The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

The knives are definitely out for the Green New Deal. The sweeping plan to fight climate change has been called immoral, a socialist manifesto and suggestive of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia. "They want to take away your hamburgers!" declared former Trump administration aide Sebastian Gorka at last week's conservative action conference. Speaking at the same event, President Donald Trump called it a "high school term paper written by a poor student" to laughter from the audience.

So chaotic is the controversy around the Green New Deal resolution introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to schedule a vote to embarrass Democratic supporters running for president. Markey says rushing a vote on his own proposal would be "sabotage."

The resolution's progressive overreach makes it a ripe target. It calls for nothing less than a complete overhaul of the American economy, with guarantees for jobs, high-quality health care and higher education that would seem to go far beyond fighting global warming.

Potential government costs for infrastructure, research and housing upgrades to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions to zero by "a 10-year national mobilization" are through the roof, certainly requiring higher taxes or deficit spending. Estimates for even a portion of the agenda run well into trillions of dollars. And even some architects of the resolution say midcentury is a far more realistic target for reaching emission goals.

Even before any of these ideas are debated, however, the resolution has shown success. If nothing else, it has people talking about climate change, a true crisis facing the United States and the world. Opponents on both sides of the aisle are producing their own plans in response, as it should be.

SEN. BARRASSO:Green New Deal is unworkable and unaffordable

The public is growing impatient. The past four years were the four warmest on record. Seventy-three percent of Americans now believe that climate change is real, and 69 percent are worried about it. A study released last week found the chance that humans are the primary cause of global warming is now 99.999 percent.

Last year, a landmark scientific report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that nations are not acting quickly enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions from industrial and agricultural processes, and the burning of fossil fuels, to avoid a temperature increase that will generate increasingly intense wildfires, storms and droughts as well as rising seas and mass migrations.

The IPCC report called for dramatic emission reductions by 2030 to avoid the worst, and Green New Deal authors used the IPCC findings as a basis for their economic overhaul. But the resolution, even if passed, changes nothing. At this stage, it is only a resolution with a list of goals aimed at generating policies to be vetted and approved by congressional consensus.

What would a more specific, realistic Green New Deal look like? Its features would include:

►A carbon tax set high enough to level the playing field in power generation so green-energy sources can gain traction. That won't happen if fossil-fuel polluters keep using the atmosphere as a free waste dump. Proceeds from the tax should be rebated to consumers to prevent the kind of political blowback seen elsewhere.

►A recommitment to nuclear power, which generates 20 percent of the nation's energy without producing greenhouse gases. Federally funded research could lead to smaller, cheaper reactors.

►Remaining in the Paris climate accord. Global warming is a global problem that requires a global solution. It's a disgrace that Trump is pulling the United States out of the agreement to which almost all the other nations are a party.

►Government-promoted research and development, aimed not just at curbing greenhouse gases but also at adaptation to, and mitigation of, the amount of warming already baked in. The R&D effort should encompass heavy industry and agriculture, two crucial areas that constitute 45 percent of global greenhouse emissions.

Republicans in the White House and Congress are having a grand old time mocking the Green New Deal, and parts of the plan lend themselves to mockery. But the critics owe this and future generations more than scorn; they have an obligation to put better ideas and solutions on the table.

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