The much-hyped “Green New Deal” (GND) offered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey would, if enacted, constitute a complete socialist makeover of the U.S. economy.
Though its provisions haven’t officially been scored by government budget watchdogs yet, estimates of the costs of Ocasio-Cortez’s earlier version of the bill topped $49 trillion in its first 10 years, making GND, by far, the costliest social and economic proposal in U.S. history. (For comparison, the United States has accumulated $21 trillion in debt over its 241-year history.)
The GND would mandate a wrenching transformation to the electric power system in the United States to replace virtually all fossil fuels with renewable power plants in just 11 years. The current electric grid was built over the course of 100 years or more. GND calls for replacing all of this in just a decade.
To meet present electric power needs under the mandates in the “Green New Deal,” millions of wind turbines would have to be erected, millions of solar panels installed, and billions of battery packs stored in millions of homes or at tens of thousands of centralized battery farms, which currently don’t exist. If we were to rely solely on wind turbines, those turbines would need to cover one-third of the continental United States. If we were to rely on solar panels, it would probably require covering more than 20 percent of the countryside, just to meet current demand.
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