The Democrat’s Green New Deal proposal is, in a word, bonkers. Dan Mitchell provided a look at the implications here. The short version is that it is an all-out assault on the free enterprise system that would be terrible for the economy, our pocketbooks, and our liberties.
Even Democrats must have had some awareness of the plan’s impracticality, as they labeled it a “stunt” when Mitch McConnell brought it to vote and merely voted “present” instead of supporting their own idea! Nevertheless, Democrats went ahead and passed a version in the House which would adopt the Paris Climate Agreement’s emission targets but doesn’t specify how that will happen.
Given all this, you’d think the other political party would draw a sharp contrast by offering a dramatically different vision. But this is the Republican party we’re talking about, so the joke’s on us. Their brilliant idea is to offer a slightly less awful plan.
First, we have Rep. Gaetz’s draft resolution for a “Green Real Deal,” which the American Energy Alliance more aptly renamed a “Green New Deal Lite.” They find a lot that is troubling with his approach:
…Early in the leaked resolution draft, Gaetz oddly asserts that a “national commitment to innovation, competitive markets and the deployment of advanced energy technologies” has led since 2009 to energy efficiency improvements, increased natural gas production, and increased wind and solar installations. …it is laughable to claim that the Obama administration led a national commitment to support natural gas production. To the contrary, the Obama administration limited gas development on federal land, slow-walked approvals for LNG export terminals, proposed numerous regulations crimping gas exploration and development, and its ideological allies aggressively opposed expanding the pipeline network which carries natural gas.
…The resolution, perhaps unwittingly, uses the language of the big government left, again betraying a lack of free market understanding. Government does not “empower individuals and businesses to come together in the marketplace,” people organize into markets themselves. Government interferes with those markets through regulation, mandates and subsidies. While some degree of regulation is appropriate, the idea that the government “empowers” is a deluded fantasy left over from the days of central planning.
Then on Earth Day, Sen. Lindsey Graham said that Republicans were “ready to cross the Rubicon” on climate change and are developing legislation for next year.
What Republicans ought to do is make the case for markets and prosperity as the best way to improve the environment. The innovation that improves the efficiency and cleanliness of products, and that leads to new technologies to solve intractable environmental challenges, is most likely to occur in dynamic, prosperous economies, which the U.S. would no longer have under a Green New Deal. In contrast, the dirtiest places in the world tend to be found in the poorest nations.
We don’t yet know what Graham’s legislation would entail. Hopefully, it provides a real contrast to the Democrats’ command and control approach. But if it’s along the lines of Rep. Gaetz’s resolution, then dueling big government policies on the environment is all we’ll have to choose from.
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Image credit: thommas68 | Pixabay License.
