Beware Republicans Bearing Environmental Gifts

Joel B. Stronberg
8 min readFeb 28, 2019

Today’s tale is a cautionary one. It centers on the proposed Green New Deal (GND) and the possibility that Republican lawmakers may soon be compelled by circumstances to introduce their notions of a national climate policy. The GND has been the talk of Capital City since Democrats captured the House of Representatives and America’s youth took to the post-2018 election battlements.

Push-back on the GND by Republican climate change deniers and their conservative media allies has been both chiding and ferocious. At one level, all the deniers’ talk is about the technological infeasibility of converting the current fossil fuel economy to 100 percent renewables in a bit more than a decade. Deniers also speak of the impossibility of making every building in the US energy efficient — presumably within any time frame — and the cost of such an undertaking.

Republican attacks on the GND are not limited to technical feasibility and price. Fingers are being pointed at Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and the growing number of progressives suspected of wanting to drag the nation into socialist territory. Mind you, not the genteel socialism of Scandinavia. Trump, as well as Republican operatives and conservative economists and news media presenters like Ben Stein and Hannity, claims the GND — its authors and endorsers — want to turn the US into a repressive red socialist state.

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R) raised crimson colored flags responding to a question on the Hugh Hewitt Show.

Sure. I mean, Hugh, it’s pretty remarkable that when these Democrats put out the Green New Deal last week that you had many Democrats running for president leap onto a proposal that was going to confiscate every privately owned vehicle in America within a decade and ban air travel so we could all drive or ride around on high-speed light rail, supposedly powered by unicorn tears…

Senator Cotton has taken a bit of liberty in his characterization of the Green New Deal. I’ve poured through thousands of documents and have yet to find anything to suggest confiscations of autos or a travel ban on flying to foreign shores.

Trump is encouraging Democratic presidential hopefuls to embrace the GND — believing it will help him win re-election in 2020. At a…

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Joel B. Stronberg

Stronberg is a thought leader in the climate community with over 40 years of experience covering environmental and sustainability issues as a freelancer.