Friday, April 19, 2019

Annotating the Future Green New Deal

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has a video looking back from sometime in the future at the Green New Deal. You can see it here.


There's a lot here and she glosses over a lot pretty quickly. It's in the form of water colored paintings so I'll take each painting.

It opens with AOC on a the bullet train from DC to New York. She's on that, because air travel has been eliminated or drastically curtailed. The time scheme is unclear but she's older with some white streaks in her hair. I guess hair dye isn't carbon-neutral.

She reflects back on being a freshman in the "most diverse Congress ever". This begins an interesting theme - the video is supposed to represent "diversity" but it does so in a very un-diverse way. Nearly every face represented is brown. There are some blacks represented but virtually no whites or Asians.

She moves on to the Green New Deal, assuring us that we already have all the technology needed to implement it (we don't).

In 1977 a scientist made a presentation about CO2 causing warming. She seems surprised that the world didn't immediately jump of and take notice but this was one of dozens of doomsday predictions that had been going on for a decade. And yes, there were predictions of a new ice age at the same time.

She then claims that Exon-Mobile was doing research to confirm this within two years. Exon is represented by the first white man we've seen - a fat guy with an evil look on his face. Plus there's another white guy representing politicians who "knew all along and did nothing". This launches into a long-standing conspiracy theory on the left: that the oil companies knew that global warming was real and suppressed the information

Onto James Hansen's presentation to Congress in 1988. She tells us that Hansen was a top NASA scientist but fails to mention that he spent decades saying "we only have 4-5 years to save the planet". Hansen is the only white guy who doesn't look evil in the video. She tells us that Hansen was 99% certain that global warming was already happening. That's a meaningless figure since it just tells us that Hansen was certain, not that he was right.

Back to Exon and how terrible they are. She doubles down on the conspiracy theory that Exon is behind any doubt about global warming.

She talks about the time lost because of the evil Exon and the animals that have gone extinct. The graphic shows a pair of rhinos. This is an outright lie. Rhinos aren't threatened because of global warming. They are threatened because of poachers who kill them for their horns.

She talks about the hurricane that hit "the place where her family is from, Puerto Rico". She calls the hurricane a "climate bomb" and compares it to 9/11. Technically, her family isn't exactly from Puerto Rico. She's decided from Spanish who colonized the island before moving to New York. The damage the hurricane caused was because the country's electrical system was already failing because of governmental corruption. The estimated death toll used highly questionable methodology.

And she threw out the "12 years to cut emissions in half" warning. That's just the latest in three decades of "act now or else" predictions. They are not based on science, they are propaganda. If these predictions were based on science then we'd have been past the tipping point years ago. But, AOC is young and hasn't learned to be skeptical. Instead she's calling on us to change EVERYTHING.

Now we hit the meat of the video. Socialism. The economy's broken, too much money goes to the people at the top. The Great Depression! World War Two (with Rosie the Riveter as a black woman).

Then she moves on to her future history with the Democrats taking the Senate and the White House in 2020 and launching the "Decade of the Green New Deal" which includes Medicare for All and nationalization of wages.  Look, even if the Democrats gain complete control of Congress and the White House, the rest just isn't going to happen.

According to AOC, the biggest problem at the beginning was that there was a labor shortage. This is a nod to illegal immigration. We need to import all the workers we can get to rebuild everything.

Then she personalizes it with a girl from AOC's old neighborhood, Iliana (I may have gotten the spelling wrong). Iliana's first job after graduating from college (at government expense?) is to restore wetlands in Louisiana. They are shown planting mangroves and removing pipelines BY HAND. No polluting earth movers here. This answers why there's a labor shortage.It takes a lot of people to replace machines. By the way, they had to get "generational knowledge" from native Americans on how to plant mangroves and remove pipelines.

Ileana soon realizes that digging by hand in Louisiana is hellish work and moves on to being a solar plant engineer before getting a job at a child care center. Since everyone seems to get the same wages no matter what the work, there was probably a waiting list years long to get one of those easy child care jobs. We never do get a hint of what Ileana's degree is in.

But not everything is perfect and Hurricane Sheldon put parts of Miami underwater "for the last time". That's not how hurricanes work. They cause a storm surge which recedes.

There were still hurricanes and droughts and other problems but making universal health care and government jobs a human right made everything just swell.

Eventually Ileana runs for Congress and wins AOC's seat in a publicly funded election. I'm not sure how digging in the swamps or minding kids qualifies you for Congress but if they let a waitress in, I guess they'll let anyone in.

AOC closes by thinking back to riding the old school Amtrak train in 2019. This is another lie. It implies that she used the train to travel between DC and NYC but she always takes the plane.

So that's AOC's vision for the future - a socialist paradise where everyone has brown skin, college graduates go on to dig in the swamps, and everyone seems to work for the government. It's framed as a kids story so all of the hard stuff is glossed over and everyone lives happily everafter.
























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