A closer look at the Democrats' latest scheme to advance socialism.

In an October 2018 campaign appearance, Democratic darling Ocasio-Cortez – on the premise that the greenhouse gas emissions associated with human industrial activity are responsible for potentially catastrophic “climate change” – made reference to a “Green New Deal” which aims to make the U.S. 100 percent reliant on renewable energy sources (wind, water, solar) by 2035. “There’s no debate as to whether we should continue producing fossil fuels,” she said. “There’s no debate. We should not. Every single scientific consensus points to that.”



In another campaign speech that same month, Ocasio-Cortez likened the fight against climate change to America's battle against Nazi Germany:

“So we talk about existential threats, the last time we had a really major existential threat to this country was around World War II.... We had a direct existential threat with another nation, this time it was Nazi Germany, and the Axis, who explicitly made the United States as an enemy, as an enemy. And what we did was that we chose to mobilize our entire economy and industrialized our entire economy and we put hundreds if not millions of people to work in defending our shores and defending this country. We have to do the same thing in order to get us to 100 percent renewable energy, and that’s just the truth of it.”

“The Green New Deal we are proposing will be similar in scale to the mobilization efforts seen in World War II or the Marshall Plan,” Ocasio-Cortez said on yet another occasion. “It will require the investment of trillions of dollars and the creation of millions of high-wage jobs. We must again invest in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and distribution of energy but this time green energy.”



In a January 2019 interview on CBS This Morning, host Anderson Cooper asked the newly elected Ocasio-Cortez if her Green New Deal would mean “everybody having to drive an electric car.” The congresswoman replied: “It’s going to require a lot of rapid change that we don’t even conceive as possible right now. What is the problem with trying to push our technological capacities to the furthest extent possible?” Emphasizing that her energy plan would require wealthy people “to start paying their fair share in taxes,” she proceeded to suggest that tax rates of “60 or 70 percent” on top earners would be fair and appropriate. When Cooper subsequently observed that Ocasio-Cortez was proposing “a radical agenda,” the legislator replied: “Well, I think that it only has ever been radicals that have changed this country. Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like Social Security.” Cooper then asked, “Do you call yourself a radical?” To that, Ocasio-Cortez said: “Yeah. You know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”



Operationally, the Green New Deal would eliminate all fossil fuels from the U.S. electric grid by 2030, thereby forcing Americans to use much more expensive and much less reliable energy sources such as wind (which costs twice as much as power derived from coal and oil) and solar (which costs three times as much). The plan would also mandate trillions of dollars in spending on a government-approved “upgrade” of all homes and businesses in the United States — to make them more “energy efficient.”



In a January 2019 analysis of the Green New Deal, the Heartland Institute notes that the plan “is appropriately named after the original 'New Deal,' the big-government power grab imposed by President Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.” “Under FDR,” says Heartland, “Democrats tripled taxes in seven years, and the government imposed an endless array of regulations, mandates, and even a secret police force to enforce them. The economy limped along for the entirety of the 1930s, with an average unemployment rate of a whopping 17 percent and Americans more dependent on government than ever.”



Regarding the Green New Deal's call for the elimination of fossil fuels, Heartland points out that “when there is more carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, plants generally grow faster, which means there’s more food available to feed the world’s growing population of people and animals.” Aside from that, adds the Institute, “regardless of what we do in the United States, the rest of the world is going to continue increasing its fossil fuel use, more than offsetting any CO2 reductions we might make.” In short, any carbon-cutting measures taken by the United States would be doomed to irrelevance.



Why then do Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrats seek to enact this Green New Deal? Scholar Tim Huelskamp, who describes the plan as “the most radical socialist proposal in modern congressional history,” explains that its provisions extend far beyond matters that are even remotely associated with energy, the environment, and climate. That is, the Green New Deal seeks to remake the entire American economy:

“[T]heir real desire is to accomplish the Left’s longtime goal of moving the United States toward full adoption of socialism. This isn’t just a theory. Significant provisions of the Green New Deal reveal its true purpose of imposing socialism on an unprecedented scale. The plan would create a 'basic income program' and federal jobs guarantee providing a 'living wage' to everybody who says they want one. It would impose a federal-government-run, single-payer health care system with bureaucrats and liberal politicians in Washington, D.C. in charge of every American’s health care. It would encourage the Federal Reserve to unleash inflation and create a system of government-owned banks to 'create' tens of trillions of dollars needed to fund these immense programs. None of these proposals has anything at all to do with climate change.”

