Your Green New Deal Questions, Answered

Eighty years after U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created a raft of public-works programs to address the Great Depression, some present-day members of his political party say measures no less grand in scope are needed to address the existential threat of global warming. A band of self-described progressives in the Democratic Party, energized by the party’s successes in the 2018 congressional elections and aching to unseat Republican President Donald Trump in 2020, have put forth a wish list of government initiatives they’ve packaged as the “Green New Deal.” It’s long on ambition but short on details.

It’s a term that’s been kicked around for more than a decade among advocates of a concerted government effort to turn environmentalism into an economic engine. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, in a 2007 column, called for “a Green New Deal — one in which government’s role is not funding projects, as in the original New Deal, but seeding basic research, providing loan guarantees where needed and setting standards, taxes and incentives” to promote clean sources of energy. Democrats led by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey adopted the name for their legislative initiative to shift the U.S. away from fossil fuels and other sources of the emissions that cause global warming.