Muddled, top-down, technocratic: why the green new deal should be scrapped
Aditya Chakrabortty
It’s a vision that unites the left, from Joe Biden to John McDonnell. The trouble is, it’s completely unworkable
Thu 11 Nov 2021 01.00 EST
Last modified on Thu 11 Nov 2021 12.21 EST
Q: What binds together such disparate souls as Noam Chomsky and Keir Starmer, Yanis Varoufakis and Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Caroline Lucas?
A: They all want a green new deal.
Rightwingers pretend that today’s left likes nothing better than to pull down statues for a laugh before disinviting speakers from student unions, but they are off by approximately 180 degrees. Only one project truly unifies the mainstream left across Europe and America today: trying to limit climate breakdown by overhauling a noxious economic model. Ask the individual parties how and a hundred flowers duly bloom, but all will be branded with those same three little words.
Promising a green new deal helped clinch the Labour leadership for Starmer. It’s also how Biden keeps the Democrat base onside. It galvanises activists and anchors progressive conversation. Measured from the start of 2018 until this week, the phrase “Green New Deal” appeared in this newspaper and on our website almost as many times as “levelling up” and far more than “Narendra Modi”. Seeing as one of those is Boris Johnson’s signature policy and the other runs the world’s second-most populous country, that is quite the showing.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/11/green-new-deal-bad-idea-policy-left-joe-biden-john-mcdonnell?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
