Why The Hype Around The Green New Deal Is Good For Our Country’s Future
On February 7, 2019, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey released — in the form of a 14-page resolution — the first real blueprint for the ambitious Green New Deal (GND).
The bumpy rollout has made it even more of a lightning rod for pundits and politicians alike, with folks on one side of the aisle deriding it as “a disaster,” and those on the other — 2020 presidential candidates very much among them — eagerly lining up to endorse it.
Regardless of its divisiveness, though, that the GND has created such a stir is undoubtedly a good thing for our country — and, even one step further than that, for our planet as a whole.
Here’s why.
The GND resolution is a simple signal that we’re serious about combating climate change — and its reception has finally begun a serious conversation about how to win that fight.
The problems we face today are intimidating and immense, including such heavy issues as climate change and income inequality. That means solving them will require ambition, imagination, and bold ideas.
But for all the GND’s imperfections, it is just a resolution that is a starting point for this debate.
At this particular moment in history, that’s exactly what we need. If there is one thing we have learned in the past few years it’s that Americans are no longer interested in middle-of-the-road ideas. There was once a time when any small step was celebrated. We know now that’s not the case.
The simple truth about our current predicament is this: If we’re going to make any real progress in saving our planet, we need to prove to people that the 10,000 companies across $200 billion of annual deployment is up to the challenge.
That starts by participating in the process, sharing our best ideas, and educating our local elected officials about solutions.
The GND recognizes a new inevitability: that innovation is not our Savior.
The fact of the matter is that a serious solution to climate change must involve the government.
This is our reality, for better or worse, and because of that, we must address this truth openly when deciding what to do next. The conversation we’re having about the GND marks perhaps the first time our government has truly come to the table.
There are some, of course, who deny the importance of government involvement in both our fight against climate change and our conversations about it. The private sector has grown substantially over the last ten years, but it is simply not enough.
The federal government is the largest consumer of energy and goods in the United States. If they are not leading, then we are missing the inherent influence and weight of the federal government as an operational entity. If the federal government were to impose a fossil fuel-free standard by 2030, it would reduce the pollution our country generates by approximately 20%. The cost could be fully paid for by the private sector through 20-year Energy Savings Performance Contracts (ESPC) at a volume of $200 billion of solutions per year.
Naysayers also continue to claim that the answer to climate change is not regulation — government intervention — but innovation.
This is equally shortsighted and even, to an extent, backwards. We should always invest in innovation, but we are not lacking innovative technology. We are displaying an inability to implement that technology at scale.
Many of the solutions we’ve identified as necessary for reducing carbon emissions en masse, say, would require education, guidance, and the mobilization of millions of workers. That’s not something our primary innovators — Apple, Tesla, and Google, for starters — are positioned to lead on their own. Nor should they.
That’s a job for which the government is uniquely qualified.
The ultimate solution to climate change and income inequality — if we can put one into place — will by necessity look something like the GND.
Consider what the United States government did at the dawn of World War 2, the last time we faced a truly existential threat.
In short, we focused our entire workforce — our entire industrial economy, no less — around one specific goal: equip the Allies for their fight against the Axis Powers. We united our industrial might behind that one purpose. We redefined what our economy’s identity was. As a result, we not only saved the world from further destruction, but we became the world’s dominant power, owning a vast majority of its industrial capacity.
Make no mistake: We were able to do this because we aligned our institutions and industry around a unified vision.
As it happens, that’s exactly what will be required of combating this new existential threat — and it’s exactly what’s being called for in the GND.
The GND is simply an idea in a resolution today. Nobody knows if the vision laid out in it will one day come into fruition so it can be implemented. But whatever solution we move forward with and, hopefully, agree upon will inevitably utilize as its foundation the blueprint for big action laid out by the United States’ involvement in World War 2. It will by design be audacious, unifying, and transformative.
Why? Because the fight against climate change will inevitably involve every person across every segment of our country.
That’s what it takes, ultimately, to mobilize and transform economies — which is what we’ll need to do to make our economy truly green — and it’s what it takes to eliminate existential threats.
Everyone across our economic and social spectrum — from the disenchanted Midwestern factory worker to software engineers in Silicon Valley — will have to participate. Every component of the machinery of our economy and society will have to be fine-tuned, which means all participants will be influenced and affected.
The project we now need to embark upon to solve for the threats knocking on our door will be shared, complex, and massive. Completing it will be difficult, no doubt. But we need to start discussing, at the very least, what that project should ultimately look like.
The GND, if nothing else, could serve as our first bit of serious progress toward that end.
