Not All ‘Green New Deals’

Threaten Americans’

Personal Liberties

To the Editor:
There is no Green New Deal. That is to say, there is no one Green New Deal despite your newspaper columnist’s alarmist assertions last week that personal freedoms are endangered by addressing Climate Change.
There are many proposals involving stimulus programs that aim to address Climate Change. Some, like House Res. 109/Senate Res. 59, sponsored by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., also address economic inequality.
Other proposals focus more clearly on Climate assessments, concluding convincingly that the burning of fossil fuels is warming the atmosphere, leading to harmful effects across the United States.
Many Republicans agree. Members of the House Energy and Committee, Greg Walden of Oregon, Fred Upton of Michigan, and John Shimkus of Illinois, write that “Climate Change is real.”
The sobering report issued by the White House in November 2018, the result of a major scientific report issued by 13 federal agencies, indicates that impacts of Climate Change could reduce the size of the U.S. economy by up to 10 percent by the end of the century.
Proposals to address Climate Change, including the Green New Deal(s), range widely – public infrastructure investment, fuel safety standards, carbon taxes, zoning and building-code changes, green-job creation, de-carbonizing the economy. These are not particularly scary measures, and are hardly likely to “overturn society as we know it.”
Fixating on the phrase “New Deal,” the professor creates a mountain out of a metaphorical molehill by raising the specter of totalitarianism, Communism, Socialism.
What Green New Deal(s) hope to do is to sensitize the populace to more frequent and intense weather and climate-related events and to put forth proposals to mitigate the dangers of damaged infrastructure and disrupted ecosystems such as local farm lands.
There are also multiple local concerns officials need to address.
Is the county and are towns
prepared to increase the size of culverts to accommodate increased storm runoff? Are there funds for aging and deteriorating bridges? If snowfall increases, are there contingency funds? Are fire departments prepared for hotter-than-normal seasons? Will emergency responses be adequate? Is our electric grid sufficient should we hope to move toward a low-carbon local economy?
Then there are personal challenges – can kids get to school, can we get to work, will my house burn down or be flooded? – that hardly require an “authoritarian central government” as the professor suggests.
We do require, however, that local officials move swiftly to address climate-related issues essential to the survival of our communities.

ROBERT SEWARD
Town of Middlefield