Euphemisms of the Apocalypse #3 Green New Deal

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The first lie about the ‘Green New Deal’ is that it’s new.

Those of a certain age and world view have been weakly ‘demanding’ variations on this ‘deal’ for decades.

The second lie is that it’s green.

* Rejecting the materialist paradigm is green

* Small Is Beautiful is green

* Permaculture is green

The ‘Green New Deal’ by contrast is primarily an industrial project – a fantastical hot swap of dirty fossil fuel technologies for ‘certified 100% eco-fresh’ innovations.

The ‘new’ part of the ‘deal’ is that instead of blowing money on fossil fuel subsidies and funneling money to the usual suspects – we’ll tax the rich and spend it all on ‘green’ infrastructure and electric trams – which sounds great until you consider what doesn’t change and what the implications for the environment are for what does change.

What doesn’t change

Prevailing economic systems are to be kept running  and the moral paradigm left largely untouched. Nasty grey economic growth is to be replaced with eco-lovely ‘green growth’ – cue pictures of wind turbines and sunshine over forests.

Suggest to politicians that the Green New Deal ought to do away with economic ‘growth’ altogether and they go very pale and change the subject. If you suggest that exigent ecological emergencies demand radical reductions in the size of the materials economy and they’ll just laugh…or faint.   

Al Gore promised in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – “this process is going to create a lot of wealth”. Wahoo! The apocalypse is going to be a win-win for everyone! Right?

The Green New Deal protects the progressivist societal narrative. Cumulative cycles of industrial ‘development’ are said to represent not only moral progress (ie they are the ‘goods’ to which we must all aspire) but are an invincible force that will (if sufficiently protected from challenge) transcend all natural and material limits to our desires. 

The Green New Deal allows politicians who are courting the moral tribes of the left to appear to embrace a radical break with the past – when in truth they are hawking the same progressivist techno fantasy that has brought us to the brink of extinction. Technologies developed to solve one set of problems have endlessly created and worsened others – but this time we are promised ‘it’s going to be different!’ because we have attached the words ‘green and ‘new’ to the same old ‘deal’.   

Litter picking and eco-shopping have been replaced by recycling and the Green New Deal but the only thing that really gets recycled is the bullshit – maybe we keep falling for it because we want to? 

If implemented the Green New Deal would invoke an environmental catastrophe, but most importantly it would fed the lie that a systemic moral crisis can be fixed with technology and revised investment decisions – it can’t – at best it might afford us a short-term truce with nature but it’s much more likely to ruinously distract us from reality. 

This ‘deal’ shields establishment economic shibboleths and toxic moral norms. Those who fret about piling up stuff in houses, garages, storage lockers, boot sales and landfills can relax- the Green New Deal is going to wash away all our sins.

Lip service will be paid of course to ideas like conservation, repairing and going without – but you will rarely hear advocates of the Green New Deal suggest that:

* The materialist party might be over (and ought to be) 

* It was immoral anyway

* We ought to change to a rationally better and thus hugely less materialist moral framework

* We must drastically REDUCE the size of the materials economy

Same environmentalists do say all of the above (although some incoherently pine simultaneously for the Green New Deal)  and this marks the razor sharp boundary between genuine environmental activism and its shadow. 

In fine, if we leave the moral praxis of billions undisturbed and try to moderate the impacts of toxic social norms via the means by which they are realised, the impacts on the environment will be grave and our prospects of survival – slim. This is  why the Green New Deal is such a dangerous euphemism and why at core it is nothing new at all…

..but it is far from the only problem with it.

What would change

With the ‘Green New Deal’, technology is to fix our atomised and unequal society and thus rescue our consumerism, foreign holidays and pension funds. This sounds great – why be a kill joy?

Well…where is the shiny utopia of flying saucers, monorails, jet packs, flying cars and lives of leisure we were promised in the sixties – how did that work out? How did all the subsequent reinventions of this myth work out?  Why does anyone imagine that the brochures offered for ‘Modernity 2050’ will be any more truthful than previous ones?

In 2017, the World Bank started to cost the hot swapping of existing electricity production to renewables by 2050 – a key component of  the Green New Deal. 

How does an extra 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron sound? It doesn’t sound terribly green to me. 

Neodymium up 70% to help build all those wind turbines. Solar panels will need more Indium (up 920%) and Silver (up between 38% and 105%) and the batteries needed for a stable grid will all require lithium (up 2,700%). Boom! That is going to require a lot of mining, miners, heavy machinery and erm mines/processing factories.

To take one example, silver mining contaminates both soil and water with toxic chemicals and contributes to ‘biodiversity loss’ (killing nature on an industrial scale). Look below for the brave new world of the Green New Deal…

That’s just for electricity. Lets not get started on the ungodly environmental impacts of replacing over 2 billion vehicles with electric cars or of retooling entire manufacturing bases to somehow run without fossil fuels. Need we go on?

The Green New Deal would swiftly lead to the catastrophic environmental outcomes that it purports to avoid, but more importantly its very existence is a confidence trick. Its true purpose is to allow us to have our moral cake and eat it. 

The stark moral choice we face is this – shall we give up the vast streams of material ‘goods’ and distractions of modernity and thus survive as a species – or keep them and kill posterity?

Our morally bankrupt species is about to run out of road and plunge into an environmental abyss of its own making. Rather than address this systemic moral crisis, the Green New Deal extends a techno fantasy that activists can demand and institutions can promise – one that allows everyone to salvage their moral self image while kicking the consequences down the road to our children.

Next up we will shine a torch at the bastard sibling of the ‘Green New Deal’ – #4 Green Growth

…there will be blood.

Since 2013 I have worked between 4-6 hours a day on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and uncovering truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.

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Thank you in solidarity with all our readers. John Lynch, Editor.     

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