Green New Deal, Meet Old Red Scare

[hatrack]

EDIT

The original New Deal worked because every American community felt the pain of the Great Depression's economic ruin. With climate change, its rampant impacts may be there to be seen, but with polling data consistently showing high levels of oblivion, apathy, or outright hostility toward climate action, the GND has a much tougher fight on its hands. Add to that the GND'S laudable-but-cumbersome embrace of fair wages, universal health care and more, and the Deal's sponsors have further stacked the deck against themselves.

Republicans and their house media organs showed their hand early, tying the GND to the rise of a few self-described Democratic Socialists like Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez. John Barrasso, the Wyoming Senator who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, called the GND a "socialist manifesto." Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has supported climate legislation in the past, dissed the GND as the work of "far left Democrats."

The President's amen chorus at Fox News left its footprint on GND's face. One Fox contributor suggested that the GND would be "getting rid of planes. " Sean Hannity and other Fox personalities regularly railed that the GND would simply destroy America and its "way of life." (This montage, compiled by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America, shows the breadth of the attack.)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other notable Dems, like Florida's Kathy Castor, declined to endorse the GND. Pelosi chose Castor to run the new Select Committee on Climate Change. Ocasio-Cortez didn't make the committee roster at all. But in spite of R's rejection and D's disinterest, climate issues can finally take hold as a central campaign talking point, albeit as the Republicans' "policy piñata." And the GOP will try their worst to elevate a brash, forward-thinking rookie like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a lefty gargoyle poised to convert America into a godless egalitarian Caliphate.

EDIT

https://www.dailyclimate.org/green-new-deal-climate-change-2629298888.html

[samnsara]

1. i get the feeling people pushing the GND are saying side with us ..or else???

[hatrack]

2. Not necessarily . . . . it's obviously more of a wish list than anything else . . .

And I think supporters realize that. But there isn't any "anything else" out there.

Half a dozen Congressional MAGGATs saying that "Gaw-lee, climate change is real! Better study it!" in the wake of November 2018 is nothing.

Shitstain convening a climate "science" committee with a think-tank non-climatologist providing sciency clear-coat gloss is nothing cubed.

And speaking of things that have no chance in the Senate, there's Sen. Feinstein's climate education bill, which will . . . . . is, yeah, whatever.

Is GND going anywhere in this Congress, with Shitstain in the WH? Obviously, not. But, whether recklessly ambitious or opium-dosed or politically DOA or the harbinger of generational political change, it's the only big environmental idea that I've heard in a long time, even if it is a flailing stab at best.