See, the beneficial socialism of the New Deal (which some say helped lengthen the Great Depression) is just not enough, and created conditions that were Bad for ‘climate change’
The Green New Deal Can’t Be Anything Like the New Deal
The decade from 1929 to 1939 was hell. The Great Depression ravaged the country, leaving 15 million Americans jobless—a 25 percent unemployment rate. Industrial production fell by half. Bank panics led thousands of them to fail, wiping out their customers’ savings. When we look back on that period, we see soup lines stretching for blocks and desperate migrant families. What we don’t see are the tens of thousands of people who took their own lives, as suicides hit an all-time high.
In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed the most ambitious economic recovery plan the country has ever seen. Within six years, the New Deal’s sixty programs touched every corner of society, employing 11 million Americans and aiding six million farmers. A crisis of unimaginable magnitude was solved, and capitalism was saved.
Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hope to replicate the New Deal’s success with a plan to address a different catastrophe: global warming. The Green New Deal, like its namesake, promises a massive economic transformation that would touch every corner of society. But that is where the comparisons should end. The climate crisis is much bigger than the Great Depression, for the very fate of humanity is at stake. Worse, the crisis is being accelerated by the very thing that the New Deal helped save: fossil fuel capitalism. Thus, rather than emulating its predecessor, the Green New Deal must undo many of its accomplishments instead.
FDR’s New Deal created lots of carbon pollution!
America’s industrial economy, like a century ago, is powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Carbon energy circulates through the veins of our transportation networks, buildings, data infrastructure, and globe-spanning supply chains. It puts food on our tables. One reason for this? The New Deal. FDR’s programs not only made industrial capitalism financially and socially stable; they sent it into overdrive by leaving monopolistic corporations intact, building the foundation of the interstate highway system, expanding car-dependent suburban housing, incentivizing consumption, expanding air travel, accelerating mechanized extraction, and ramping up resource-intensive manufacturing.
To say that a viable Green New Deal must dismantle and replace all this is not an ideological stance. It’s a material fact….
So, do away with fossil fuels which make the world run, get rid of highway systems, force everyone into big cities from the suburbs, limit by law consumption of good, restrict air travel (to the elites), and just basically take us back to the 1800’s or earlier.
“So, do away with fossil fuels which make the world run, get rid of highway systems, force everyone into big cities from the suburbs, limit by law consumption of good, restrict air travel (to the elites), and just basically take us back to the 1800’s or earlier.”
You forgot to add, “Impoverish and endanger billions of people as the reliable affordable sources of energy are taxed to impossible levels or are removed.”
You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few billion eggs.
“But it’s most definitely NOT about controlling every aspect of people’s lives!” coughbullshitcough