The Corruption of Science and Economics and the Green New Deal

Congressman Garret Graves of Louisiana said at a press conference about the Green New Deal, "I've heard Democrats over and over again accuse Republicans of denying science[.] ... There is another type of science that is being denied here, and that is economic science." Ideological corruption of economics has a long history. John Maynard Keynes was one of the most influential economists of the early 20th century. He wrote that giving people money to dig holes and fill them would increase employment and be good for the economy. He had a point. As long as the government can print or borrow enough money to pay people to dig holes, they will create jobs; however, those jobs will not produce the food needed to feed the hole-fillers, nor will it build them a home to go to after they finish filling their last holes of the day. Basic economics teaches us that printing or borrowing the money to pay for unproductive work will result in inflation. The result will be that the money of those who do productive work will lose value, so farmers who would normally produce the food that would feed these hole-fillers will find it more and more difficult to pay for the resources they need to do so, including workers whom they will have to lay off.

Left-wing Keynesian thinking (if you can call it that) is not far removed from the Democrats' conception of how they will pay for the Green New Deal. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the Green New Deal will create many jobs. Certainly, building energy-efficient high-speed trains and retrofitting buildings to require less energy and building giant solar farms will require a lot of labor. There is no doubt that the Green New Deal would create many jobs in the short term, just as the government paying for people to dig and fill holes would create many jobs in the short term. Perhaps the major selling point Trump has for re-election is the number of jobs he has created. The Green New Deal gives the Democrats an answer to that. They can claim they will create jobs and save the Earth from climate catastrophe in the process. In fact, the text of the Green New Deal guarantees a job for everyone. The problem is that the contribution to the economy of the Green New Deal would actually be less than that of digging and filling up holes, since even though it might reduce energy use of buildings and transportation, it would replace cheap energy with expensive energy. Replacing fossil fuels with solar cells and windmills will cause the cost of energy to go up. As the cost of energy goes up, the cost of production of useful goods will go up as well, with the result that Americans will buy cheaper goods from countries that do use fossil fuels. The result will be that fossil fuels will still be burned, the only difference being that they will be burned overseas. Just as with paying people to dig and fill holes, such a policy will result in inflation. Supporters of the Green New Deal argue that according to science, it must be implemented, or climate disaster will ensue. This argument is based on ideologically corrupted science. In the '70s, alarmists predicted global cooling. When that didn't pan out, they raised the alarm about "global warming." When those predictions didn't pan out, they raised the alarm about "climate change." If changing alarmism didn't make it clear that the science was corrupted, the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit that exposed the corruption of climate alarmists should have made it clear to everyone. Instead of being embarrassed by the shifting, changed predictions, the Green New Dealers use the predictions as justification for why the multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal is necessary. It doesn't occur to them that instead of preventing an apocalypse, the cost of the deal could bring about an economic apocalypse. Ocasio-Cortez said the Green New Deal could be partly funded by cuts in military spending. This after Vladimir Putin announced that Russia will deploy hypersonic nuclear missiles, which the United States has no defense against. Where is the concern about the effects on global warming when one of those goes off? Ironically, it is unlikely that reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the United States would significantly affect the climate. In 2014, the Cato Institute published an article with an estimate of how much a 30% drop in U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide would reduce global temperature by the year 2100. The estimate was 0.018 degrees centigrade. The only change in climate will be in the homes of people who can't afford to pay their soaring heating bills. Soaring energy prices due to efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions have led to the highest winter death rate in Britain in 42 years. In 2018, 48,000 Britons essentially froze to death. The absurdity of the Green New Deal becomes even more apparent when one considers the evidence reported by NASA that the Earth is heading for a period of global cooling. Might Americans be so foolish as to elect politicians who would enact such a disastrous deal? Don't be too confident they would not. Ocasio-Cortez, although wrong about almost everything, is right when she says the Green New Deal "is a winning issue." She pointed out that "about 67% of Iowa voters in the caucus support" it. Dr. Rael Jean Isaac showed in her book, Roosters of the Apocalypse, that masses of people have endorsed self-destructive policies multiple times in the past with disastrous consequences.