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THE LIBERTY CHAMPION - OFFICIAL STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
The Green New Deal (GND), a piece of legislation proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, gained support from a large base of the younger generation.
The Green New Deal’s goal is to solve America’s environmental issues.
However, as a student and a young person who will receive the negative effects of this deal should it pass, I find this proposal concerning, as its main directive is to siege control and impose progressive laws override their desires to aid the “climate crises.”
Many support the GND because they want to solve climate change, but multiple studies have shown it wouldn’t do much to help the issue. According to a study done by the American Enterprise Institute, the proposal would reduce global temperatures by “0.083 to 0.173 degrees,” a number “barely distinguishable from zero.”
The GND would also be astronomically expensive. In a study reported by Bloomberg News, the proposal could cost up to $93 trillion over the span of 10 years, or $65,000 per family, per year. That’s more than three times the national debt. Between paying for my tuition and student loans, I can’t afford to take on more financial burden, and neither can the majority of other college students.
In addition, the Heritage Foundation reports that the GND would cause the average household’s electricity cost to increase by about 12-14%. An economic recession or not, this is an additional hardship that struggling Americans cannot afford.
Another concern is that the initial goal of the GND was not to solve environmental issues, but rather to restructure the economy.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, even said, “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,” and, “…we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing,” according to the The Washington Post.
This legislation seems to be a proposal for economic change camouflaged as a piece of environmental legislation.
Environmental policies implemented by the government from the top-down, such as the GND, can lead to more pollution, which is contradictory to the solution this policy aims to provide. As reported by the journal Global Environmental Change, Russia (formerly the USSR when these policies were put into place) already implemented top-down policies like the GND, however, its air quality is 1.5 times dirtier than the USA’s per unit of GDP in the 1980s.
The Green New Deal aims to restructure the economy under the guise of environmental solutions.
Lastly, the GND would largely expand the use of wind and solar energy, but in order to make this work on a national, industrial scale, it would mean the clearing of hundreds of thousands of square miles of forest and habitat to make way for those facilities, according to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. In an effort to promote conservation, habitats for wildlife would be destroyed while making room for these facilities, such as solar panel farms.
The Green New Deal is a harmful environmental policy that aims to implement faulty solutions to the environmental problem that would harm the American people more than it would help.
As a college student and lover of the environment, I am strongly opposed to the Green New Deal.
Julia Heath is a guest writer.
COURTESY OF "THE LIBERTY CHAMPION"
OFFICIAL STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF LIBERTY UNIVERSITY
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