The rollout of the Green New Deal was just February 7, so it’s extremely frustrating that five days later, during the State of the California Address, California Governor Gavin Newsom moved to kill it.
Obviously, Newsom can’t kill the entire Green New Deal, but in the case of worst timing on my part ever, I wrote at length just yesterday morning about how the Green New Deal, despite all its vagueness and other problems, calls funding to build National High Speed Rail.
Without a National High Speed Rail network, part of the larger Steel Interstate Initiative, there is no way to achieve transportation emissions to meet the IPCC goal. Air travel will still exist, and while there are electric cars, buses, trucks, and trains, there’s no electric passenger aircraft.
Newsom didn’t have make such a decision, which reeks of uninformed political expediency. California is a Democratic supermajority state. Democrats hold a supermajority in both the state legislature and state senate. Both Senators are Democrats, and only 7(!) of the 53 member congressional delegation are Republicans. The state even has a $9 billion budget surplus.
There is no funding in place for future work, but that doesn’t mean you preclude further progress. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and Proposition 1a money has already been awarded for Construction of the 130 mile Central Valley Segment from Bakersfield to Fresno. And Gov. Newsom has pledged to see that construction through, creating a worst-case public relations scenario.
There’s no financial reason to kill the project. There’s no political reason to kill the project. Republicans are going to attack public works projects no matter. We’ve been seeing increased strength from Democrats in just ignoring Republican attacks. If there was a time to ignore the Koch and Big Oil funded Reason foundation criticism, it is now.
In the previous diary written before Gov. Newsom’s address, I noticed something unusual in the Green New Deal text: it omitted any reference to the ARRA, and the $100 billion in green spending and $8 billion of high speed rail funding included therein.
The Stimulus? Never Heard of It.
But the Green New Deal makes no specific reference to these projects... It also makes no mention of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act ..., nor President Obama who brought these projects to life. It does, strangely, mention Tesla; an endeavor literally forced into reality through the vast personal fortune of a silicon valley tech lottery winner.
How can you call for infrastructure spending on the environment if you don’t tout past successes? Dave Weigel shed some light yesterday afternoon on how that decision by was deliberate.
Obviously, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t involved in Gov. Newsom’s cowardly and expedient decision. This is not a decision Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s remotely wanted, and it is to her exclusive credit, at least as of yesterday (before Gov. Newsom acted), that we were having a National discussion about Green Infrastructure. I hope she speaks out against his decision. But the decision to omit any reference of California High Speed Rail from the Green New Deal text did not go unnoticed by armchair critics of the project (in the days before Gov. Newsom’s speech yesterday), and that might have been all the cover Gov. Newsom needed. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, proclaimed that:
Obama “wasn’t talking about a big mobilization and the solutions were too small.”
This is a sentiment echoed by many critics of President Obama; that his accomplishments were incremental. But instead of discussing the need for larger and renewed efforts, the same critics often make the error of simply pretending they never happened.
But no matter how incremental Obama’s solutions were, they were real, and they produced tangible results. There’s no way to know whether the decision had an impact on Gov. Newsom. But we do know today the Green New Deal is further from becoming reality than it was just yesterday.