Bernie Sanders unveils $16T 'Green new deal' plan

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/climate/bernie-sanders-climate-change.html

by kaushikt • 7 years ago

117 154 7 years ago

nytimes.com

bbmario• 7 years ago

and commits $200 billion to help poor nations cope with climate change.

Why?

api5• 7 years ago

Because otherwise our abandonment of fossil fuels would make their price fall on the global market, causing them to just be burned in poor countries instead. This is one place in the proposal where he's right. CO2 is a global problem so we can't ignore the rest of the world.

StreamBright8• 7 years ago

This is not as simple.

av2• 7 years ago

If I had to guess: Justice. Wealthy nations like ours are the primary driver of climate change while poor nations will suffer the bulk of the damage.

notJim4• 7 years ago

In addition to that, wealthy nations developed by exploiting resources like forests and oil. Now we're asking less-developed nations not to do that. Instead, they need to leapfrog that phase of development, which will cost money they don't have.

jfrankamp2• 7 years ago

I'd go one more explicit step: the carbon we emitted made us wealthy while externalizing the costs. The recipe for gaining wealth at present for poor countries is, emit a shit ton of carbon in the pursuit of growth. If we're serious about reducing emissions we'll have to provide a different recipe.

rinchik• 7 years ago

Well you guessed wrong. What justice? Developing nations are the major polluters (reasons aside, that's just a fact). If there was "justice" for pollution we'd be at war.

nostromo2• 7 years ago

US and EU have reduced carbon emissions in the past decade. Meanwhile China almost doubled their emissions, and now emits more than the US and EU combined.

China now burns more coal than all the other countries of the world, combined.

Any plan ignoring China's dramatic carbon emissions growth (for example: the Paris Accords) will do nothing to stop climate change.

alekratz• 7 years ago

I don't understand why you were downvoted for just asking a question.

StreamBright8• 7 years ago

The new HN.

stronglikedan• 7 years ago

I don't understand why you would ask this two minutes after the comment in question was posted.

marricks3• 7 years ago

Countries like the US and China are the largest contributors to climate change while the nations most affected by it (poorer countries at or near the equator or coastally located) have the least resources to actually do anything about it. How unfair is that? We should be footing the bill to help them.

pizza• 7 years ago

From the plan pdf, p. 3:

Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world, including providing $200 billion to the Green Climate Fund, rejoining the Paris Agreement, and reasserting the United States' leadership in the global fight against climate change.

from p. 12:

In order to help countries of the Global South with climate adaptation efforts, the U.S. will invest $200 billion in the Green Climate Fund for the equitable transfer of renewable technologies, climate adaptation, and assistance in adopting sustainable energies. U.S. leadership can ensure that the developing world secures reliable electricity, reduces poverty and pollution-related fatalities, creates greater net employment, and improves living standards - all while reducing greenhouse-gas emissions

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-...

HugoDaniel• 7 years ago

"reasserting the United States' leadership in the global fight against climate change."

nitpicking, did he consider changing "reasserting" to "asserting" ?

avz• 7 years ago

Probably because diffusion, air currents, stratospheric jets, winds and other climate phenomena are not contained by national borders.

Caprinicus• 7 years ago

That is four times the entire US foreign aid budget, perhaps it is a typo?

safgasCVS3• 7 years ago

Man you gonna be so upset when someone tells you how insurance works

mc322• 7 years ago

He should do it like China does. “Give” them 200 to buy our solutions with natural resources as collateral. No free lunches. Either that or do it multilaterally, otherwise you’re just encouraging gamification of the system.

jfrankamp2• 7 years ago

Where do you think China got that strategy? We've long had aid-with-strings-attached.

Klinky• 7 years ago

Global deforestation is one concern. Instead decrying nations depleting their rainforests for economic benefit, we should put money where our mouth is given the importance of these ecosystems for overall global health.

tinktank• 7 years ago

my guess would be potential allies and short and long term investment opportunities for American businesses.

MAGZine2• 7 years ago

Poor nations will continue to do whatever is most economically expedient to them. Does that mean burning down the rainforest? Overfishing oceans? Or any number of other environmentally unsustainable things? Yes, it does.

