The decade from 1929 to 1939 was hell. The Great Depression ravaged the country, leaving 15 million Americans jobless—a 25 percent unemployment rate. Industrial production fell by half. Bank panics led thousands of them to fail, wiping out their customers’ savings. When we look back on that period, we see soup lines stretching for blocks and desperate migrant families. What we don’t see are the tens of thousands of people who took their own lives, as suicides hit an all-time high.

In response, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed the most ambitious economic recovery plan the country has ever seen. Within six years, the New Deal’s sixty programs touched every corner of society, employing 11 million Americans and aiding six million farmers. A crisis of unimaginable magnitude was solved, and capitalism was saved.

Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hope to replicate the New Deal’s success with a plan to address a different catastrophe: global warming. The Green New Deal, like its namesake, promises a massive economic transformation that would touch every corner of society. But that is where the comparisons should end. The climate crisis is much bigger than the Great Depression, for the very fate of humanity is at stake. Worse, the crisis is being accelerated by the very thing that the New Deal helped save: fossil fuel capitalism. Thus, rather than emulating its predecessor, the Green New Deal must undo many of its accomplishments instead.

The climate crisis has reached desperate extremes. It has so far triggered the world’s sixth mass extinction event, and dangerous climate feedback loops. The economy is burning greenhouse gasses ten times faster than the volcanoes that sparked Earth’s greatest mass extinction, the Late Permian event (a.k.a the Great Dying). The worst-case outcome is a planet denuded of most life, potentially including Homo sapiens. That’s not to mention the many economic crashes that such a societal collapse would cause, making the Great Depression look like a Mild Discomfort.



America’s industrial economy, like a century ago, is powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. Carbon energy circulates through the veins of our transportation networks, buildings, data infrastructure, and globe-spanning supply chains. It puts food on our tables. One reason for this? The New Deal. FDR’s programs not only made industrial capitalism financially and socially stable; they sent it into overdrive by leaving monopolistic corporations intact, building the foundation of the interstate highway system, expanding car-dependent suburban housing, incentivizing consumption, expanding air travel, accelerating mechanized extraction, and ramping up resource-intensive manufacturing.