Do You Support Bernie Sanders' $16T Green New Deal?

What’s the story?

• 2020 presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has unveiled a $16.3 trillion energy and climate change plan.

What’s in Sanders’ Green New Deal?

• 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 and complete decarbonization in the U.S. by 2050.
• Declaring climate change a national emergency.
• Investing $16.3 trillion toward these efforts, “in line with the mobilization of resources made during the New Deal and WWII.”
• Banning fracking, new offshore leases, fossil fuel imports and exports.
• Emphasizing "frontline" communities, including people of color, through a new "Climate Justice Resiliency Fund."
• "Massively" raising taxes on the fossil fuel industry and "investors’ fossil fuel income and wealth."
•  “Supporting small family farms by investing in ecologically regenerative and sustainable agriculture.”
• Spending $526 billion to modernize the U.S. electric grid.
• Providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund to help poor nations cope with climate change.

What are people saying?

Critics

Washington Examiner:

• “Sanders claims that ‘this plan will pay for itself over 15 years. ... Collecting new income tax revenue from the 20 million new jobs created by the plan.’ But this logic only works if the people we're putting to work aren't currently working, for the new tax they pay in their new job is offset by us losing the old taxes they paid in their old job. So the idea that Sanders' plan pays for itself is nothing short of laughable.”
• Joshua Freed, vice president for clean energy at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way:

“The Sanders plan appears to be big, but it’s not serious,” Freed told the New York Times. We need to have every option on the table.”

Supporters

• “President Trump thinks that climate change is a hoax,” Sanders said in an interview. President Trump is dangerously, dangerously wrong. Climate change is an existential threat to the entire country and the entire world and we must be extraordinarily aggressive.”

“I have seven grandchildren, and I’m going to be damned if I’m going to leave them a planet that is unhealthy and uninhabitable,” he added.

•  Jacobin Magazine:

“The tide is starting to turn against the fossil fuel industry: every major candidate has signed a pledge not to take money from oil and gas companies. But Sanders brings the kind of moral fury we need, pledging not only to take on oil companies but to hold them responsible for obfuscation by pursuing civil and criminal lawsuits in a manner similar to the cases brought against tobacco companies for covering up data on smoking and lung cancer.”

How does it compare to other 2020 contenders’ plans?

• Sander’s Green New Deal’s “eye-popping price tag is several times bigger than those of his leading opponents,” Lisa Friedman of The New York Times says.
• “Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has called for spending $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has a $2 trillion green manufacturing plan. Other candidates, including former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, have also put forth ambitious proposals.”

What do you think?

Do you support Sanders’ Green New Deal? Or do you prefer some – or none – of other climate change proposals? Take action above and tell your reps, then share your thoughts below.

—Josh Herman

 (Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)