The Economic Case for the Green New Deal
Paying for a climate overhaul would reap rewards for everyone
Critics of the Green New Deal have plenty of serious arguments for why all this is doomed. Political paralysis in Washington, D.C. is real. Even in a world where climate change-denying Republicans were swept out of power, there would still be plenty of centrist Democrats convinced that their constituents had no appetite for radical change. The plans are expensive, and getting the budgets approved would be a Herculean effort.
A better course of action, we hear, would be to advance climate policies that appeal to many on the right, like a shift from coal to nuclear power, or a small tax on carbon that returns the revenues as a “dividend” to every citizen.
The main trouble with these incremental approaches is that they simply won’t get the job done. In order to win support from Republicans soaked in fossil fuel money, the price on carbon would be too low to make much of an impact. Nuclear power is expensive and slow to roll out compared with renewables — and that is not to mention the risks associated with uranium mining and waste storage.
The truth is, we cannot lower emissions as steeply and as rapidly as required to swerve off our perilous trajectory without a sweeping industrial and infrastructure…
