Who’s Afraid of the Green New Deal?

Lots of people, it seems, even some of the 81% who tell pollsters they support it. Republicans consider it the spawn of Satan or, worse, Lenin. Democrats fret that it’s so radical it will drive voters into the nurturing arms of President Stable Genius. To which I say, good. Excellent. All this chatter shows the GND already has done its job. It’s put climate change on the agenda.

No matter how you feel about the Green New Deal, overall or in its specifics, you have to admit this is the first time the debate will go past “Is it real?” and into “What are we going to do about it?” If you don’t think that’s a big step, you don’t understand the geologic time scale on which Washington operates, or how the media behemoth picks its stories.

It’s OK that pragmatists, including lots of Democratic leaders, dismiss it as too broad, expensive or unfocused, as Dianne Feinstein famously did last week to a clutch of concerned students. Such confrontations keep the proposal in the news. And every time a wrinkled old pol confronts young people over this on camera, it reinforces the image that aged people with authority are lecturing youngsters who will have to survive the world that results from their so-called pragmatism.

The actual proposal, especially its social components, are indeed radical. (If you aren’t familiar with the plan or how it was developed, you can catch up with this thorough explainer at Vox, which goes into a good bit of detail in a non-polemic way.) That’s a feature, not a bug. As Bill McKibben pointed out in the New Yorker, only a radical plan will do. It was 2001 when scientists said we had 30 years to deal with the problem before things got dire. We’ve now frittered away 18 of them. Every new study seems to point to effects of current CO2 levels progressing faster than expected. One released Monday found we could be 100 years from a tipping point in which higher temperatures and reduced cloud cover would trigger a sudden 15-degree Fahrenheit increase. It’s too late to employ the usual stalling tactics.

Yet, even though now is too late, the American public won’t embrace this right away. That 81% of people who claim to support the Green New Deal obviously haven’t read it yet. They’re supporting it in principle, and they were cued to support it because the questions contained prompts about creating jobs and overcoming income inequality. The proposals poll much worse when the same questions are bracketed by concerns about costs and social upheaval.

You can’t effect change without a committed buy-in from the public. The initial support shows that people want to confront this. As usual, though, they will resist making the changes they know are necessary. All this Democrat Party establishment resistance is a necessary step in establishing that everybody’s eggs will be broken for this omelette, and the sooner the establishment Dems explain this to their corporate donors, the better the chance advanced civilization will survive.