Wargan and other left-leaning critics are disappointed by the plan’s commitment to the “dogma of endless growth.” Von der Leyen, who’s politics are center-right by European standards, has called the Green Deal Europe’s new “growth strategy” and asserted that the plan will allow Europe’s GDP to continue to grow while sparing the environment from further harm. The plan’s opponents also take issue with what they see as its commitment to fiscal austerity. “What happens when you excise the ‘New Deal’ part of the Green New Deal?” David Adler, a colleague of Wargan’s, asked on the podcast TRASHFUTURE on Wednesday. “You take out the Rooseveltian premise of actually investing in Europe, investing in communities.” Adler and Wargan have criticized von der Leyen’s plan to use the European Investment Bank to “unlock” more than $1 trillion in private financing for climate investments, rather than making public investments to create public jobs. “It runs so counter to the premise of the Green New Deal as all of us understand it,” Adler said on TRASHFUTURE. “All the good shit we associate with AOC or the Labour Party or the Green Party. They’ve taken that idea and inverted it, and delivered this plan that does not stand to benefit European citizens at all.” At this point Europe’s climate plan, whatever color or shape it is, is just a proposal, and neither the policy ideas it contains nor the financing are fully fleshed out. On Thursday, 27 out of 28 E.U. leaders agreed to pursue the net-zero goal. Poland, which burns a lot of coal, opted out for now. That means the commission will start rolling out more concrete proposals next year. But the initial backlash to the plan offers a sneak peek at the inevitable tug-of-war between enacting climate policy that the left will get behind and enacting any climate policy at all.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Europe’s ‘Green Deal’ doesn’t live up to its name, critics say on Dec 13, 2019.