The aff GND pushes too fast skyrocketing costs- we should focus on climate without distractions like a job guarantee that undercut effectiveness

(https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KVvvcBgETGQJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/want-a-green-new-deal-heres-a-better-one/2019/02/24/2d7e491c-36d2-11e9-af5b-b51b7ff322e9_story.html&cd=43&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us , 2-24)

IN THE climate debate, the most destructive actors are those who want to do nothing — or even, like the Trump administration, go backward. But it’s also true that good intentions are not sufficient. There are a lot of bad ideas out there. The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal. Christopher Clack, the CEO of analysis group Vibrant Clean Energy, estimates it would cost $27 trillion to get there by 2035 — a yearly price tag of about 9 percent of 2017 gross domestic product. (Total federal spending is currently a bit more than 20 percent of GDP.) Put another way, that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II. The plan’s proposal to retrofit all existing buildings is also astonishing in its implied scale, and its promise to invest in known fiascos such as high-speed rail reveal deep insensitivity to the lessons of recent government waste. At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions. As ostensible parts of a Green New Deal, they divert money and attention from the primary mission: rapidly eliminating emissions between now and midcentury. Even focusing only on that central mission, it is easy to go wrong. California created a cap-and-trade program that prices emissions in the state. But policymakers undercut the system with a variety of additional and unnecessary mandates, such as the state’s low-carbon fuel standard. Because California put an overall ceiling on its total emissions — the “cap” in “cap and trade” — the same level of emissions reduction would happen without the additional fuels standard. The standard just forces particular businesses and consumers to bear a higher burden for the same level of greenhouse-gas abatement. Then there is Germany, a country whose government has imposed extremely high electricity costs on its people in the name of emissions reduction but that still burns tremendous amounts of noxious brown coal. German energy consumers’ investment has not paid off as much as it should have, in large part because the government surrendered to anti-nuclear-power hysteria following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Germany’s nuclear power plants produced vast amounts of electricity with no carbon dioxide emissions. But instead of keeping them open as long as possible, giving the country more time to scale up renewables, Germany is shutting them early. The nation’s investments in renewable energy have gone to filling this loss of zero-carbon electricity generation, rather than to retiring coal plants. Spurning a major carbon-free energy source is an irrational indulgence that no nation can afford in the fight against global warming. Good intentions will not solve the global warming crisis. Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan. Our Green New Deal would do that.