Joel Kotkin writes in Spiked,
climate hysteria has become the abiding faith of the dominant media, universities and a large swath of the corporate establishment, particularly on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley. Some have even embraced the hardly capitalist notion of degrowth, an ideology which suggests, in essence, the Western working and middle classes must sacrifice comfort and aspiration to save the planet. (Often at the urging of the world’s wealthiest people, with their grand estates and private jets!)
Although most industrial unions backed Biden, the first clear victims of his embrace of the Green New Deal are obvious: people working in energy and fields that depend on reliable and affordable energy, such as oil workers, truck drivers, factory and logistics workers. For example, a move to ban fracking – which vice-president Kamala Harris has supported – would, according to a US Chamber of Commerce report, cost several million jobs. This will be made much worse by the green turn against nuclear power and natural gas, notes long-time environmentalist Ted Nordhaus.
Climate activists today often mouth slogans about how climate change is also ‘racist’, but historically disadvantaged minorities are most likely to be negatively affected by a Green New Deal. In California, a test case for Green New Deal-style policies, extreme climate measures have driven the loss of traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing, construction and energy, while other environmental regulations have boosted housing prices. The biggest losers have been African Americans and Latinos. Overall, minorities in places like Los Angeles and San Francisco do far worse economically than in historically less regulated and taxed places like Kansas City, Phoenix, Oklahoma City, Atlanta, Dallas or Nashville.
The fundamental problem is not that Americans dislike public transport, but rather that you ‘cannot get from here to there’. In the US, more than 90 per cent of metropolitan-area jobs are dispersed into the suburban and exurban areas. On average, in the nation’s major metropolitan areas, cars provide access to about 50 times as many jobs as public transport, according to University of Minnesota research. The best transit access is in the New York City metropolitan area, where cars provide access to six times as many jobs as public transport.
These difficulties have been evident in the one big high-speed system under construction. In less than a decade, the California high-speed-rail project has doubled in cost and, far from its original 2020 deadline, is not likely to connect San Francisco to Los Angeles any earlier than 2033.
In America, at least, such an agenda is not driven by the concerns of the broad public. A recent Gallup poll showed 26 per cent of Americans are focussed on the pandemic, 16 per cent on economic problems, and 10 per cent on race – just three per cent mentioned climate and environment as their key concern.
So who benefits from the political focus on climate? Ironically, right now, it would be the Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs who, under Obama, used his green-energy programmes to add to their already bloated bank accounts. The Green New Deal would widen this opportunity for profiteering dramatically. This clearly is not the kind of ‘change the economy thing’ the Green New Deal’s designers had in mind when they dreamt of derailing the entire free-market system. After all, capitalism remains the prime villain in their tale of planetary devastation. They did not want to green it; they wanted to transform or destroy it.
Read more here: https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/04/23/the-green-new-deal-will-impoverish-america/
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