A dead planet costs more [View all]

[DemocracyMouse]

The War On Climate Change Won’t Be Won Quibbling Over The Green New Deal’s Costs

The mounting damage of global warming is a crisis far greater than the deficit.

By Zach Carter and Alexander C. Kaufman

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5c66285be4b01757c369e3df

...The Green New Deal is framed as a joint resolution, not a formal law, meaning even if it passed, the measure wouldn’t bind the government to any new policies. This distinction is key to understanding what the Green New Deal is — and is not — and how to usefully talk about it now. It is a major statement of the Democratic Party’s political priorities. It is not a detailed blueprint of how to get there — or how to pay for it.

The Green New Deal’s agenda, however, is clear: Dramatic action must be taken to avert a climate disaster that will otherwise render much of the world uninhabitable. This is an emergency that deserves immediate attention. Millions of lives are quite literally at stake.

Instead of extreme weather disasters, famines and wars over natural resources, the Green New Deal envisions a future in which our nation overcomes its addiction to oil, gas and coal. The federal government would need so many workers to deploy renewable energy, retrofit buildings to be more energy efficient and construct more durable infrastructure that it could guarantee a job to every American who wants one. Those jobs would pay well and offer union protections. And because climate change touches on every facet of life, the transition away from fossil fuels would happen alongside a rapid expansion of safeguards for Americans already suffering the ill effects of dirty energy, from poisoned waterways to the coal industry’s monopolistic domination of entire regional economies.

One priority the Green New Deal does not include? Balancing the federal budget. Neither the Green New Deal legislation nor an FAQ released by Ocasio-Cortez last week included a detailed set of plans about how to pay for it. This is as it should be.

This was the approach taken during the original New Deal. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw fighting the Depression and the Nazi war machine as emergencies that required immediate action. Roosevelt himself liked balanced budgets as much as the next fellow. He raised taxes on the rich repeatedly ― the top rate rose as high as 94 percent during the war. But he didn’t let a balanced budget get in the way of progress. If he couldn’t get enough money from taxes, Roosevelt borrowed it, fighting both the Depression and World War II with enormous federal debts.