FDR's (Democratic) New Deal now has a new, green wonky think tank
Any time I mention the phrase Green New Deal I get a strong reaction. Its either About time! or Thats just too new for anyone to grasp or Everyone is taking credit for that! or Was FDR a Democrat? (he was).
Never mind. We have 10 years to put a tourniquet on carbon emissions and a serious policy think tank has just issued a major paper on what an environmentally responsible New Deal would look like. Its getting coverage everywhere.
Huff Post:
https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5c47a004e4b025aa26be00c9
The heart of the proposal is a call for 100 percent carbon-free electricity before 2030, the date by which United Nations scientists said the world must halve global emissions or face cataclysmic global warming. But the paper goes beyond that goal, proposing lifting the geographical limitations on the TVA to create what would essentially function as a national power company....
Yahoo News:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/proposal-aims-legacy-fdr-works-110028891.html
In May 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act establishing the nations largest public utility and setting in motion an ambitious New Deal policy to provide electricity and jobs to some of the poorest Americans in the midst of the Great Depression.... Nearly 86 years later, a new proposal aims to sharpen the Tennessee Valley Authority into the speartip of a so-called Green New Deal...
The Hill:
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/426493-economic-reasons-for-a-green-new-deal
Lets start with economic reasons for a Green New Deal. The global economy is creating half a million new jobs yearly in renewable energy and employs more than ten million people. In the U.S. weve created a hundred thousand new solar and wind jobs annually, 12 times faster than in the rest of the economy. Green energy is putting people to work.
Green power is also increasingly cheaper. Here at Stanford, we just signed a long-term contract to buy solar power for less than 2.5 cents a kilowatt-hour. Thats extremely low. Remarkable things are happening in wind power, too... Other countries are transforming even faster. A third of the cars consumers bought in Norway last year were electric, up 40 percent from the year before. The transition lets them couple zero-pollution vehicles with clean hydropower. Chinas investing $360 billion in renewable power in their current five-year plan, creating 13 million new jobs. Their Green New Deal is here.
A Green New Deal also makes sense because were paying the costs of climate change today. We suffered $306 billion in damages from hurricanes, fires and other U.S. disasters in 2017, the last year data are fully available, a hundred billion more than ever before.
Policy paper by Data for Progress:
https://www.dataforprogress.org/green-new-deal/