Green New Deal: Fact versus Fiction

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal proposes to save the planet. It calls for the United States to reduce carbon emissions to zero in 10 years.

James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics, tells me “That's a goal you could only imagine possible if you have no idea how the energy economy works or how energy is produced in this country.”

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The Green New Deal calls for a transition to 100 percent renewable energy, many more wind turbines and solar panels.

But the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.

Because of that, Meigs explains, “You also have to build all this infrastructure to connect [renewables] with energy consumers possibly very far away, and you always need some kind of backup power.”

That means many more transmission lines and bigger batteries.

But “batteries are lousy way to store energy” says physicist Mark Mills, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He also points out that wind mills and solar panels are anything but green, “I have to dig up a 1,000 pounds of stuff to process it … digging up is done with oil, by the way, big machines, so we're consuming energy to quote, save energy. It's not a good path to go.”

It would also be very expensive.

Mills points out, "We're charging more for people who can't afford it and we give money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy 100,000 dollar [electric] cars, put expensive solar arrays on their roof or to be investors in wind farms. We have an upside down Robin Hood in our country to the tunes of 10s and 100s of billions of dollars."

The bottom line, the Green New Deal, even if it were scientifically possible:

Would hurt the poor.

Cost everyone more.

And make energy less reliable.