The actual problem with the Green New Deal

Both here and in the US there’s this thing called the Green New Deal. A vast and transformative project to, well, actually, to move the world over to an entirely different economic structure. The claimed justification being the need to deal with climate change. Caroline Lucas is to launch the proposal for legislation. There’s a problem with it though:

It’s been more than 10 years in the making, and is the top demand of the youth strikers gathering on Friday for the UK’s largest ever climate protest – which is why Friday is also the first attempt in Britain to put legislation in place to make a Green New Deal a reality for our country. Working with the Labour MP Clive Lewis, I am launching the full version of a Green New Deal bill (formal title, the decarbonisation and economic strategy bill), which sets out a transformative programme driven by the principles of justice and equity. It aims to move our economy away from its harmful dependence on carbon, at the scale and speed demanded by the science, and to build a society that lives within its ecological limits while reversing social and economic inequality.

The problem being that selection of words, justice, equity, social, economic, inequality. None of which have anything to do with climate change of course.

Assume that we do have that technical problem of climate change, as the IPCC avers. The science of how to deal with it is well known. It’s a technical problem with a technical solution, the carbon tax. As we have droned boringly on about for at least the past decade.

There is nothing at all within this solution that requires the following:

and the eradication of inequality

Climate change is being used as an excuse to impose an extremely partial meaning of the words justice, equity, social, economic, inequality. A meaning which very large portions of the population don’t agree with - as evidenced by the fact that no plurality, let alone majority, has ever voted to impose the meanings being used here upon us all.

For that reason, if no other, the proposal must be rejected.

There are, of course, other reasons too. Like the manner in which all of the science of climate change - William Nordhaus, The Stern Review, the IPCC’s own reports and economic models - say that this isn’t even the correct way to deal with climate change itself. The carbon tax is.

We’re in a Rahm Emmanuel world here, never letting a crisis go to waste. The correct response to such manipulations being an Anglo Saxon wave and then going off to do the right thing instead.