Green New Deal, Updated

As I've posted, we need to mount a WWII level offensive against global warming.

The only question that remains, however, is will this be in time to keep the worst from happening? During WWII, it took a few years to gain the confidence that Hitler would actually be undone. How long, if ever, will it be before we feel that way about global warming?

Now that is what the supporters of the Green New Deal are saying

The Green New Deal resolution introduced last week by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) states that fighting climate change requires “a new national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II.”

The world’s leading climate scientists agree. In 2015, for instance, they called for a sweeping mobilization — “a radical transition (deep decarbonization now and going forward),” as they described it — to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate change. And last October, the world’s nations unanimously agreed with our top scientists that preserving a livable climate requires “system changes” across the economy that “are unprecedented in terms of scale.”

Republicans have decided upon a strategy against the Green New Deal,

Judging by their initial reactions to the Green New Deal resolution, President Donald Trump, Republican leaders, and other longtime opponents of climate action seem to have decided that the best way to block such an economy-wide mobilization is to try to paint it as “socialism.” On Friday, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) went so far as to claim the Green New Deal begins with “socialism” but “ends with the Gestapo.” Major media outlets, like Axios, have already begun parroting the GOP line of attack.

No one was calling our response to Hitler and the Axis Powers as "socialist".

But the Green New Deal’s mobilization isn’t socialism any more than America’s remarkable undertaking to win WWII.

Yes, the WWII effort was massive and sustained and impacted every facet of American life — from energy, transportation, and manufacturing to infrastructure and agriculture. But that did not require “socialism.” In fact, under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “labor, business, government, education, and the military” all worked together “by democratic collaboration” to mobilize America for the war effort, as Lt. Col. Thomas Morgan explained in a 1994 article in the journal Army History.

Climate change action requires a similarly massive and sustained marshaling of resources across every sector of the economy, regardless of the fact that the president doesn’t understand either the science or the urgency. And just like the WWII effort, it will not require socialism.

I've posted many, many times in favor of a carbon tax, or dividend.  Even oil companies, and Republicans, world financial institutions, and conservative think tanks have come out for a carbon tax.  However, a carbon dividend has failed twice in Washington State, and President Macron of France has been nearly unseated by the "Yellow Vest" movement which began in a reaction to increases in the price of gasoline.

The Green New Deal is a different approach from the carbon tax to solving the problem of global warming.  I'm hoping that at some point in the implementation of the Green New Deal that a carbon tax will be entertained.