People do these things to make ends meet. Make their ends meet on condition that that stop doing $BadThing, and the problems stemming from e.g. burning the rainforest will diminish.

If the countries themselves aren't willing to establish these programs, let's help. Climate is a world game with all humanity on one side.

asdkhadsj2• 7 years ago

Furthermore, if the solution has to be solved for the entire planet, it's in our interest to ensure poor nations play ball. We have limited options to do that while not forcefully invading/etc.

Alternatives are always welcome; but the premise here is that we need them to do it. We need everyone to do it.

jmull• 7 years ago

Besides morality and compassion (and who cares about that, amiright? /s), there's an enlightened self-interest here.

If, e.g., droughts and floods make a various regions holding, say 1 billion people unable to sustain themselves, those billion people are going to be forced to try to move to some place they can survive. That may cause us a lot more than $200 billion worth of trouble.

(Not that $200 billion is going to counteract the effects of climate change, but they idea is that it would substantially mitigate the most serious issues. I have no idea if that's true under this plan or possible under any plan, but that's the idea.)

Hongwei• 7 years ago

"The proposal opposes nuclear energy and carbon capture and storage technology." Ugh

spidermango• 7 years ago

why

cma6• 7 years ago

To disambiguate, it doesn't oppose energy storage technology, "carbon capture and storage" should be read as one thing, relating to carbon capture only.

marricks3• 7 years ago

I'm for nuclear energy as it gets us away from coal the most reliably, but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it. Not only that, but we'd actually be willing to share those green solutions around the world.

bluejekyll• 7 years ago

Seems that building nuclear plants takes much too long to have any noticeable effect in the short term, better to take it off the table so that it’s not present as a red-herring.

umvi• 7 years ago

but investing in solar, wind, geothermal, etc works too if we're serious about it.

2 questions:

Don't huge windfarms affect the local climate and wildlife? Afaik we don't know the long term effects of massive sustained wind farms.

Have we solved the solar storage problem yet?

I read something about massive battery plants and/or high speed flywheel energy storage, but as far as I know this is still a problem.

I vote we go all in on nuclear just to quickly remove coal, and then slowly phase out nuclear with better, low-impact renewables.

NittLion78• 7 years ago

I can understand the opposition on a long enough timeline, but to dismiss it from the start is almost certainly a recipe for failure.

safgasCVS3• 7 years ago

Carbon capture is a completely absurd idea, but agreed on the nuclear.

29_29• 7 years ago

No it's not. What do you think trees do?

unpwn3• 7 years ago

why do you say that?

henryfjordan• 7 years ago

We took a bunch of carbon from the earth and put it in the air, causing climate change. If we want to reverse climate change, we need to start pulling carbon from the air and putting that carbon back into earth.

How do you do that efficiently is going to be a challenge, sure, but one we need to undertake.

avmich2• 7 years ago

I tend to think the opposite, but maybe nuclear isn't such a bad idea; this isn't clear to me.

MSM• 7 years ago

Do you see nuclear as a stopgap between coal and renewable, or do you think that 100% renewable is not going to be possible?

I'm with you as being pretty pro nuclear, but if I'm making a plan to spend $16T, why even bother with half measures; just go straight for the future ideal.

toomuchtodo7• 7 years ago

You can replace all current nuclear generation in the US with solar and batteries in less than 2 years, for a lower cost (nuclear generators take at least 10 years to build, and almost always go over budget; some are never finished and abandoned [See Duke in Florida, ratepayers got soaked on a nuclear plant they gave up on]). Your point is spot on.

Nuclear lost (for commercial generation; edge cases like the Arctic circle and marine applications are still valid). It’s time we get over it and build as much solar, wind, and batteries as we can, and get Americans trained to deploy these technologies. Anything else is deck chairs on the Titanic. Drive out fossil fuel use through any means necessary.

stochastic_monk3• 7 years ago

It’s certainly not sustainable. We can’t handle the radioactive waste we already have unless there are some massive overhauls.

manfredo14• 7 years ago

Nuclear is the "future ideal". Non intermittent power means no need for complex and costly energy storage. Seawater uranium extraction has been demonstrated, and scientists have found cost-effective ways of producing it (not quite as cost effective as mining at the moment, but enough to supplant it once the mining capacity is exhausted).

