Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made her first campaign stop in Michigan on Tuesday, and launched a shocking $2 trillion “infrastructure investment” plan designed to address the burgeoning problem of climate change, which Warren claims is a bigger threat to the American way of life than the enemies the Allied Forces faced in World War II.
Speaking to the job training organization Focus:Hope just days before the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion, which turned the tide against Nazi German in western Europe, Warren claimed that the “climate crisis in this country, a threat to the very existence of every living thing on this planet,” requires that Americans need to be “all in” on battling it, according to The Detroit News.
She added that the “climate crisis” may, in fact, be a bigger threat to democracy and freedom than Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan.
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But if she believes “climate change” must be approached with a “total war” mentality, Warren’s plan doesn’t seem to address the issue with all that much urgency. Instead of, say, playing hardball with the globe’s major polluters like China, India, and industrialized southeast Asia, Warren’s $1.7 trillion “climate plan” is mostly subsidies for alternative energy companies — subsidies she claims will be “paid for” by cutting tax breaks for corporations like Amazon (even though Amazon claims to be a national leader in sustainable business practices).
Under Warren’s plan, Gizmodo explains, federal government subsidies would be given to companies that embrace “green manufacturing,” though she doesn’t really define the term. In a separate blog post on her campaign website, Warren writes about a “Green Apollo Program, Green Industrial Mobilization, and a Green Marshall Plan,” all of which, presumably, will be part of her “Green Project Overlord,” to steal a D-Day term.
The Green Apollo Program would pump government money into research and development of alternative energy sources (even though that’s already going on in the private sector). The Green Industrial Mobilization pushes companies to produce only sustainable and environmentally friendly products. The Green Marshall Plan would limit imports and exports to those products that comply with similar sustainability standards.
The only similarities between the initial projects and Warren’s new “green” projects is that they spend copious amounts of taxpayer cash. Unlike the original Apollo program and Marshall plan, Warren’s “green” version isn’t likely to demonstrate immediate, marked results.
Plus, there’s already a snag: Warren’s corporate tax hike is already supposed to pay for things like free college, and it’s not clear whether her new $2 trillion climate plan will come out of that same fund or whether she’ll soak American industry a second time for her environmental program.
Of course, Warren isn’t the first leftist to compare the battle to save planet Earth to the fight against the creeping problem of fascism. Everyone from The Guardian’s op-ed team to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has made the connection though, like Warren, their ultimate approach to the issue of environmental degredation seems to stop short of any real “total war” mentality — certainly neither Warren nor AOC is storming the beaches of Indonesia to put a halt to carbon-spewing early industrialization there.