Green New Deal proposes to get rid of air travel, replaced by high speed rail?

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Green New Deal: Build Enough ‘High-Speed Rail‘ to Make Air Travel Unnecessary
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By Caroline Biscotti on February 7, 2019





An outline of the “Green New Deal” shows progressive Democrats hope to expand high-speed rail transportation across the United States to “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”
The proposal — championed by freshman congresswoman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) — calls for the federal government to tackle “climate change” and “systemic injustice” by eliminating “pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” to meet “100 percent of the power demand” through “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.”

The plan outlines 14 different proposed “infrastructure and industrial” projects to meet its objective to “totally overhaul” transportation in the U.S.

“Every project strives to remove greenhouse gas emissions and pollution from every sector of our economy” by “massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary,” the reads.

It also calls for the government to “create affordable public transit available to all, with [the] goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.”
Speaking at a press conference Thursday, Markey the proposal “the greatest blue-collar job creation program in a generation,” before adding “Our energy future will not be found in the dark of a mine, but in the light of the sun.”

The proposal’s unveiling came after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) released a list of the eight Democrats who will serve on a select climate change committee.

Ocasio-Cortez was not chosen for the panel in what is widely regarded as a snub. On Wednesday, Pelosi threw shade on the Green New Deal, noting that despite the plan’s sparseness on details, numerous Democrats have said they support it.

“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi Politico on whether the climate change panel will write legislation around the Green New Deal. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

https://prestonbusinessreview.com/g...d-rail-to-make-air-travel-unnecessary/101004/

:lol: broad buggin.
 
I fully support every Democrat presidential candidate adopting the Green New Deal as a core principal of their campaign ...
 
They should rather invest in more fuel efficient and energy efficient aircrafts.
 
:lol: why and how is this a negative to ya'll? aside from having infrastructure that needs attention first, it would naturally make short flights less necessary and bring the opportunity gap closer with people having more access to big city job hubs.
 
Japan bullet train system is one of the best imo. from tokyo to kyoto is 3 hours was amazing. beats paying $$$ to fly.
 
Economics
The Green New Deal Would Spend the U.S. Into Oblivion
The environmental parts of the plan would be costly, but manageable. The same can’t be said of its social programs.

By
Noah Smith
February 8, 2019, 9:15 AM EST
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Out there. Photographer: Alex Wong/Getty Images North America
Skeptics of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s promise of a Green New Deal were worried that the plan would be a Trojan Horse for unrealistic and ruinously expensive economic proposals that have little to do with stopping climate change. The unveiling of the plan gives them more reason for worry. Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal appears to take every big spending idea that has emerged on the political left in recent years and combine them into one large package deal, with little notion of how to pay for them all.

The Green New Deal as introduced to Congress is in the form of a non-binding resolution laying out a series of goals. The wording of the resolution is ambitious, but vague. More concerning are the details of an online FAQ that appeared on Ocasio-Cortez’s website but was later taken down. The FAQ contained important details that are not included in the resolution itself. On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, referred to the FAQ as a “bad copy,” and promised to release a revised version.


But the original FAQ may give insight into the Ocasio-Cortez camp’s true goals. And it shows that although the Green New Deal bills itself primarily as an environmental policy and jobs program, the most expensive items are enormous new entitlements paid for by unlimited deficit spending.

First, to be fair, it’s important to discuss the good ideas in the plan. The Green New Deal would retrofit all American buildings and factories to be carbon-neutral, electrify all transportation, and switch the entire electrical grid to carbon-neutral energy sources. These goals are highly ambitious, but they’re good targets. Ocasio-Cortez’s plan correctly recognizes that carbon taxes wouldn’t be enough to prompt private companies to do all these things on their own, and that large-scale government-funded infrastructure is required. Furthermore, a focus on scaling up clean energy would push the technology forward. That would help other countries — where most of the world’s carbon emissions are produced — to follow in the U.S’s footsteps.

