America needs a Green New Deal, just not the one radical...

The United States needs a Green New Deal, but totalitarian environmentalists with little comprehension of free-market economics or energy industry realities should not dictate the terms.

Liberals and conservatives, capitalists and communists, the rich and the poor all need to join the debate to define what a Green New Deal should include. Failing to engage now in devising a strategy to mitigate climate change, while also addressing income inequality, will cede too much territory to radicals on all sides.

Conservatives are already vilifying the moniker, and radical environmentalists are setting goal posts. But the Green New Deal dates back to columns written by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman in 2007 when prominent advocate U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York was a senior in high school.

The following year, a Green New Deal Group published a concrete proposal, and the U.N. Environment Program backed the recommendations to boost the world economy, promote more equitable development and fight climate change.

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The original was firmly rooted in the modern, capitalist system and sought to address market inefficiencies. For example, since companies that emit greenhouse gases do not pay the full cost of their damage to the planet, governments were encouraged to grant tax credits for emission-less energy.

Other proposals included energy efficiency, sustainable agriculture, improved urban planning and better climate-risk management through financial markets.

Today, environmental fundamentalists want to co-opt the Green New Deal into a regulatory bludgeon that forces Americans to forsake vast swathes of the economy and pay billions more for electricity. Their logic is that climate change is an extreme problem that requires extreme solutions.

In a letter to Congress, 600 environmental groups said they expect lawmakers to “vigorously oppose” any “market-based mechanisms and technology options” to reduce greenhouse emissions. Nuclear energy, carbon capture systems and waste-to-energy solutions are expressly forbidden.

Never mind that nuclear power provides more than half of the nation’s carbon-free electricity. Never mind that market-based tax credits moved wind and solar energy from experimental to mainstream. Never mind that cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing made coal-fired plants uneconomical.

These groups also want a Green New Deal that keeps fossil fuels in the ground, bans the export of fossil fuels and pursues "a managed decline of fossil fuel production.” Apparently, the hundreds of thousands of families that depend on the $715 billion spent annually on oil and natural gas do not matter.

Most disturbingly, these groups oppose a carbon tax, the most economically-efficient tool to encourage consumers to adopt cleaner technologies and to spur the private sector to develop new technology. And it won’t take the global economy out at the knees.

A carbon tax makes so much sense that oil companies support it, and a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a bill in Congress to establish one last week.

The version of the Green New Deal promoted by the Sunrise Movement, a new leftist and youthful environmental lobby, is old-school, Stalinist-style central planning, where the government dictates not only emissions goals but how to achieve them.

Congress will never pass any package of laws that remotely resembles this proposal. The nation’s six largest environmental groups apparently agree, because they did not sign the letter.

Some activists will argue that the signatories are helping frame the argument by staking out extreme positions. However, such unrealistic proposals only alienate people who could otherwise join the fight, including the 67 percent of Americans who support a carbon tax to counter the effects of climate change, according to a new AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Young people do not realize how much better the world is today since the collapse of global communism and the advent of globalization. Market-based approaches have improved air and water quality in most nations while lifting more than a billion people out of poverty. We may face a global climate crisis, but we have a successful template for addressing it.

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The world does need to tax greenhouse gas emissions at a rate that reflects the damage they are doing to the planet. This trillion-dollar tax, even if returned to taxpayers as a dividend, would encourage people to burn less fossil fuel, rely more on low-emission fuels and spur technologies that capture carbon.

The sooner we impose the tax, the sooner the U.S. develops the technologies that the rest of the world will need. There is nothing wrong with a system where people get rich making the world a better place.

Any Green New Deal must encourage the enormous intellectual capacity of the private sector to find solutions, not get in the way.

Chris Tomlinson writes commentary about business, economics and policy.

chris.tomlinson@chron.com

twitter.com/cltomlinson