In a moment of prophetic shade, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., delivered a harsh truth about Democratic support for the Green New Deal: "The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they're for it, right?"

Despite being only a vague outline of principles promulgated by various interest groups and demanded by House Democratic leader — sorry — freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the GND has earned the endorsement of nearly every 2020 front-runner. Now, Ocasio-Cortez's official overview of the GND has been released, and it's every bit as fallacious, impractical, and useless as a "green dream." Or whatever they call it.

Ocasio-Cortez bills the GND as a "massive transformation of our society" to "move America to 100% clean and renewable energy." But it explicitly calls for a ban on nuclear energy, by far the largest source of carbon-free energy. She justifies her call to "mobilize every aspect of American society" with the GND, citing the "economic prosperity" that followed the Franklin D. Roosevelt era. Ocasio-Cortez mistakenly insinuates that the post-World War II economic boom was sparked by FDR's New Deal rather than by the war's having ended, and before that having forced FDR to cease his attacks on private industry.

She specifically cites airplane production, which increased by a factor of 100 during the war, as the model around which to create a federal jobs guarantee. This, of course, ignores the fact that our aviation industry has always been a private, competitive market industry that hires as many workers as it needs, and no more.

But now to assess the details of implementing the actual demand that the nation achieve carbon neutrality within a decade: Well, there is none.

Just like the noble and righteous Paris climate accords, the newly unveiled Green New Deal makes massive promises with an total absence of legal enforcement.

The outline, which reads like it was written by a woke middle schooler, reads as follows (emphasis added):



Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it — this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically. We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible. We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.



And how will we pay for it, you may ask? The answer makes about as much sense as "Mexico is going to pay for the wall."



The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments and new public banks can be created to extend credit. There is also space for the government to take an equity stake in projects to get a return on investment. At the end of the day, this is an investment in our economy that should grow our wealth as a nation, so the question isn’t how will we pay for it, but what will we do with our new shared prosperity.



To be clear, the government taking an "equity stake in projects" means that the GND doesn't just call for standalone block grants to transition to clean energy, but instead effectively nationalizes our entire energy industry. Furthermore, the Federal Reserve exclusively loans to banks and governmental entities only, thus confirming that the GND is a call to have the state take over private companies.

More importantly, monetary policy is incremental by design. There's a reason markets rise and fall and politicians panic when the Fed debates a rate raise of a mere quarter of a percent. The demand for enormous loans from the Fed to fund a project with no promise of return on investment could threaten the entire stability of the U.S. dollar.

The GND essentially bans carbon taxes, cap-and-trade regimes, carbon capture, and most disastrously, nuclear energy, which currently provides half of the country's clean, carbon-free power. As environmental expert Michael Shellenberger notes at Forbes, when Vermont promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2005 through renewables alone while banning nuclear, emissions actually rose by 16.3 percent, more than twice the national average in the same time period.

The federal and state governments can and should deregulate and empower the expansion of nuclear energy rather than succumb to scientifically illiterate fearmongering. For the notion that the nation could maintain anything resembling our current standard of living through renewables without nuclear is nothing but a pipe dream.

Despite decades of government subsidies for non-nuclear clean energy, wind power provides just 6 percent of the nation's energy, and solar provides just 1 percent. And energy scientists still haven't refined microgrids and clean energy transmission to the levels of efficiency required to replace all non-clean energy forms without the assistance of nuclear. With microgrid technologies still in their infancy, we're looking at a matter of decades or even centuries before wind and solar could completely replace every other energy form. A previous draft of the GND also banned biomass, hydroelectric, and waste-based energy — all also clean energy forms. This overview doesn't address them, but the attempt to ban them in that earlier draft should give you some idea of the depths of the authors' ignorance about the topic of energy.

The plan also calls to “build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary." Although train development is a fine idea in theory, the U.S. rivals the entire continent of Europe in size, and train travel will never rival long-distance plane flights in their convenience. On a more practical level, rail is impossible, as California has learned. Taxpayers there have wasted $4 billion on what has now become a $77 billion bullet train project, now in its second decade of development hell with no end in sight.

By now it should be clear that this deal won't actually decrease carbon emissions. But what does it actually do?

Well, looking at the last page of the preview, it's clear that it's a Trojan Horse for communism — a series of measures meaningless in terms of climate change but certain to slowly transfer private industry, property, and means of production to government control. The last sentence of the GND explicitly promises to "[p]rovide high-quality health care, housing, economic security, and clean air, clean water, healthy food, and nature to all."

The GND revels in its unseriousness, "cows farting" and all. It's performative wokeness all the way down. But formidable presidential candidates have embraced it anyway. They are afraid of their progressive base, a well-educated set of voters for whom economic literacy has never been a strongpoint.

Ocasio-Cortez swears that "the world is going to end in 12 years" if we don't address climate change. Yet her plan bans nuclear, signifying a lack of concern about the end goal, and spends an extraordinary amount of political capital on things completely irrelevant to GHG emissions, such as "grow[ing] domestic manufacturing" and the federal jobs guarantee. It also completely ignores the single greatest sources of emissions: China and India, next to whose growing carbon emissions the Green New Deal will look like a rounding error even if it succeeds. There's not a single mention of how to pressure them into making their own populations poorer with emissions limits.

If the authors of the GND cannot bring themselves to go all in (as the French have done) with a practical push to replace coal, oil, and gas with nuclear, they should be honest about their true intention: to socialize the American economy and fundamentally transform the United States into a Soviet-style hellscape.