The Green Leap Forward, but unironically

If the right wants to argue that the Green New Deal is destined to fail, they shouldn’t invite comparisons with China

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez released an outline of her proposal for a Green New Deal earlier this year, it became the subject of widespread derision from the right. A chorus of pundits dubbed her plan to address global warming the “Green Leap Forward,” likening it to the disastrous Maoist program that caused a deadly famine by redirecting farmers to smelt useless pig-iron in backyard furnaces. It’s curious that conservatives go all the way back to the late 1950s to find a comparison for what Ocasio-Cortez and others hope to achieve when there is a more analogous example of a government-led initiative in China’s recent history.

For more than a decade now, China has pursued its own version of the Green New Deal, and the results have been impressive. The country did an about-face after years of prioritizing the economy over the environment. From the mid-2000s onward, each of China’s economic policy documents known as “five-year plans” has set and met increasingly ambitious targets for emissions reductions.

The country plows vast amounts of funding into renewable energy, outspending the United States by a ratio of 3-to-1. In 2017, its investment in green power sources nearly doubled that of the next four countries combined. Renewable energy now accounts for roughly one-fourth of China’s total power generation, and the country looks to be on track to meet its commitments under the Paris agreement 12 years ahead of schedule.

The Chinese government has intervened in its economy in ways that eclipse even the wildest conservative fever dreams about what Ocasio-Cortez has planned, and it’s no worse off for it. In 2010, the country shuttered 2,000 plants across 18 industries and it has carried out several similar actions in the intervening years, including massively downsizing the coal sector. For that entire time, the nation’s economy has grown steadily by around 7 percent annually despite a global recession that seldom saw American GDP growth top 3 percent. China is now poised to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy even sooner than previously predicted.