Shades of Green - Pt. 1
Jill Stein and the Green Party's energy, environmental and economic policy haunted house.
“Why struggle to discover the world if you can make it become whatever you wish--by wishing?” - Ayn Rand
On the night of the 2000 U.S. Presidential election, the results were too close to call and hinged on the outcome in the state of Florida. The initial vote count showed that George W. Bush’s slim margin over Al Gore required a recount under Florida law.
An anxious nation waited. For days.
A month-long series of legal battles tossed the entire affair over to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a landmark decision issued 35 days after the election, the Court ruled 5-4 that the Florida recount be stopped on the basis that different methods of counting votes in different counties violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. The controversial Bush v. Gore ruling handed a painful defeat to Al Gore. By a margin of fewer than 550 votes in Florida, George W. Bush became the 43rd POTUS, going on to serve two terms.
Al Gore was never heard from again in Presidential politics. But he would gain celebrity (almost cult-like) status as the global champion for what would become the defining issue of twenty-first century “environmentalism”: “global warming” (this was in the era before the Climate Industrial Complex coined the term “climate change”). His 2006 documentary film An Inconvenient Truth helped scare the bejeezus out of western electorates. In 2007, in conjunction with the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Gore was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on that “existential crisis.” For whatever that’s worth.
A commonly forgotten aspect of the 2000 election story is that Ralph Nader was the Green Party candidate for President when Bush defeated Gore. With his VP Winona LaDuke, Nader won ~2.7% of the popular vote. The votes he received were just enough for Democrats to accuse Nader and the Green Party of being election “spoilers” and handing victory to George W. Bush.
Could the same situation occur in 2024 with the Green Party and its candidate for President Jill Stein? Stein is on the ballot in ~44 states, is polling at around 1% (higher in a few states), and in a contest that could be as tight as the 2020 race, this has the Democrat machine in something of a panic. Stein and the Green Party have thus drawn the wrath of Democrats including “Green New Deal” author Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic National Committee, and its operatives. This is ironically funny given that the EcoLeft wing of the Democrat party would appear to be ideologically nearly perfectly aligned with the Green Party on many if not most issues.
One state Democratic Party did not find it funny at all. Instead, they viewed it as a serious threat.
Jill Stein and the Green Party are on the ballot in all of the “swing” states except for one - Nevada. And who went to court this summer arguing that the Green Party used the wrong affidavit despite having enough signatures to get their candidate on the state’s 2024 Presidential election ballot? If you guessed the Nevada Democratic Party, congratulations.
In late September, the U.S. Supreme Court left in place the Nevada Supreme Court’s ruling earlier in the month that Green Party candidate Jill Stein was not eligible to appear on the state’s Presidential ballot in November. Incredibly, an “error” by an employee in the Secretary of State’s office disqualified Stein from appearing on the ballot, despite having more than the required 10,000 signatures. The website scotusblog summarizes the snafu:
The affidavit originally submitted with the Green Party’s petition in July 2023 was the correct one. However, because the petition that the Green Party submitted contained a separate mistake, an employee in the secretary of state’s office sent the party a sample petition that included the wrong affidavit – for use with petitions to put initiatives and referenda on the ballot (not political parties). As a result, the affidavits that the Green Party later submitted with its petitions did not contain the attestation required for access to the ballot.
The episode demonstrates how badly the Nevada Democratic Party wanted to keep Stein and the Green Party off the Nevada ballot. You know, Democrats being the “defenders of democracy” and all.
Recognizing that Nevada has an outsized influence as one of the battleground aka “swing states”, the Nevada Democratic Party also unleashed its legal guns on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. back in May, when he was still a candidate for President. The Nevada Democratic Party sued RFK, Jr. and the Secretary of State to keep him off the ballot, claiming that Nevada law defines an independent candidate as one “who is registered with no political party affiliation”. At the time, Kennedy was a registered Democrat in New York.