Why bother with energy storage if we can just deliver enough capacity to meet peak demand 24/7 and use the excess energy to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere during non-peak hours? If we don't just want to stop emitting CO2 but actually reverse climate change, then we need truly immense amounts of energy.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

2. https://newatlas.com/nuclear-uranium-seawater-fibers/55033/

unpwn3• 7 years ago

https://www.yang2020.com/policies/nuclear-energy/ https://www.yang2020.com/policies/climate-change/

stochastic_monk3• 7 years ago

I rather like Yang. He’s my favorite candidate outside of my Warren and Sanders. His policies are evidence-based, compassionate, and Yang Gang is fun.

js8• 7 years ago

Opposes? Or just "doesn't support"?

I mean, free market is still free to jump in and create nuclear power plants and CCS technologies, or am I wrong?

wongarsu2• 7 years ago

I'm on board with not funding nuclear (takes forever to build, on those time frames it will likely be outcompeted by solar+storage). But carbon capture and storage seems essential for keeping carbon levels on an acceptable level. We dragged our feet too long to solve this with just reducing pollution. And while carbon capture is expensive it's a bargain compared to the costs of climate change over a few decades.

StreamBright8• 7 years ago

Sooner or later we gonna have nuclear power as the main source of energy.

api5• 7 years ago

I don't like this. I like the sentiment but repeat after me: politicians should never ever insert themselves into engineering! The only exception would be politicians who are engineers, and there are not many of these in the US. Bernie Sanders it not an engineer.

When they do we tend to get ignorant choices (because 99% of them are not scientists or engineers) and corruption. A great example is our biofuels programs that gave us corn ethanol, which is literally the absolute worst possible biofuel for EROEI. Another example unrelated to energy is the Space Shuttle. NASA would have built a much more affordable and reusable orbiter had Congress not mandated a bunch of extra capabilities that were never used, specific contractor mandates, and other meddling that ruined the design.

Just tax fossil fuels and other carbon emitting activities. Do not allow politicians to get involved in picking the alternatives or they'll pick the wrong ones or be influenced by lobbyists for the most expensive or politically well connected ones.

I also don't like the categorical rejection of nuclear. I'm not strongly for expansion of current-generation nuclear power but I am also not at all opposed to more research on better ways of exploiting fission energy. I'm also strongly in support of increasing funding for fusion energy given the progress that's occurred in areas like compact superconductors and computer modeling. If we can solve fusion we'd at the very least have a source of base load power for regions with strong base load power demands and that lack large scale renewable resources sufficient to meet that demand.

danhak2• 7 years ago

politicians should never ever insert themselves into engineering! Never. Ever.

So Manhattan Project and Apollo program were mistakes, in your opinion?

api5• 7 years ago

In those cases politicians set the goals. They did not pick how it was to be done. If NASA came back and said "we think we can put humans on the moon with a big catapult" and they were right, we would have built a big catapult. They set the goals and let the real professionals do the work.

What I dislike about this and other proposals is politicians specifically saying what technologies should and should not be used. That's the road to an expensive failure. Instead we should just tax carbon and set emissions goals and let the people who know how to build stuff build stuff.

selimthegrim2• 7 years ago

Look at Dieselgate where the engineers pulled the wool over the politicians’ eyes and they merrily kept cranking down the emissions targets without checking if or how they were met

save_ferris4• 7 years ago

or be influenced by lobbyists for the most expensive or politically well connected ones.

Sanders has categorically rejected PAC money and large donations from high-profile donors. If you had a rate a candidate's platform based on likelihood of lobbyist influence, this would undoubtedly be one of the least corrupt proposals.

api5• 7 years ago

I think Sanders is pretty honest in this department. The problem is that if he becomes President (or influences the next one) and puts a gigantic trillion dollar money pot out there, lots of politicians and bureaucrats are going to be involved in doling that out. It's gonna be a wild pork stampede and we'll end up with a lot of BS shell companies doing "green" stuff that involve no real engineers or other people who know how to actually build anything.

Edit to clarify: I also think we'll end up with a lot of well-meaning people who simply don't understand the science or the engineering wasting a lot of money. Corruption is a problem but it's not just corruption.

