The Digger

The  New York Times  columnist Thomas Friedman claims to have invented the idea of the Green New Deal in 2007. He’s back to enlighten us about what it should mean now. Friedman deserves credit as one of the few mainstream pundits who takes climate breakdown seriously. But mainstream methods created the problem, they won’t solve it. But massive is not the cure for massiveness. Clean is a relative term. Energy efficiency is wonderful, right and indispensable, but it only makes massiveness a little less massive; the energy and money saved by efficiency tend to get used somewhere else. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives humanity till 2030 to get our act together and curb the rise in average global temperature. Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions are rising, not falling, both in the US and worldwide. The climate is telling us something we don’t want to hear: If you burn mass quantities of coal and oil and methane gas, the waste gases will heat the...