Green New Deal is a good deal

To the editor:

(re: “Engel urged to back Green New Deal,” Feb. 14)

I agree that U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel should back the Green New Deal, although I realize that not everybody is a big fan of the Green New Deal. They don’t think it goes far enough.

But I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal, and I’m happy with it as a great first step.

At least it will get us to zero emissions by 2030, the minimum we have to achieve to prevent catastrophic and irreversible climate change. And with that as its major goal, the Green New Deal provides concrete plans of how to get there while creating millions of good-paying, permanent, local clean-energy jobs.

I’m especially pleased to see that an important part of the Green New Deal is actually reversing global warming by using best farming and grazing practices that have proven the soil can become a massive carbon sink. This change also will make family farms profitable again, especially organic farming, and eliminate the industrial-scale factory farms that contribute greatly to global warming while polluting our land and water.

Green New Deal critics mainly object to its cost. If you think the Green New Deal is expensive, try climate change.

That’s projected to cost many trillions of dollars before leading to global economic collapse followed by societal collapse. Irreversible warming will mean the end of all life on Earth.

Forever.

That is, if we don’t act now, and act boldly.

And a trillion or so dollars pumped directly into the economy will build us, not bleed us, just like the original New Deal.

In any case, can’t the Titanic afford lifeboats?

One thing that will help pay for the Green New Deal is a bill now in Congress dealing with carbon dividends — H.R. 7171.

I’m hoping that Rep. Engel and others in the House will support it. It can make the fossil fuel industry that knowingly created our global warming crisis pay to fix it.

It will tax fossil fuel corporations out of existence, and as they disappear, cheaper clean energy will replace them.

And the cost of that energy and its storage will keep plummeting as it scales up.

The carbon dividends bill also will make other nations cut their emissions as fast as we do, and provide them with a model of how to do so. First, it eliminates the enormous subsidies taxpayers now provide fossil fuels (similar massive subsidies provide an impediment to clean energy development in many countries), and then it taxes all imported goods from countries with higher rates of greenhouse emissions than ours.

This protects American industries from unfair competition from polluters overseas, while making sure they don’t relocate overseas to avoid the carbon tax.

The carbon dividends idea has worked as promised in British Columbia for more than a decade, and has created a booming economy while slashing emissions.

It’s been so successful that Canada has expanded it nationwide.

Lynn Goldfarb