That's why I like incentives much more, whether they be tax incentives or general goal-oriented subsidies. There's a lot of surface area to work with here, not just carbon taxes:

* Extending and deepening EV tax credits.

* Reforming zoning laws to encourage density and eliminate impediments to it. This is largely a state thing but the Fed could apply pressure or incentives to states. It would also help with the housing affordability crisis that exists in some cities and states.

* Tax credits to encourage higher density housing, such as an increased mortgage deduction for condominiums in multi-story buildings and a rent deduction.

* Building public transit, a lot of public transit, and fixing/elminiating the regulatory and bureaucratic nonsense that stops the US from building high speed rail like other developed nations.

* Funding R&D by labs and universities with a record of producing results in areas like batteries, next-generation nuclear power, fusion, better solar PV, etc.

There are also some areas where you might have to fight with environmentalists, like expanding hydropower. I've long wondered how much hydropower potential there is in Northern Canada and how efficiently it could be transported by HVDC lines to the US. Would Canada like another big export?

jacinabox• 7 years ago

Sixteen T's is too many T's. He needs a plan with less T's.

api5• 7 years ago

Agreed there too. A few tens or hundreds of B's in the right places could have a huge effect. I'd put the money on extending EV tax credits and subsidizing solar, wind, and grid-scale storage, and fund it with a big tax on carbon emitting fossil fuels.

atmosx4• 7 years ago

I would make it 60 and force the EU to pay at least 30%.

atmosx4• 7 years ago

Engineers are equally stupid on average as everyone else. It takes an engineer to believe in apolitical money or unbiased facial recognition “predictions”.

notJim4• 7 years ago

There are several problems with a just-carbon-tax approach:

1) Carbon taxes just get passed on to the consumer. This makes them incredibly unpopular, because consumers see a short-term cost, but not a short-term benefit. In the US, this means that implementing a carbon tax is a good way to make sure you get voted out and replaced by a climate-denier in the next election. The Yellow Vests movement in France was sparked largely by a fuel tax.

2) Using a consumption tax also means that the poorest people of society pay the highest cost (relatively speaking.) It's unjust to make the poorest people pay the most, especially since they also do the least "damage."

3) According to the IPCC report, a carbon tax high enough to effect a rapid enough change would effectively be a fossil fuel ban anyway.

mcorning2• 7 years ago

Something along these lines is necessary to save our planet. Cutting off the $650B in fossil fuel subsidies over the course of 15 years pay for a little over half of the plan.

If we can hand over trillions of dollars to save big banks, we can hand over what is necessary to save the planet.

blackflame7000• 7 years ago

Because there is no guarantee any of that money will actually save the planet but there is a guarantee that all that money will be missed in other places.

atmosx4• 7 years ago

Well it is guaranteed that Greece will never repay the debt, but for some reason the ECB and the IMF keep flushing huge amounts of money down the toilet. No one seems to care all that much though...

yifanl• 7 years ago

If an effort like this isn't made, then it's guaranteed we don't save the planet.

Yes, it sucks, but someone has to be the first to bite the bullet.

nostromo2• 7 years ago

Cutting off the $650B in fossil fuel subsidies over the course of 15 years pay for a little over half of the plan.

That's not how subsidies work. "Subsidies" here are just lower tax rates for R&D spending.

If those tax breaks go away, so do most of the energy projects associated with them. The taxable income would shrink, and you'd have less money, not more.

achow• 7 years ago

From Reddit, posted by 'AlarmedScholar':

The most significant goals:

- Reaching 100 percent renewable energy for electricity and transportation by no later than 2030 and complete decarbonization by at least 2050

- Ending unemployment by creating 20 million jobs

- Directly invest an historic $16.3 trillion public investment

- A fair transition for workers

- Declaring climate change a national emergency

- Saving American families money

- Supporting small family farms by investing in ecologically regenerative and sustainable agriculture

- Justice for frontline communities

- Commit to reducing emissions throughout the world

- Meeting and exceeding our fair share of global emissions reductions

- Making massive investments in research and development

- Expanding the climate justice movement

- Investing in conservation and public lands to heal our soils, forests, and prairie lands

- This plan will pay for itself over 15 years

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/ctvmwp/bernie_san...

marricks3• 7 years ago

Given how cities that transitioned to $15 minimum wage workers did better* after implementation maybe it's time to try investing in infrastructure and the working class rather than the 30 years of trickle down economics and stagnate wages we've suffered from both Republican and Democratic administrations...

mcorning2• 7 years ago

We can dream

rdevsrex• 7 years ago

Do you have any links to those stats? I’ve only ever heard partisan talking points and haven’t looked at the data myself.

heartbreak• 7 years ago

I'm asking this in good faith. Does the success of a $15/hr minimum wage in specific cities indicate that it would be successful across the US?

