Whatever Happened to the Green New Deal?
04/24/2025
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Mises Wire
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William L. Anderson
Fresh off her 2018 upset New York Democratic congressional primary win, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (better known as AOC) and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Markey announced they were launching an ambitious legislative plan called the Green New Deal. While people who had a grounding in economic thought found this new initiative to be naïve at best and destructive at worst, nonetheless it has energized American progressives and other environmental true believers.
The goals for the GND were right out of Central Planning Fantasyland, something that is obvious from reading from the website:
The Green New Deal starts with a WWII-type mobilization to address the grave threat posed by climate change, transitioning our country to 100% clean energy by 2030. Clean energy does not include natural gas, biomass, nuclear power or the oxymoron “clean coal.”
The implementation of the Green New Deal will revive the economy, turn the tide on climate change and make wars for oil obsolete. This latter result, in turn, enables a 50% cut in the military budget, since maintaining bases all over the world to safeguard fossil fuel supplies and routes of transportation could no longer be justified. That military savings of several hundred billion dollars per year would go a very long way toward creating green jobs at home.
On top of that, the Green New Deal largely pays for itself in healthcare savings from the prevention of fossil fuel-related diseases, including asthma, heart attacks, strokes and cancer.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/whatever-happened-green-new-deal
