A faith requires its pieties, and the so-called “Green New Deal” amounts to a sacrament. To true believers, its implausibility and impracticality is not a mark against it. Just the opposite; it is an expression of zeal, an acknowledgment of the righteousness and urgency of the cause it seeks to address. Its efficacy is measured in the number willing to genuflect before it.
This is not a serious policy proposal. Its goal is the elimination of fossil fuels in transportation and power generation, though it also would phase out emissions-free nuclear power plants. It seeks to retrofit every free-standing structure in America, pare back America’s industrial agriculture industry to “local” (or, presumably, subsistence) scale, and virtually eliminate domestic air travel within the continental U.S. by transitioning entirely to high-speed rail (which, assuming perfectly uniform topography, would still force bicoastal Americans to a nearly 20-hour trip). This would all be done in a single decade.
All this disruption to the economy isn’t much of a problem, of course, because the plan assumes that the displaced will simply transition directly into new, unionized green jobs. And for those who spent their lives acquiring expertise that is no longer valuable, the proposal would impose a “just transition” into a lifestyle more befitting this brave new world.
The Green New Deal’s central planners aren’t so hubristic that they cannot admit uncertainties. For example, they admit that it’s unlikely that they could “fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The ethics associated with industrial-scale bovine slaughter are unaddressed. The Green New Deal is its own moral imperative.
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In the absence of a national religion, Americans have frequently adopted a variety of civic codes that mimic the inviolable tenets of a faith. Some of them are healthier than others. With each passing day, the dogma of the green revolution looks less like a healthy expression of political agency and more like a cult.
Once Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” the entire history of “Progressivism” became an exercise in replacing Him with various and often interconnected cult-like pseudo-religions. As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Try reading this piece by Arthur Allen Leff for more on this phenomenon.