Before we get started, a quick note. The other day, we mentioned that the Koch’s admonishment of Trump for attacking the press was undercut by Koch operatives working to provide ammo for the Trump Administration to attack the press. A key example was Jason Hopkins’ claim that EPA security didn’t shove a reporter out of the building to prevent her from reporting on an event. E&E News got security camera footage of the incident this week. Sure enough, the footage shows EPA security pushing AP reporter Ellen Knickmeyer out of the building.
Moving on to other creeps attacking climate. There’s a new report out claiming that the Green New Deal will have a $93 trillion price tag. This attempt to put a dollar figure on a resolution calling for policies is ridiculous, since we don’t know what exactly all the various GND policies will be.
But we shouldn’t be surprised, given the report comes from the American Action Forum, a group we discussed back in 2016 when it put a big price tag on an Obama climate policy. AAF is a well-connected Republican group chaired by Fred Malek, who served as “the hatchet” for Richard Nixon. Malek also managed the Committee to Re-Elect the President, CREEP, which was pretty much responsible for the Watergate scandal.
So what’s this CREEPy alum up to now? More dirty tricks, it would seem.
Trying to put a price tag on a policy that doesn’t exist yet is fundamentally dishonest. It's similarly dishonest to look only at the costs, and not the benefits, of a policy--especially because economic literature shows the sooner and stronger we take action on climate, the better our return on investment. And of course, only including the most extreme end of the expected costs provides a skewed picture.
But that’s not all the new report does to inflate the GND’s expected price tag.
The bulk of the $93 trillion cost, $80 trillion, comes from the jobs guarantee and health care promise, both of which other reports suggest is vastly overblown. The jobs price tag is wrong because it’s double counting: many of those jobs would be created by the other parts of the GND. Improving energy efficiency and building a clean energy economy will create a lot of jobs, which are counted in the GND’s green policy price tag tally. But then AAF simply counts those jobs again in the jobs guarantee portion, as though none of those promised jobs would be used to put the green in the Green New Deal.
On healthcare, it’s not as though the GND is going to increase the amount Americans have to pay to stay healthy. In fact, we know climate action has huge public health benefits. The question is whether we want to pay private insurance companies to profit off of our pain, or whether we should pool our resources by expanding Medicare/Medicaid so that it covers everyone.
Obviously, this “analysis” ignores the cost of inaction. The NCA tells us that climate change could shrink the size of the US’s economy 10 percent by 2100, and it has already doubled the acreage burned by wildfires. Those who call climate action into question because of the price tag should be asked a question in return: if terrorists burned down an American town called Paradise, would your first reaction be whether we can afford to respond?
If it is, well, then you’re a CREEP.
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