Opinion | Do We Need the Green New Deal?

Ms. Gunn-Wright also believes tying climate change to economic inequality is a winning political strategy. Class-blind approaches, like carbon taxes, are often regressive and can trigger public backlash (see France’s Yellow Vest protests) that ends up hamstringing climate action. “Any solution that is tied to tangible economic benefits is going to have a better chance of passing,” she told The Times.

“The war on the climate emergency, if correctly waged, would actually be good for the economy — just as the second world war set the stage for America’s golden economic era,” writes Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, in The Guardian.

Social programs are beside the point

Green New Deal critics say that the plan prioritizes social justice over political reality and even science itself. The plan “retreats into a political fantasy world in which the ideologically median legislator is Bernie Sanders,” Jonathan Chait writes in New York magazine. He points out that the plan is mum on nuclear power, despite a vigorous debate about that technology’s necessity. (Mr. Sanders’s Green New Deal plan, the most ambitious of any candidate’s, explicitly rejects nuclear expansion.) Mr. Chait writes:

While rightly insisting on the primacy of climate change, it betrays its own confidence by submerging climate policy into a broader array of priorities … Thus, at the same time, the plan avoids taking stances that are absolutely vital to reduce carbon emissions, it embraces policies that have nothing to do with climate change whatsoever.

Along similar lines, The Washington Post’s editorial board notes that the Green New Deal is noncommittal about a carbon tax, which many economists believe is imperative to harnessing market forces to reduce emissions. “Policymakers should focus above all else on quickly and efficiently decarbonizing,” they write, “and carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy.”

We need to focus on the rest of the world

The Green New Deal suffers from domestic myopia, argues Megan McArdle, a libertarian-leaning Washington Post columnist, because the United States produces only 15 percent of the world’s emissions, a share that will only shrink as developing countries industrialize. “Zeroing out U.S. emissions and moving the whole country into yurts wouldn’t prevent the climate from warming,” she writes, “because Americans are not the biggest problem anymore.”

For the same reason, Noah Smith, a left-leaning Bloomberg columnist, agrees with the spirit, but not the letter, of the Green New Deal. The priority, he writes, is to “pour money” into researching green technology and then transferring and subsidizing it across the world:

The climate change battle will be won or lost in developing countries such as China … If the U.S. can discover cheap ways of manufacturing cement and concrete without carbon emissions, and of reducing emissions from agriculture, it will give developing countries a way to reduce carbon output without threatening their economic growth.

We need a technological breakthrough

Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Sixth Extinction,” has written that the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere has most likely locked the planet into another half degree of warming. The 1.5-degree target may therefore be impossible unless emissions can be reversed.