The origins of the term “Green New Deal”can be traced back to Richard Murphy, a British tax scholar and political economy professor, who in 2007 collaborated with a number of newspaper editors, economists, and environmentalists to form a “Green New Deal Group” that proposed massive public expenditures to fund: (a) the development of a zero-carbon-emission transportation infrastructure wholly reliant on renewable energy sources rather than fossil fuels; (b) the wide-scale insulation of homes to make them more energy-efficient; and (c) the establishment of training programs to develop a national corps of workers to carry out these objectives. To fund this initiative, Murphy advocated a combination of tax hikes on wealthy people and corporations, “straightforward deficit spending,” and the implementation of quantitative easing – a strategy whereby the government would establish a green infrastructure bank that would issue bonds which the government, in turn, could buy back. On July 21, 2008, Murphy's “Green New Deal Group” published a report detailing its specific recommendations.



In a similar spirit, on October 22, 2008, United Nations Environment Programme Executive Director Achim Steiner unveiled a “Global Green New Deal” initiative designed to simultaneously strengthen the world economy and curb climate change by creating jobs in a wide array of “green” industries. The following year, the United Nations drafted a report explicitly calling for a “Global Green New Deal” to promote government stimulus spending on renewable energy projects. Such objectives gained significant popular momentum in the United Kingdom when the ruling Labour Party in 2010 established a green infrastructure bank, as Richard Murphy had proposed. But when the conservative Tories swept into office later that year, they sold the bank and cut subsidies for renewable energy and energy-efficiency programs.



Among the first to introduce the concept of a “Green New Deal” in the United States was New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who in January 2007 wrote: “[W]e will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid -- moving it away from dirty coal or oil to clean coal and renewables. And that is a huge industrial project – much bigger than anyone has told you. Finally, like the New Deal, if we undertake the green version, it has the potential to create a whole new clean power industry to spur our economy into the 21st century.”



In 2008, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama added a Green New Deal to his campaign platform. In April of that year, the self-identified revolutionary communist Van Jones -- who in 2009 would become President Obama's “Green Jobs Czar” – made clear his desire to incrementally socialize, by stealth, the U.S. economy: “Right now we say we want to move from suicidal gray capitalism to something eco-capitalism where at least we’re not fast-tracking the destruction of the whole planet. Will that be enough? No, it won’t be enough. We want to go beyond the systems of exploitation and oppression altogether … until [the green economy] becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.”



A few months later, in February 2009, Jones proclaimed that America's new “green economy” would emphasize “gender equity,” in contrast to “the pollution-based economy” wherein women “are making 70 cents to the dollar” as compared to men. Moreover, he charged that the United States was built on land that had been “stolen” from “our Native American sisters and brothers,” who were “bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn’t want, where it was all hot and windy.” But under a “renewable energy” system (i.e., solar and wind power), he explained, there would be retribution, as Native Americans would “now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources.” “Give them the wealth!” Jones shouted. “…We owe them a debt!” “A clean energy revolution,” he emphasized, would merely be the first step toward wholesale societal transformation: “[W]e gonna change the whole system! We gonna change the whole thing!”



But when the cap-and-trade legislation known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act died in the U.S. Senate in 2010, talk of a Green New Deal became suddenly scarce. In 2012, and again in 2016, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein revived the idea by making a Green New Deal a central part of her campaigns, and the Green New Deal became part of the Green Party's official platform.



It is noteworthy that although Ocasio-Cortez and some other Democrats likewise began making reference to a “Green New Deal” during the 2018 campaign season, it was not until December 2018 – well after Election Day – that their plan was actually fleshed out in the form of a tangible piece of legislation. Remarkably, the Green New Deal that Democrats are now promoting was drafted during a single December weekend by young millennial staffers employed by Ocasio-Cortez and three like-minded progressive organizations – the Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, and the New Consensus. According to Saikat Chakrabarti, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff: “We spent the weekend learning how to put laws together. We looked up how to write resolutions.”



Before the end of December 2018, 40 House Democrats had joined Ocasio-Cortez in openly declaring their support for the Green New Deal. These were: Jared Huffman, Barbara Lee, Jackie Speier, Ro Khanna, Judy Chu, Ted Lieu, Mark Takano, Mike Levin, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Joe Neguse, John Lewis, Mike Quigley, Tulsi Gabbard, Danny Davis, Chellie Pingree, Deutch Ruppersberger, Jamie Raskin, Jim McGovern, Lori Trahan, Joe Kennedy III, Katherine Clark, Seth Moulton, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Chris Pappas, Annie Kuster, Deb Haaland, Nydia Velazquez, Carolyn Maloney, Adriano Espaillat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jose Serrano, Earl Blumenauer, David Cicilline, Steve Cohen, Peter Welch, Gerry Connolly, Pramila Jayapal, and Mark Pocan.



Other notable supporters include every Democrat seeking the 2020 presidential nomination: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Julian Castro.