America's Talking - ‘Enormous’: Dems reintroduce Green New Deal

Episode Date: April 21, 2023

A group of liberal Democrats reintroduced the Green New Deal Thursday, the controversial environmental legislation that experts say would spike energy costs in the U.S. and cost taxpayers tens of trillions of dollars. Advocates, though, argue the changes are needed to prevent worsening climate change and get ahead of an inevitable renewable energy transition. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello and welcome to American Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Democrats in the House this week reintroduced the Green New Deal, Casey, a plan that would spend trillions of taxpayer dollars on climate change initiatives. What's in the plan and what are its prospects for passing? Green New Deal. Well, I'll use the words of the face of the Green New Deal, Representative Alexandria, Ocasio Cortez. She called it enormous. It's kind of interesting to call your own legislation enormous, but the price tag is definitely enormous. As you hinted at, it could cost as much as $93 trillion over 10 years. So a $93 trillion enormous bill, there's no way we could go through everything. But just top line,

what this does is it takes what a lot of Democrats see as an inevitable green energy, renewable energy future. And it just, it rips it from the future into present day, you know, at a huge price tag. And so some of the things are like building electric vehicle charging things just all around the country, right? So you imagine like the electric vehicle equivalent of gas stations just enough to make it normative around the country instead of. I mean, so there are here, but you know, we live, both you and I live in, you know, some of the largest cities in the country, more rural areas, things like that aren't going to have that. Smaller cities aren't going to have it. So creating an energy, creating an infrastructure for electric vehicles is going to be, is a, is a, is a, a major part of what this plan's about. And that's, you know, part of why it's so expensive.

And you can imagine the cost of, I mean, what it would cost to try to build, you know, electric gas stations basically all around the country. So that's a big one. There's a big emphasis on union jobs. I mean, this is really a economic justice plan, not just an environmental justice plan, is how they talk about it. So, you know, she cited the number of 20 million union jobs. I mean, I think we know from past experience when lawmakers talk about how many jobs something will create. You know, you could take it with a grain of salt. You know, you probably remember. the shovel-ready jobs. So I don't put too much weight on when it's such a large number of jobs, who really knows. But the emphasis is they are going to be union jobs. They want people to be

to be really well paid. They want this to kind of to use this green energy revolution and make it an economic revolution where they try to bolster the middle class and things like that. And then there's just big investments in mass transit. I mean, if you think about a post-fossil fuel world, which is the way that a lot of these more liberal Democrats think, what is the world that we would have to create if there were no more combustible engine cars? It's like, well, we need thousands of electric vehicle gas stations and we need the best public transit that we can get

so people don't have to own cars. So those are some of the things that are including this and tens of millions, tens of trillions of dollars. It kind of is based on the assumption of the end of oil and gas and the introduction of this. renewable energy-only future. Let's focus on the cost here for a second. The conservative American Action Forum estimates that it would cost between $51 trillion

and $93 trillion over 10 years. Let's just assume it's the low end, $51 trillion over 10 years. That's $5.1 trillion in new spending every year. The government, the federal government, already is operating on a massive budget deficit year in and year out. The national debt is what? Has it hit 32 trillion dollars yet? No, but it's about 31 and a half about, I think. 31 and a half trillion dollars. So if you increase the federal budget by more than $5 trillion a year, you're either taking on massive more debt or you're having to raise taxes. A lot, a lot of taxes. I mean, you think about, you put it this way that the national deficit right now,

you know, it's somewhere around $2 trillion a year. So if you add on an extra, if you don't raise taxes to pay for this, you're going to be more than doubling the deficit over the next 10 years. Right. So you go for $2 trillion deficit to something like a $7 trillion deficit, which is unheard of, unprecedented territory. So you really do have to raise taxes for something like this, I think, which of course has its own issues. And even if they do raise taxes, they won't raise it enough to pay. There still will be some debt going along with it. So it's very, very expensive. Now, you did point out this is a right-leaning group that created these estimates, but they've been really, you know, cited by some pretty reputable people.

They're not just a total right-wing Republican farm or something. I know you talked to some critics for this story. You talked to some lawmakers, power the future and energy workers advocacy group. What are they saying? Yeah, I mean, they're just, well, one, the cost of energy right now is just so high. It's risen a lot under the Biden administration gas prices are on the rise right now. So the way it impacts, you know, our listeners right now is you could expect your energy cost to really rise, you know, electric vehicles.

we know are more expensive than you're going to buy a new electric vehicle or you're going to buy like a 2010 Toyota. It's not really a comparison or 2015 Toyota or something. So it's going to be a lot more expensive for Americans. The other thing is big criticism is just the technology's not there that you can't rush this. Like maybe in an ideal world, we would all have, you know, solar panels on our backpacks or something that would power, you know, store up and power our homes. But you don't want to take away all the oil and gas before you get the technology to replace it, right? And if you're really zealous, which I think there is some good-hearted zeal on this issue, but zeal without knowledge is not good.

And so that if you just rip out from under the American economy, the oil and gas, the natural gas, which is actually really clean, pretty clean burning, like blocking these pipelines and things, but you don't have the replacement for it yet. I mean, solar energy is just not there yet. The wind farms are not reliable. They have their own environmental issues with birds and things like that. And the military, we also wrote a story this week at the CenterSquare.com that the Air Force and other branches of the military are pushing back on the wind farm agenda that Biden's pushing to put build wind farms off the east coast of the United States, saying it would affect their military preparedness. But that's another matter.

I'm sorry for the side bar there. It's interesting for sure. And what is, in terms of the number of cars on the roads across America, something like 5% of all vehicles are electric. vehicles right now? Yeah, I mean, it's a very low number. The cars are very expensive. And it's interesting. The latest polling right now shows that Americans are less concerned about environmental issues than they were, you know, in the year, in the last year or two. So Americans are getting, you know, less worried about it. I think that there was a concern that spiked when Trump took office that Trump wasn't going to consider the environment. But now people's fear about the

environment is going down. There's also other environmental regulations, you know, the waters of the United States rule. There's a big battle over that right now, which basically give the Biden administration broad control over waterways, even small streams and creeks could be under federal control. Farmers are really concerned about this and about the regulatory burden. The federal, basically their argument is, hey, the federal government can't just issue an order that they control all the water, which, you know, you can kind of see their concern there. So there's a lot of environmental and energy, you know, that is one of the main issues right now. Energy prices are rising. Trillions of proposed spending on these environmental,

things, projects, real concerns about solar and wind, of course, real concerns about oil and gas and climate change. So this is one of those issues that I'm sure we keep talking about, but it's not going away. We're going to be talking about this years and years to come because it's really complicated and we can't, you know, we need the energy, so we're not going to get away from it without a solution. Well, we're almost out of time here, Casey, but let me ask you one very real question.

As you mentioned, AOC, a very progressive Democrat introduced this in the U.S. House, which is controlled by Republicans. Does this have any chance of getting out of the house? No, and you've seen critics say, oh, it's interesting how it seems like the more liberal Democrats push this much more when they don't have the majority. But when they had, you know, control, you didn't hear much about it. But now that it can be a messaging bill when they know that they don't have the votes to pass it, you know, here we are talking about it. But that's reading some motives into it. But no, it doesn't have any chance of passing right now.

Thank you for your insights. Casey, listeners can keep up with this story and more at the same. Center Square.com or Casey Harper. I'm Dan McAulb. Please subscribe and thanks for listening.