The Green New Deal will eliminate deaths caused by global climate change

The argument

The case rests on treating deaths from air pollution and from climate change as preventable harms with identifiable causes, and on the claim that the Green New Deal addresses both causes at their source. The current toll is the starting point. Approximately 62,000 Americans die per year due to air pollution-related causes. Researchers at the World Health Organization believe that over 150,000 people die worldwide because of climate change-related causes — deaths arriving by several distinct routes rather than one: the increased speed of spread of infectious diseases, conditions leading to malnutrition and diarrhea, and an increasing frequency of heatwaves, floods, and numerous other weather-related catastrophes. The range matters, because it shows the harm is not confined to the direct effects of heat but works through disease, food supply and disaster alike. Within the American figure, tens of thousands of those deaths are attributable to emissions caused by cars and coal-fired powerplants. That locates a large share of the problem in two specific and identifiable sources rather than in diffuse activity that no policy could target. Which is what makes the response tractable. The Green New Deal aims to expand carbon-capturing devices, thereby reducing the air pollutants that add to those deaths, while its transition from fossil fuels to clean energy addresses the same two sources at origin rather than after the fact. The second effect operates over a longer timescale. The transition from fossil fuels to clean energy will help reduce the acceleration of natural disasters and therefore lower climate-change-caused death rates, since the heatwaves, floods and disease conditions in the WHO's list are consequences of the warming that transition is designed to slow. The benefit claimed for the Deal is measured in the deaths it prevents in both categories.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Climate change is a mythical, nonexistent hoax. Deaths from air pollutants are not caused by climate change. These deaths are caused by an existing disease like lung cancer and asthma (illnesses that are often either genetic or from habits like smoking). Additionally, heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and other natural disasters are just that – natural. These tragic events happen every year, and sadly people die as a result. But these are not caused by climate change. A Green New Deal will not change these deaths.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The two figures count different things and are added together as though they did not. Air-pollution deaths are attributed largely to combustion emissions such as particulates, while the climate-attributable estimate covers a separate set of pathways including heat, flooding and infectious disease. Combining them overstates what any single policy is addressing. [Rejecting P2] The Green New Deal as introduced is a non-binding resolution setting goals; it is not an enacted programme with specified technologies, timelines or funding. What it 'would expand' is therefore a statement of intent rather than a policy whose effects can be estimated. [Rejecting P3] Reducing US emissions slows a global process to which the United States contributes a minority share, so deaths from heat, flooding and disease would fall only partially and only over decades. The domestic air-quality benefit is far more direct than the climate benefit, and the argument does not distinguish them. [Rejecting C] 'Eliminate' overstates what the premises support. At most they make a case for reducing a share of these deaths — a real benefit, but not the ending of a category of mortality.