Green New Deal seems a bit Red

Let’s talk about climate change.

Don’t get hot under the collar. This won’t take very long and it won’t be too deep.

A popular talking point on right-wing cable TV (looking at Russian sock puppet Tucker Carlson) is how the crazy environmentalists want to ground all air traffic, with the sub topic that the politicians who want to keep you from flying, themselves fly, often using chartered private jets.

That much is true. Often out of necessity — but sometimes because they just prefer it — politicians and current political candidates do use private jets. So do celebrities. A lot.

The idea of grounding all air traffic in the name of green meanness is spoken as if it were a fact. 

It is not a fact. Read the bill yourself.

It is not included in House Resolution 109, sponsored by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — you remember her — on behalf of some 70 other Honorables.

It is known as the Green New Deal. It says not one word about grounding airplanes. It does not say one word about banning cars operated on fossil fuels. Cows farting? Not mentioned.

Fox News’ Carlson should read it because he keeps rattling on about how “they” want to keep “you” from flying. Maybe he has read it and just ignores it because it doesn’t fit his reactionary narrative.

So, if you were worried, the Green New Deal does not want to take your car nor keep you from flying into the stratosphere. If that was your worry, you can stop right here. In some ways, HR 109 is more Red than Green.

The bill is repetitious, wonky and double-talky, but it is not that radical, at least the environmental action part. To my surprise, there is no direct demand for something affordable and simple: Planting billions of trees. Maybe that is too small an idea for the visionaries.

The bill says human activity is the “dominant cause” of global warming, it’s causing forest fires and sea levels to rise, there will be mass migrations, 350 million will be exposed to deadly heat, and therefore we must get to “net zero global emissions by 2050.”

Okaaaay.

It then takes a hard Left turn from environment to economics, creating a weird salad of lower life expectancy, wage stagnation, declining socioeconomic mobility, income inequality and the wage gap between genders and races.

Um, climate change?

HR 109 reads like it was cut and pasted by a Brown University Soc 101 class from a primer jointly authored by communist Karl Marx and anthropologist Margaret Mead.

It’s kind of AOC’s green dream.

“Whereas climate change, pollution, and environmental destruction have exacerbated systematic racial, regional, social, environmental, and economic injustices. . . .”

Um, climate change? AOC seems to have lost the thread.

So HR 109 seeks to “create millions of good, high-wage jobs” and create “unprecedented levels of prosperity” and reverse “systemic injustices.”

There is no detail how this pie in the sky will be baked.

The action agenda calls for eliminating green-house gas emissions “as much as technologically feasible.”

It wants to convert residences and manufacturing to clean energy, to the extent that is feasible, which is reasonable.

More language is spent on creating union jobs and wages and free health care and workplace safety than what you would expect. It is more New Deal than Green.

But it is not touching your car or your airline seat, despite what Tucker Carlson tells you.