticisms aired last week is that the Green New Deal is totally unrealistic. Transitioning to a clean, just economy on a timeline the science demands is a tall order, to put it lightly. But as Michael Grunwald at Politico explains in a piece for the magazine, the fact that the Green New Deal is impossible is sort of the point. “Climate change is an unprecedented emergency that requires unprecedented action,” Grunwald writes, “so America needs to try to do seemingly impossible things.”
Then there’s a reaction even farther to the right: Washington Examiner commentary writer Tiana Lowe compared the Green New Deal to Trump’s “Mexico’s going to pay for it” line about the wall. Both, Lowe argues, are vague promises people can rally around without diving into the nuances of policy. Lowe describes the GND as “at best… a campaign slogan,” and “at worst...a Trojan horse of socialist fantasies.”
This leads us directly to the main criticism from the right last week of the bill: socialism is bad! From the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan using a clip from the Bruce Willis classic Armageddon to illustrate his very sophisticated opinion, to the Wall Street Journal running two seperate pieces to the same effect, to Breitbart, to various Koch front groups and fossil fuel spokespeople with comically bad gifs, to the president’s large adult son, socialist fearmongering is the go-to point from conservative commentators. Given how the right has recently assailed everything that isn’t corporate handouts as socialism, it seems at this point Americans are increasingly tuning out the boys who cry “socialist wolf!”
One of the more infuriating conservative reactions was that of Megan McArdle, a columnist for the Washington Post. (You may remember her as the career Koch stooge who thought maybe it was okay that people burned alive in the UK’s Grenfell Tower tragedy because safety rules could have inconvenienced someone.) McArdle’s approach to the Green New Deal in her column was to complain about how much she’s spent renovating her house, and suggest that improving our country’s buildings would, based on her “experience at energy-efficiencizing [sic]” her own home, “require the entire population of the United States” to do the work.
Somehow, providing funding so people can pay less to heat and cool their homes is bad, and creating jobs to do that work is not “politically enticing.” Everyone knows government isn’t supposed to spur job creation or help the working class lower their power bills, right?
The best reaction to last week’s legislation goes to the Heritage Foundation’s Nicolas Loris, who complained that the plan to get the US carbon-neutral in ten years “wouldn’t change our climate” because it wouldn’t zero out emissions from other nations. The GND’s foreign policy push would encourage energy innovation and export it to developing nations, which would bring down emissions globally. Loris dismisses this with a wave of the hand, calling the idea of other nations giving up fossil fuels “ pure fantasy.” The reality is that these developing nations are already choosing renewables over fossil fuels, rendering Loris’s entire argument moot.
Pelosi may not believe in AOC’s Green Dream (yet), but there’s no doubt that it’s the blustering objections to the Green New Deal that are “pure fantasy.”
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