Bernie Sanders Unveils $16 Trillion Green New Deal To Combat Climate Crisis

LOADING ERROR LOADING Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders released a sweeping $16.3 trillion climate plan on Thursday, vowing to create 20 million jobs and completely zero out planet-heating emissions by 2050. There’s the money saved: $1.215 trillion from “scaling back military spending on protecting global oil” and $1.31 trillion from federal and state welfare “due to the creation of millions of good-paying, unionized jobs.” Then there’s the money earned: $6.4 trillion from selling electricity produced by the Energy Department’s regional power marketing authorities, $3.085 trillion from “making the fossil fuel industry pay for their pollution, through litigation, fees, and taxes, and eliminating federal fossil fuel subsidies,” $2.3 trillion from income taxes on the 20 million new jobs the plan creates, and an additional $2 trillion from forcing “the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share.” Those pushing a Green New Deal, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the grassroots group Sunrise Movement, have shied away from talking numbers, even as Republicans fabricated a bogus $93 trillion price tag. The plan calls for creating a $40 billion Climate Justice Resiliency Fund at the Environmental Protection Agency to “conduct a nationwide survey to identify areas with high climate impact vulnerabilities and other socioeconomic factors, public health challenges, and environmental hazards,” then offer block grants “in order of most vulnerable to least vulnerable.” The program would establish a special Office of Climate Resiliency for People with Disabilities to “ensure that nationwide, the needs of people with disabilities are consistently addressed during adaptation planning and that those efforts are coordinated throughout the federal government.” “The first two years of this plan will be spent very aggressively laying down a social safety net to ensure that no one is left behind,” the proposal reads. “We will also use these funds to bring grocery stores to food deserts ensuring all people have access to healthy, local food.” Harkening to the rural revitalization plan Sanders released earlier this year, the proposal makes a vague call to “incentivize community ownership of farmland.” “The scope of the challenge ahead of us shares some similarities with the crisis faced by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940s.” “One of the barriers to being able to choose a career in ecologically regenerative farming is the cost of acquiring farmland,” it states. “We want communities to be able to join together to own farmland to help people grow our local, ecologically regeneratively produced food and help solve the climate crisis and will provide government assistance to do so.” Market Wisdom It’s easy to imagine the political right smearing the proposal as a Soviet-style takeover by an avowed democratic socialist.