The Green New Deal will grow the United States' economy

The argument

The proposals in the Green New Deal would massively expand the economy of the United States, and the argument for this rests on where the work of the transition would have to be done. Moving from a reliance on fossil fuels toward clean energy — including capturing carbon and methane emissions to reuse for other purposes — is not a matter of switching a supply off but of building the systems that replace it, and that building is itself economic activity. Proponents estimate the transition would net two million jobs in the United States. The claim that this is achievable draws on what the sector is already doing. There are currently over ten million Americans with renewable energy jobs, and the industry adds half a million new ones annually. The significance of those figures for the argument is that they describe a trend rather than a target: the growth is happening under present policy, so the question is not whether such jobs can exist but how quickly their number rises. A sector already expanding at that rate is one that can eventually replace and outperform the economic benefits of the fossil fuel industry for the American worker, rather than merely substituting for it at the same level. That is what the policy is designed to accelerate. The Green New Deal seeks to expand the renewable energy sector and to push for more jobs with higher wages — the wage element mattering because a transition that moved workers into worse-paid employment would shrink household incomes even while raising employment totals. Taken together, more jobs in a growing sector and better pay within it are what the argument means when it concludes that the Green New Deal would help the United States' economy.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Eliminating America’s use of fossil fuels will kill jobs and hurt the American worker. In the state of Pennsylvania alone, the proposals in the Green New Deal would result in an estimated job loss that would exceed three hundred thousand, and utility bills would increase over three hundred dollars per family each month. Additionally, the investment in the Green New Deal would cost the federal government approximately 16.3 trillion dollars – moving the country deeper and deeper into the deficit. The Green New Deal hurts the American economy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The employment figures are given without a source, and the ten-million and half-a-million counts appear to describe energy-sector employment on a broad definition rather than renewable generation, leaving the premise's baseline unclear. [Rejecting P2] Jobs created are not by themselves economic growth: the relevant figure is net of the fossil-fuel employment displaced and of the programme's cost, both of which the counter puts at large numbers and neither of which the argument addresses.