Kennedy was on the Nevada ballot pending the outcome of the litigation, but after dropping out of the race and endorsing Trump in August, he actually missed the state’s deadline to withdraw. But the suit brought by the Nevada Democratic Party against RFK, Jr.’s campaign and the Secretary of State was resolved with the parties agreeing that Kennedy’s name would be removed from the state’s ballot.
RFK, Jr. has spent decades as a highly committed Democrat environmental activist, and just like Jill Stein, one with whom “progressive” regressive “green” Democrats should find common ideological ground. Until he was perceived as pulling votes away from Kamala Harris in a swing state like Nevada. Then, shared ideology be damned.
Whether Stein and the Green Party have any impact on the outcome on November 5th remains to be seen. But the prospect made us wonder. In terms of energy, environmental and economic policy, what are some of the defining elements of the Green Party platform? And how different are they really from some ideas put forth by the EcoLeftist wing of the Democrat party over the last decade? The similarities in many of the key areas might surprise you.
Jill Stein’s 2024 Green Party platform has three main policy focal points: People, Planet and Peace, the last of which deals largely with “Foreign Policy and Demilitarization”. On that front, independent voters who are weary of foreign conflicts and wary of the U.S. Military Industrial Complex can find common ground with Stein and the Green Party.
The “People” policies deal with economic, labor, housing “social” justice, immigration, and other social issues. Healthcare, “democracy,” and prisons and policing all feature prominently.
Stein and the Green Party’s “Planet” policies are described in three segments on the campaign website: the “real Green New Deal,” climate and energy, and agriculture and food systems.
As would be expected, “climate change” is a key theme for Stein and the Green Party platform. Its centerpiece has a special, if vaguely familiar sounding, name: The EcoSocialist Green New Deal.
While readers of environMENTAL know that we routinely refer to adherents of “green” forms of collectivism alternately as EcoStatists and EcoSocialists, we did not add the term here.
Rather, the EcoSocialist Green New Deal is the Green Party’s (very fitting) choice of words. An excerpt from the introduction makes sure the “socialist” aspect is not lost (emphasis ours):
Greens call for social ownership and democratic planning in order to make a rapid coordinated transition to 100% clean energy and zero-to-negative greenhouse gas emissions. This Green Economy Reconstruction Program will socialize key productive sectors, notably energy production, power distribution, broadband, railroads and automobiles, a greatly expanded public housing sector, and a domestic manufacturing sector to be rebuilt on an ecological basis of clean power and zero waste.
The EcoSocialist Green New Deal is a 14,500-word manifesto. (Makes our Substack posts seem like 140-character old Twitter!). Some of the core elements that jump off the page include:
Declare a climate emergency utilizing presidential powers associated with the National Emergencies Act, Defense Production Act, and the Stafford Act.
Achieve 100% clean renewable energy and zero-to-negative carbon emissions by no later than 2035.
Take the energy industry into public ownership using a democratic federated structure, with municipal and regional utilities.
Take all railroad systems into democratic public ownership, including freight, commuter, and high-speed rail.
Ban all forms of fracking, oil and gas pipelines, gas-fired power plants, mountaintop removal, and all new fossil fuel infrastructure.
Phase out nuclear power, a dirty, dangerous, expensive, and uninsurable unneeded technology, and ensure no new nuclear energy facilities are constructed.
Replace pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and large-scale industrialized factory farms with regenerative organic agroecology and subsidize the transition of farmers to organic production.
The Ecosocialist Green New Deal also includes an “Economic Bill of Rights,” with commitments to guaranteed jobs, income, housing, healthcare, education, and retirement. The cost is a modest $14.2 trillion over ten years.
The “Green Economy Reconstruction Program” is the moniker given to the newly socialized industrial sector. In order “to reach 100% clean energy and zero emissions” the ten-year cost is estimated at $27.5 trillion.
Taken together the total cost for the Ecosocialist Green New Deal comes to $42 trillion over ten years. It purports to create 38,070,000 total jobs, including 8,868,000 manufacturing jobs.
For perspective, at $4.2 trillion annually, the cost is nearly equal to the sum of all revenue collected by the U.S. federal government in 2023 ($4.44 trillion).
