Naked Capitalism Topic: Why the Green New Deal Is the Stuff of Fantasyland

I'm posting Yves Smith's introduction to this piece. Use the link below it to read Stan Cox's argument.

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Yves here. I’ve been disappointed by the cheerleading over the Green New Deal. Its claim is that if we mobilize enough resources, we can convert to a renewable-energy-based economy and arrest the rise in greenhouse gases soon enough to prevent the worst global warming outcomes.

That might have worked if we had started 20 years ago. But as they say in Maine, “You can’t get there from here.”

The fastest way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is radical conservation. There is no doubt a lot of low-hanging fruit in terms of behavior change, particularly by businesses. But even if corporations embraced the notion that they need to Do Something, the easy stuff is not likely to make enough difference.

The false promise of the Green New Deal is that we can keep our high-consumptoin lifestyles. A lot of oxen would need to be gored if the public were to cut way back on activities like air travel that do a lot of damage. How many people are prepared to fly at most once a year or once every five years, to deal with a real emergency? And what would that do to jobs and investment portfolios? While Japan had enough social cohesion to embrace shared sacrifice in its post-bubble era (executives and top managers took permanent pay cuts to preserve employment), that capacity is notably absent in the US.

By Stan Cox (@CoxStan)is an editor at Green Social Thought. He is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationingand, with Paul Cox, of How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia. Originally published onand was produced by the Independent Media Institute

Read Cox's argument at https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/01/green-new-deal-stuff-fantasyland.html