What If the Green New Deal Is Not as Good as It Sounds?
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
In a room of some 35 progressive activists, I once raised a question about the effectiveness of the Green New Deal, suggesting it might not be targeting the roots of pollution and global heating. I was armed with my own research, including EPA and CDC statistics. And I had thoroughly read the elaborate Bernie Sanders version of the GND.
I had a captive audience. I expected pushback but got none. No one in the audience had read any version of “The Green New Deal” even though they all supported it.
When a good three-word slogan passes for an argument, we’ve got a problem. And when words like “renewable,” “sun” and “wind” substitute for analysis, we may broaden the environmental movement, but we certainly do not deepen it.
I’ve devised a list of 10 questions, intended to add some depth to the vital struggle against global heating (and for clean air/water and biodiversity). This is our last chance to get it right:
1. Are you supporting the GND because you’ve read it, or simply because it sounds like a good thing?
2. What manufacturing processes are needed to convert wind and sun into electricity, and what impact do these processes have on the environment?
3. Is the resulting energy continuous or is it intermittent, requiring shift-backs to the traditional power grid (when the wind dies down and the sun stops shining)?
4. Where do minerals for wind and solar-panel farms come from and are such materials themselves renewable or might they be rare-earth minerals? What if the minerals needed to harness the sun and wind are not renewable?
5. What are the working conditions for miners who extract these minerals and the health conditions of the people who live near these mines? What if a GND in Western countries requires neo-colonial exploitation of miners in the global south?
6. Are the industrialists who operate solar and wind farms socially conscious environmentalists or classic capitalists?
7. Does the expanded land use needed for low-density, sprawling energy production like wind and solar farms have an impact on biodiversity and habitat that more densely situated nuclear energy does not? Shouldn’t we know such things?
8. If unprecedented technical advances were discovered that allowed solar and wind to replace fossil fuels, what would be the end goal? By promising this technological solution are we implying that the human species (and especially the wealthiest nations) will then be able to continue with infinite growth and consumption on a finite planet? Is that what the Green New Deal promises?
9. Have you ever considered other methods, less dependent on unproven technologies, that could reduce pollution and carbon emissions on a massive scale? Or have you been convinced that technology, a primary cause of global heating, is also the only solution?
10. What if we were not living in a society based on massive consumption? Would the fossil fuels industry still have a total grip on our lives?
Since childhood, I’ve been subjected to a perpetual energy-propaganda machine that has stopped at nothing to bamboozle me into participating in a voracious consumer culture.
It took me my own “half-life” to begin asking why Hollywood films have always presented their heroes driving a car, almost never riding a bike or using public transportation. And why you see advertising for processed foods and soft drinks, but never for carrots, melons or fresh-baked bread.
We progressives like to bash conservatives for one-dimensional thinking, but could we also be guilty of trusting slogans and buzz words without further analysis? When something sounds too good to be true, shouldn’t we, at least, ask some probing questions?
Selected bibliography
To build a solid foundation for analyzing the value of any Green New Deal, here’s a short reading list. You might find free PDFs of some of these works on the Internet:
- Daly, Herman E. Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development (Beacon Press, 1996)
- GrowthBusters.org
- Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity (Harper & Row, 1973)
- Jackson, Tim. Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow (Routledge, 2017)
- Jordana, Rufus, “False Hopes for a Green New Deal,” Open Democracy (29 August, 2019)
- Latouche, Serge. Farewell to Growth (Polity, 2010)
- Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Hartley & Marks, 1973)
- steadystate.org