In other words, A) does the local cost of living matter to its success? and B) does the limited rollout keep inflation in check?

Is YC still studying UBE in an attempt to answer questions like these?

slowmovintarget• 7 years ago

Please define "did better" because small businesses in those cities generally took a beating.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/07/10/the-uninte...

...reduced hours worked in low-wage jobs by 6-7 percent, while hourly wages in such jobs increased by 3 percent ... consequently, total payroll for such jobs decreased.
...
Those who were already working more hours before the wage increase saw “essentially all of the earnings increases,” while the workers who had fewer hours saw their hours go down, but wages go up enough so that their overall earnings didn’t really change

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/7/13/20690266/seattle...

Seems like its a mixed bag, and depends on circumstances.

greenail3• 7 years ago

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys intellectual curiosity, which is what the site exists for.

notus2• 7 years ago

They are just reposting a summary of the goals of the plan.

fragsworth2• 7 years ago

If his goal is 2050, how is he going to ensure that the deal is maintained for long enough to last until then? Maybe the Democrats happen to gain control of the House, Senate, and President in 2020, and he's capable of getting it passed as a result. Or maybe it's close enough that he gains a few votes from the Republicans with a bit of effort.

If Republicans gain control of the President at any point between 2024 and 2050, they will make every effort to ruin it as much as possible. And if they also get the House and Senate, they will dismantle the whole thing. Then what? Will it all be for nothing?

They've already dismantled Obamacare by removing the individual mandate. It's just a matter of time - Obamacare will inevitably collapse because the economics are unsustainable.

They'll do the same to Bernie's deal. Is there anything Bernie can do to stop this?

antisthenes• 7 years ago

No offense, but you're misinformed about the individual mandate. It was nothing but a tax on healthy people without fixing any of the underling issues like runaway cost, incentive incompatibility and predatory billing by providers.

The only reason it worked for the short period that it did is because many insurance plans significantly raised their deductibles.

It was a half measure that only further entrenched insurance companies.

Healthcare needs to be single payer, period. Allowing for individuals to purchase plans to supplement single payer if they choose to do so, but it needs to be single payer at its core. And the US govt. needs to be able to strong-arm providers into lowering costs.

The green deal would, hopefully, be mostly infrastructure. Solar power plants, battery installations, maintenance jobs for those fields.

partiallypro3• 7 years ago

I don't understand why politicians always put forth "plans" that would never pass. Why not put forth realistic options that would pass? It's not wonder we can't tackle anything, much less climate change. Everyone goes so far on the spectrum that they can't garner votes for anything. It's ridiculous. This pleases the base, it does nothing more. And even at that, I'm sure the far flungs will say this isn't enough. Come to the middle.

derg2• 7 years ago

Starting negotiations from the middle never works out.

asdkhadsj2• 7 years ago

Well, not never.. but with congress.... yea, I definitely agree.

rileyphone2• 7 years ago

If the plan is further out, so is the middle to. It's a political mandate, if your plan is milquetoast congress will pull it to almost nothing.

m_ke• 7 years ago

You have to aim high and have room to make sacrifices.

save_ferris4• 7 years ago

Because politics is largely a negotiating game. It's really not that different from haggling. Formal bills are adjusted in order to be passed, which usually involves making members of both major parties happy.