But these environmental policies, as sweeping as they would be, wouldn’t be the most costly items on the list. Among other things, the now-removed FAQ stipulates that every American would be guaranteed the following:


. The guarantee of universal affordable housing is, to my knowledge, new.


How much would these proposals cost? It’s hard to know. Senator Bernie Sanders’ Medicare for All proposal was predicted to cost about $3.2 trillion a year. Switching to renewable energy would conservatively cost more than $400 billion annually. Even though the cost is coming down as technology improves, net-zero emissions retrofits of every building in the country would be expensive — optimistically, perhaps $88,000 for a townhouse, and presumably much more for free-standing homes. Assuming $100,000 per home, that comes to about $1.4 trillion a year over a decade. Factories, office buildings, stores, etc. would cost much more per building, but there are far fewer of them — about 5.6 million. If each one costs $500,000 to retrofit, that’s about $300 billion more per year.

For universal basic income, the cost has been estimated at $3.8 trillion a year. A narrower program that only covered, say, one out of three Americans who are “unable or unwilling” to work, it would cost about $1.3 trillion. By comparison, free college would be cheap at about $47 billiona year. Affordable housing for the entire nation could cost a lot, depending on what that means, but let’s ignore that for now.

So this quick, rough cost estimate — which doesn’t include all of the promises listed in the FAQ — adds up to about $6.6 trillion a year. That’s more than three times as much as the federal government collects in tax revenue, and equal to about 34 percent of the U.S.’s entire gross domestic product. And that’s assuming no cost overruns — infrastructure projects, especially in the U.S., are subject to cost bloat. Total government spending already accounts for about 38 percent of the economy, so if no other programs were cut to pay for the Green New Deal, it could mean that almost three-quarters of the economy would be spent via the government.


And all this is assuming that repurposing essentially all of the nation’s economic resources doesn’t cause any loss in economic efficiency. History and the experiences of other countries suggest that this wouldn’t be the case.

Most troubling, the Green New Deal’s FAQ sidesteps the question of how to pay for the plan. It simply links to two op-eds explaining so-called modern monetary theory, or MMT, which posits that deficits don’t matter all that much in the absence of inflation for those countries that issue their own currency.

This suggests that the Green New Deal will be paid for with soaring deficits, which could be quite dangerous. The plan’s environmental spending proposals would be temporary, but the new entitlement programs would be permanent. If MMT is wrong, and if ever-expanding deficits cause runaway inflation, the result would be a devastating collapse of the nation’s economy. Hyperinflation has never happened in the U.S., but then again, neither has anything like the Green New Deal. A wholesale breakdown of the U.S. economy wouldn’t do much to arrest climate change, nor would it provide an enviable example to the rest of the world, upon whose emissions reductions the planet’s future actually depends.

So although a big push for renewable energy is needed, the Green New Deal’s vast program for economic egalitarianism could make it unworkable. Let’s hope the FAQ doesn’t represent the final version of the plan, and the sweeping proposals for economic restructuring — especially basic income — can be dropped in favor of a tighter focus on reducing carbon emissions. But if the now-deleted FAQ represents Ocasio-Cortez’s true plans, the answer to the question of “Do you support the Green New Deal?” will have to be “No.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/a...casio-cortez-s-green-new-deal-is-unaffordable
 
I love this girl. We need the dialogue she is creating. These aren’t always the best ideas but they’re fresh and will lead to a broader scope that is feasible and good for business. We need a high speed rail system. It’ll create so many jobs and boost manufacturing.
 
Does the deal ban/prohibit international flight ?

I didnt catch that tidbit. But in regards to the idea, it's cute but they have been working on the ****in fdr for what feels like 15 years. I know its a money grab for those contractors.

But incant trust city/state/federales to construct anything of value in a reasonable time. Its selling dreams from 2050 when in 2019 we still struggle with infastructure from 1895.
 
:lol: says da party that's entire signature issue is being affraid of a orange NYC *** hole.
 
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