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cerne

The Green New Deal is set in an unrealistic time frame and there is no way it is possible in today's society.

Plaffelvohfen

Not as is, but there's very good ideas in it and just on principle I support it...  It won't prevent what's to come though, it's already too late for that imo... But there's very good economic opportunities in there...

MayCaesar

It is not a "new deal". It is just a product of new age people who learn economics from Twitter and Facebook. There is not much here constituting a deal; it is a usual emotional outburst in the form of a political proposal.

Discussing it seriously would not constitute a good way to spend one's time.

billbatard

@cerne its always given me this bad feeling in my gut, they want to do too much all at once

Ampersand

I can't really fathom the view that the green new deal is "set in an unrealistic time frame", "too much all at once" or " a product of new age people who learn economics from Twitter and Facebook".

The reality is that the Green New Deal is the bare minimum that the USA should be doing and that honestly it's unrealistically weak, needing to go further than it is.

The international aim for fighting global warming, as per the Paris Agreement, is to keep the global temperature increase at 1.5C which will stop the worst effects of climate change and stop the harm (both human and economic) that would come if we pushed past that. That's the aim that the Green New Deal is trying to reach. It's insufficient on a few grounds:

1) Every single other country on earth isn't going to meet the carbon emission cutting deadlines, meaning other countries and especially large polluters like the USA need to go over and above to make up the difference.

2) Realistically the Green New Deal isn't going to reach it's target alone. Trump has been cutting away at the efforts the USA had started to make to achieve it's targets and there realistically isn't going to be enough legislative/executive support in 2020 to pass a large transformative bill. It's good that measures are being pushed to fight climate change, but when you look at when the USA will really have the political will to get serious about climate change the USA will have to make far more drastic measures by the time it's seriously able to act.

3) It tries to enact climate change in the friendliest least disruptive way possible, which isn't realistic in the long-term. The new generation of people being born now will have to have spend a sixth of the amount of carbon as the people a couple of generations back. This causes radical and fundamental changes to the way people live. Where does the Green Bill mention banning petrol and diesel cars? Plans to cut air travel? Ending farming subsidies for cattle, pigs and sheep?

4) Climate change is damaging, the more we do faster the better the economic outcome. We're going to have to make a huge effort to fight it, so it makes sense to do it as soon as possible - certainly before the point where it will literally end all of human civilisation.