Supporters of the Green New Deal are launching a nationwide tour Thursday to build support for the congressional resolution to transform the U.S. economy through funding renewable energy while ending U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Democracy Now! spoke with Noam Chomsky about the Green New Deal and the lessons of the old New Deal in Boston last week.
TRANSCRIPT:
Amy Goodman: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. We end today’s show with the world-renowned linguist, political dissident Noam Chomsky. I spoke to him last week at the Old South Church in Boston. In a moment, we’ll hear Noam Chomsky talk about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and what the Mueller report found and didn’t find, which is being released today. But first, I asked Noam Chomsky to talk about the Green New Deal and the lessons of the old New Deal.
Noam Chomsky: First of all, I think the Green New Deal is exactly the right idea. You can raise questions about the specific form in which Ocasio-Cortez and Markey introduced it: Maybe it shouldn’t be exactly this way; it should be a little bit differently. But the general idea is quite right. And there’s very solid work explaining, developing in detail, exactly how it could work. So, a very fine economist at UMass Amherst, Robert Pollin, has written extensively on, in extensive detail, with close analysis of how you could implement policies of this kind in a very effective way, which would actually make a better society. It wouldn’t be that you’d lose from it; you’d gain from it. The costs of renewable energy are declining very sharply. If you eliminate the massive subsidies that are given to fossil fuels, they probably already surpass them. There are many means that can be implemented and carried out to overcome, certainly to mitigate, maybe to overcome, this serious crisis. So the basic idea is, I think, completely defensible—in fact, essential. A lot of the media commentary ridiculing this and that aspect…