March 24, 2019
This is an extended comment on this article from the online publication, "Lets Fix This Country" The article is written with the right mix of detail and broad concepts to allow this involved citizen to really think about "The Green New Deal. Kudos to the author- publisher, a long time colleague.
Anyone who skimmed, go back read it carefully and go to the links that expand on why GND (one more acronym to handle) is inherently complex, utopian yet, important for we who will escape the problems that the GND tackles by opting out, otherwise known as dying- (ideally after a full long life) Politics inherently, even when tacitly, overlaps ideology- IE Marxism and current term "liberal."
Those of us born before TV (a useful benchmark) are living in a world that was unimagined in our childhood. This is from the technological (every person on earth has a supercomputer in their pocket) to the cultural (a child has the right and ability to decide his gender) Those political leaders of the pre TV age, no matter how brilliant or benevolent, could never have come up with a plan for the next century. We face the same problem today.
Climate change, while an actual phenomenon, "only" means that a portion of the world will become uninhabitable. I suggest, this should not be the central, but one of many, of the profound changes in the coming century. In the pre-TV era, there were other fears equivalent to Global Warming. The expected population explosion was more dire as food production would remain static. Now the latest prediction is world population will soon peak, and prosperity and lower birth will change the prediction of mass starvation.
Global warming is real, but other seismic cultural and technological changes will interact in a way that is not predictable. As of now, social interaction depends on physical proximity, a truism that is rapidly vanishing. Science fiction can no longer be considered fictional, but predictive. Even if Global Warming makes a quarter of the earth uninhabitable, based on the revolutionary technological changes that will only accelerate, it is reasonable that those creatures of future generations, will be in a world where everything is different.
While climate scientist can have a general idea of the consequences of the increase in greenhouse gases on our earth, what they can't predict, based on similar efforts six decades ago is how technology could change pretty much everything. This recent article from the N.Y. Times describes the dire prediction that never happened of what was known as The Population Explosion. Exacerbating this catastrophe were limits on food production, which turned out to be overcome by what we now know as the Green Revolution, research and technology starting in 1950s that increased agricultural production
worldwide, particularly in the developing world.
Rationality lies somewhere in between the full attack on Global Warming proposed in the Green New Deal legislation of 2019, and complete dismissal of the potential serious adverse effects of this advocated by President Trump. As of now this is impossible, based on the distortion of perception caused by confirmation bias, an example of this being an article on the liberal L.A. Times that described a major study predicting that by the turn of this century the U.S. economic productivity will be reduced to ten percent of current level.
The actual report it referenced said it would be "reduced" ten percent. The newspaper refused to correct this, and few if any other than I, seemed to have noted the error. Such confirmation bias is at the root of the exacerbation of the culture wars since the last election. As long as the American public is so divided as to be living in different realities, the prognosis is dire.