How would Stein and the Green Party pay for all of this? Through “progressive tax reform” and a variety of “ecological taxes.” The former involve “closing tax havens” and higher tax rates on wealth, estates, personal income, corporate income, and financial transactions. Not surprisingly, a “carbon tax” forms the backbone of the “ecological tax,” which also includes a land valuation tax, and “Federal severance taxes on non-renewable resources” (oil, gas, minerals).
No “Socialist” plan would be complete without tearing down institutions and reforming them in the Statist vision under the banner of “Democracy,” concessions to labor, and social welfare programs. Here, the EcoSocialists in the Green Party do not disappoint:
· Abolish the Electoral College and elect the president via national popular vote using ranked choice voting.
· Increase the number of Supreme Court justices from 9 to 18, with 18-year term limits staggered so that one seat opens per year.
· Lower the voting age to 16.
· Guarantee lifelong free public education for all institutions of learning, including trade schools and Pre-K through college and graduate school.
· Abolish all student debt for 43 million encumbered Americans.
· Pass a $25 minimum wage, indexed to cost inflation and productivity growth, whichever is higher, with special consideration for geographic locations where cost of living greatly exceeds other areas.
· Guaranteed Livable Income above poverty.
· Guarantee housing as a human right.
· Implement universal rent control.
· Ensure worker representation on corporate boards (co-determination) at 50%.
· Federalize workers' compensation to standardize and ensure full funding for worker’s comp.
You have to give Stein and the Green Party credit. By comparison, Kamala Harris’ campaign platform is a veritable salad spinner of vacuous pablum. Agree with them or not, Stein and the Green Party have plans that are specific, detailed, and address a broad swath of economic, social, energy, environmental, governance and other important policy areas. They are unafraid to label themselves “EcoSocialists,” and they specify plans true to their beliefs will full knowledge those policies will be highly unpopular among a large percentage of the electorate.
Of all the socially and economically destructive policies advocated by Stein and the Green Party, among the more disturbing is the idea of eliminating synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Fortunately, Sri Lanka provides a startling real-life laboratory experiment. What occurred there is a cautionary tale about the wisdom of such policies.
During his campaign in 2019, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa made a promise to transition the nation’s agricultural production to “organic” over a ten year period. In April 2021, dissatisfied with the pace, he declared the country would immediately switch to organic farming, banning synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Within a year, the country’s rice crop failed and citizens and farmers rebelled. By July 2022, Rajapaksa had to be rescued by the military and placed on a Navy vessel in Sri Lankan waters when an “organic” mass of protesters stormed his palace.
Podcaster Andrew Heaton had the best take on the Green Party’s platform. Heaton’s podcast, The Political Orphanage, caters to independents and voters who have become disillusioned by the two-party system. While reading the Green Party’s plan on his October 16 episode during Third Party Candidate Week, Heaton (who we would describe as a liberal-leaning Independent) had to pause before he could finish to say the following:
“I don’t think I’ve ever said this on the program before, about 5 years old now…. if these people ever somehow actually got ahold of power, millions of people would literally starve to death and the rest of the country would wallow in abject poverty and misery.”
We surmise the majority of the American electorate would be opposed to these policies (if they knew about them in the first place). Many would think they are patently absurd.
But how different are some of the Green Party’s key policies from those espoused – for years - by the EcoSocialist wing of the Democratic party? On closer inspection, the answer might surprise you.
In Part 2 of this series, we highlight similarities between Stein’s Green Party and the energy, environmental and economic policies of U.S. Democrats.
“Like” this post or be forced to sit in a folding metal chair and read the EcoSocialist Green New Deal for 24 hours.
Leave us a comment. We read them all. They put gas in the tank.
Subscribe to environMENTAL for free below.
“Share” this post. It helps us grow. We’re grateful for the support.
my condolences for deciding to actually read the Green Party platform, but thank you for your sacrifice so the rest of us don't have to. In sum, it showed a remarkable breadth of their complete lack of understanding of either science or economics, let alone human behavioral traits.
The greens say the quiet thing out loud.