The proposed “Green New Deal” has attracted enormous attention in the past few weeks, mostly negative. In fact, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise of an early vote on the measure is widely seen as a stunt, designed only to embarrass democrats. Some democratic senators are scrambling to create an alternative to substitute before the vote, while most simply want the vote called off.
The growing controversy almost makes me proud to have warned about this several weeks ago, although at the time most of us viewed it only as an extremist wish-list from one especially far-out freshman legislator (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). Many were prepared to dismiss the proposal as summarily as Speaker Nancy Pelosi did, except that several presidential candidates have now endorsed it, and others are calling for more in-depth discussion of it. OK.
Simply put, the energy and environment aspects of the plan are unserious. Many observers call the dream of eliminating carbon emissions “pie in the sky.” I don’t like the reference, because I like pie. More to the point, that expression implies a dream that may be impossible to achieve – but is a dream nonetheless. The “Green New Deal” is no such thing.
The newly-elected New York City congresswoman might be forgiven her lack of understanding of how America’s economy works, given her young age (29) and complete lack of useful experience. After college she “participated in a panel on Latino leadership” for a 5-day even at the National Hispanic Institute, and she once tried to start a publishing firm with help from a local business incubator. Both the business and the incubator are now defunct. So she waited tables for about a year while running for Congress, and has otherwise never really had a job, no connection at all to public policy. Perhaps that explains why so many experts looking at the details of her proposed “Green New Deal” wonder why much of it has nothing to do with energy or the environment.
The energy section is straightforward. All electric power in America will be generated from renewables. Every building in America will be upgraded to state-of-the-art energy efficiency (that’s 136 million homes and 20 million business and industrial buildings). Nuclear, coal, and natural gas power plants will be shut down, and several trillion dollars spent building solar, wind and other renewable facilities.
It can be paid for, the proposal says, by “the Federal Reserve extending credit,” and by “various taxation tools,” including a 70 percent tax on millionaires, and carbon taxes. No revenue source is suggested when the carbon industries are gone, but we are told “there is also a space for the government to take an equity role in projects,” meaning government ownership of the means of production.
Other emerging details include eliminating airplanes and cows, among other changes in our way of life. As one supportive news analyst explained, it is “meant to transform not just the energy sector, but the entire economy. It is meant both to decarbonize the economy and to make it fairer and more just.”
That last bit is the source of other details, such as government housing for everyone, guaranteed income for all, including those who don’t wish to work, nationalized utilities and health care, and free K-college education. Perhaps a unicorn in every stable.
Has anyone wondered how western states like Colorado might fund the education component, when a primary source of its revenue is eliminated? It is a fair question, because the proposal would not impose on renewable energy the same taxes and fees currently paid by the energy sector.
A new report from Vital for Colorado, a statewide business group focused on energy policy, found that over the past five years, Colorado got $3.3 billion in primary and higher education funding from oil and gas – $669 million per year. The report examined all revenue streams for K-12 and higher education that are tied to oil and gas – local and state property taxes, royalties from energy production on state and federal lands, corporate and personal income taxes, and state sales taxes. Oil and gas businesses properties are assessed at 87.5 percent, triple the assessment rate on commercial property, and 12 times that on residential property.
How would Colorado fund schools if $669 million a year disappeared from the budget? What would be the fate of planned teacher pay increases, or the Governor’s $200 million proposal for universal kindergarten?
For Colorado, the “Green New Deal” is not new, not green, and a bad deal.
This column originally appeared in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel March 1, 2019.
Comments on this entry are closed.