Alex Epstein’s What’s the Deal With the Green New Deal?

Whenever I listen to Alex Epstein, I am mesmerized by his clarity, his cool, and his precise choice of words. Nothing is superfluous, and his message is powerful and thought provoking.

His short new video for PragerU, What’s the Deal With the Green New Deal?, is no different. It is a treasure trove of information, delivers an illuminating message, and will serve as a wake-up call to many.

Epstein starts by relaying the narrative of the Green New Deal’s (GND) proponents: “We have twelve short years to change everything or it’s game over.” If we don’t act to stop “catastrophic” climate change now, they say, it will result in irreversible damage to our planet and monstrous death tolls. They argue that we must give the government absolute power to prohibit “the use of fossil fuel energy and impose 100 percent renewable energy.” Likewise, we need to give “government control . . . of major users of energy, such as the transportation industry, manufacturing, and agriculture.” All of this by force.

As Epstein points out, those demanding that we “change everything” repeatedly have been egregiously wrong in their predictions of climate-related catastrophes. In 1989 the United Nations predicted that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. We’re now two decades past 2000, we’re not missing any nations, and human beings are living longer, healthier, and wealthier lives than ever before.”

Epstein reports that 80 percent of the energy we use to power our modern world comes from fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. “Only 3.4 percent comes from solar and wind—despite decades of government subsidies and mandates to encourage their use.”

Epstein makes it clear:

Fossil fuel energy has not taken a naturally safe climate and made it unnaturally dangerous; it’s taken our naturally dangerous climate and made it unnaturally safe. Fossil fuels are not an existential threat. They are an existential resource because they increase something much more important than the level of CO₂ in the atmosphere: the level of human empowerment.

Epstein’s video elucidates the complex issues surrounding what to do about the GND. “By opposing every affordable, abundant, reliable form of energy,” he concludes, “the Green New Deal won’t protect us from an existential threat; it is an existential threat.”

What’s the Deal With the Green New Deal? already has been viewed more than 2.4 million times, which is encouraging. But ten times that would be better. If you want to think more clearly about this issue and help others do so, check out Alex’s video and share it with your friends.

If you want to think more clearly about the Green New Deal and help others do so, check out Alex Epstein’s “What’s the Deal With the Green New Deal?” and share it with your friends.
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