Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey made headlines when introducing the Green New Deal resolution to Congress. Within milliseconds, contesting waves of support and opposition flooded the news wires, social media, and blogs. Critics focused on the proposal’s perhaps overly hopeful (some say, delusional) absence of any accounting for the funding, political feasibility, and technological capacity needed to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the Green New Deal’s target date of 2050 (some Green New Dealers advocate an even earlier date), especially under the other conditions they demand. After all, the Green New Deal movement is basically asking our nation to replace one national energy infrastructure with another, plus demanding that government also ensure social justice for present and future generations, provide millions of new jobs, install an awesomely sustainable economy, extend free health care, and the list goes on.

But let’s put all that aside. Let’s say we had a blueprint for the Green New Deal’s carbon goal and a whole lot of money to spend. The stark reality is that the Green New Deal is going to run smack dab into the wall of the Old Green Laws. I’m talking about the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, Section 404 of the Clean Water Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Clean Air Act, the…do I really need to keep going, because the list is really long.

What the Green New Deal movement simply does not seem to appreciate is that the nation’s existing energy infrastructure is a vast physical, social, and economic entity that has been defined in its geographic, technological, and economic dimensions largely by decades upon decades of lawsuits brought under those Old Green Laws by many of the interest groups now behind the Green New Deal. The infrastructure the New Green Deal envisions—particularly if it rules out hydropower and nuclear power—can’t just land where the existing fossil fuel energy infrastructure is located, as if we are just changing car tires. Wind power has to follow wind, and solar power has to follow the sun, and neither of those geographic footprints has much overlap with where the fossil fuel infrastructure is currently located. So, making the Green New Deal happen means putting vast new renewable energy production facilities on the landscape. And then, because our existing transmission grid is based on where fossil fuel generation occurs, which is generally not where solar and wind generation will occur, we’ll need to put new transmission lines on the landscape. Just looking at NEPA alone, it would take 25 years just to get the Environmental Impact Statements done and through the courts before the first shovel of dirt is moved!

To put it bluntly, this is going to be ugly. Environmental protection special interest groups already are attacking wind and solar energy projects around the nation, claiming they will kill too many bats, birds, and desert creatures. Yet, if you were to map out what would be needed to implement the Green New Deal, we’ll need to locate new wind and solar power generation infrastructure, and their transmission line infrastructure, on the landscape at a pace and scale unprecedented in our nation’s history. Believing that everyone will be behind that is naïve. Wherever this Green New Deal landscape transformation machine goes, it will face opposition by narrow-interest environmental groups, not-in-my-backyard landowners, states, local governments, and companies threatened by the new regime, and so on. To think otherwise is delusional. And their first weapon of choice is going to be the Old Green Laws. After all, look around and ask, what has for decades impeded and often stopped new fossil fuel infrastructure such as pipelines, processing facilities, and port facilities. It’s the Old Green Laws.

Looking into the Law 2050 future, the “green” interests that are promoting the New Green Deal sooner or later will have to come up with a convincing soundbite explanation for how they propose to comply with the Old Green Laws in a way and time frame that meets their 2050 deadline. Doing so without in some substantial ways relaxing the current Old Green Laws seems implausible, but relaxing any current regulations seems a nonstarter for Green New Deal politicians. In other words, the Green New Deal is between a rock and a hard place, and they can blame their predecessor “green” generations who designed and implemented the Old Green Laws that must be satisfied regardless of the climate virtues of the Green New Deal.

One can easily imagine that many industry and landowner special interest groups long pitted against the environmental protection special interest groups have grins on their faces, as the latter will seem to have been hoisted by their own petard. It is not hard to envision how the Green New Deal will splinter the environmental interest group universe—indeed, more than 600 groups recently signed a letter to Congress supporting the Green New Deal agenda, but a good number of leading national groups such as the Sierra Club and Audubon Society did not sign on.

There is perhaps a third path, however. To make its agenda complete, the Green New Deal could propose a new environmental law regime as well, one that does not tinker with the Old Green Laws and thus face the claim of “deregulation” or “backsliding.” The Green New Deal must acknowledge the environmental disruptions its infrastructure proposal will cause and design an environmental planning, assessment, permitting, and regulatory regime (perhaps even with--gasp!--market mechanisms like trading and taxes) built from scratch around concepts of resilience, adaptive management, and collaborative adaptive governance. This will mean dispensing with the Old Green Laws’ morass of comprehensive pre-decision studies and rounds of lawsuits. In short, the New Green Deal needs New Green Laws.