The other reason is that there's a large consensus that believes that we're not in a climate for moderate politics to thrive because some members of congress have a tendency to negotiate in bad faith. There's a widely held belief on the left that the GOP cannot be negotiated with, and any kind of call to the center requires giving them more power.

partiallypro3• 7 years ago

Of course it's a negotiation game...but that tactic works a lot better when the stakes aren't so public. In this political world, you have now tainted your proposal and any future proposal you make because the media on the other side will paint anything and everything as a slippery slow toward your original goal or plan. So this particular tactic doesn't work here, not anymore.

mc322• 7 years ago

It’s part of politics. You cannot put forth realistic plans because your opponents or competition would split the difference. Also at the early stages you have to appeal to your most fiery ardent base. Later on it’s time to “negotiate” and become more moderate and realistic.

xboxnolifes• 7 years ago

Instead of getting both votes for going middle, you get neither.

notJim4• 7 years ago

Why not put forth realistic options that would pass?

The problem is, there's no "middle solution" to climate change. There was 30 years ago, but we didn't do it then, and now it's too late. There's nothing "realistic" about being too indecisive to save the planet.

manfredo14• 7 years ago

There is always a middle solution, the problem is that many people aren't willing to do it. All US electricity generation could be replaced with nuclear power for 1/5th to 1/10th the cost of this plan. Realistically, probably ~70-80% since we might not want to build plants in earthquake prone zones. How's that for a middle ground?

derg2• 7 years ago

Good. This is the kind of total war ramp up to help attempt to save the planet that we desperately needed to do years and decades ago.

misiti37802• 7 years ago

Question: If he is dropping 650B in FF subsidies, does that mean we can assume the price for gas prices, flights etc will all go up respectively ?

rileyphone2• 7 years ago

Yeah, as they should.

misiti37802• 7 years ago

it's fine for people that can afford it, i suspect a large group of people in the US cannot afford gas prices to double/triple

zaroth• 7 years ago

NYT appears to link to a scanned copy of the plan;

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1654-bernie-sanders-...

nodesocket• 7 years ago

I respect and listen to Bernie even though I have very different ideologies and fiscal policy. Recently he went on the Joe Rogan podcast for over an hour; it is a great source of information on his politics: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2O-iLk1G_ng

greenail3• 7 years ago

The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter.

greenail3• 7 years ago

can someone explain why I got downvoted for quoting the community guidelines?

manfredo14• 7 years ago

Some quick napkin-paper math as far as how much electricity we could generate if this $16T was spent on nuclear energy:

The levelized cost (that is, including overhead costs of plant construction) are still lower than solar. Less than solar and about the same as wind, except that nuclear isn't intermittent which eliminates the need for energy storage. At $120 per megawatt hour, this $16 trillion could be used to generate 128000 terawatt hours of electricity [1].

Let's put this in more concrete examples. The total us electricity generation is ~1 terawatt. The Palo Verde plant generates ~4 gigawatts and cost $12 billion in 2018 dollars [3]. At this cost/capacity ratio, $16 trillion could be used to generate just over 5 terawatts. Over 5x the current capacity of the US power generation grid. What's even more impressive is that this is a one-off plant design, which is much less cost effective than serial plant production (like what the French did during the 70s and 80s) where a handful of designs are created but dozens or more plants are built using those designs.

Granted electricity isn't the only form of energy consumption, but it is a huge source of carbon production that can be replaced.

1. https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/electri...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_of_the_Unit...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_...

cma6• 7 years ago

Does that pay for the insurance liability?

manfredo14• 7 years ago

The amount that insurance will cost depends on how much we want to insure against, there's no fixed value for that. Currently each US nuclear power plant has a minimum of $375 million in insurance, as compared to total plant costs often in the several billion dollar range. If those estimates above didn't include insurance, the total cost would not increase very drastically

Contrary to popular belief nuclear power plants have historically been the safest forms of power generation. Even more so if you restrict the analysis to nuclear power plants in developed western countries, where there are zero deaths due to radiation and only a few during construction. We could take 1/5th of the 16 trillion to construct the plants and have over 12 trillion left over to insure them.

sleepysysadmin• 7 years ago

Just gave the leadership to Biden.

abeppu• 7 years ago

The article mentions that the plan doesn't include a carbon tax, and that one of Sanders' advisors says we need "more than just a carbon tax", and then gives a favorable quote from that advisor. I can understand why a carbon tax might not be _enough_ given the current state of affairs, but is there a good argument against including it in a comprehensive plan other than that people dislike the idea of new taxes?

Bernie Sanders unveils $16T 'Green new deal' plan

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