We can also add that the Green New Deal won't actually work

Aditya Chakrabortty rather shocks contemporary opinion by stating that the Green New Deal probably isn’t quite the way to do it:

At some point, the post-2016 left, radicalised by Trump and Brexit, will have to surrender its notions of a radical programme executed through a vast state machinery. …(…)… I hope what comes next is a more focused, locally rooted and inclusive politics based around asking people what they actually need in their lives, and working out how to fit those things within an environmental framework. That can be done with universal desires such as housing and food, healthcare and education.

Indeed so, the task is how do we gain the highest possible standard of living for the most people within whatever constraints the universe throws at us? Highest here being measured by what actual people think best maximises their utility, by their preferences of what they value. Constraints being, well, everything. Physics just doesn’t work that way, or it does, being no different in the sense of constraining action than chemistry or known technology or human desires - constraints are constraints.

Programs executed through a vast state machinery don’t have a good track record at delivering that although of course hope springs, as ever, eternal that some day, with some plan or other, they will.

The solution will be, as it is with everything else, markets even if they need to be nudged or adjusted. Because that’s the system which does produce that maximisation of utility inside whatever constraints exist.

We can also add, and we should also add, that such centralised and clod-hopping state plans won’t in fact work. This is one of the strong messages from the Stern Review itself. Where it is noted that humans tend to do less of more expensive things, more of cheaper. This being just one of those human things. This is then linked to the insistence that state plans, the detailed direction of activity, are more expensive ways of dealing with climate change than markets suitably nudged and adjusted.

The implication of this, and it’s made explicit in that very Stern Review, being that if we adopt the expensive method, the state and planning, then we’ll do less climate change dealing with than if we used the cheaper, more efficient, method of nudged markets.

This then means that those who insist upon the Green New Deal aren’t, in fact, interested in dealing with climate change for that’s the way of doing less dealing with climate change. It is, instead, an excuse to impose their other plans upon us all.

Something that many of us have twigged already of course but worth pointing out once again.