The Left’s Climate Playbook Is Already Outdated

In the United States, the philosophy behind many of the most important progressive climate proposals of the past few years—such as the Green New Deal and Joe Biden’s climate plan—was premised on three ideas. Each was rooted in a diagnosis of the 2010s economy—and each, unfortunately, is looking more and more out of date.

First, each plan almost universally assumed that the American economy remained bruised from the Great Recession. Climate policy could succeed by providing stimulus to the economy and creating jobs, just as the New Deal had done in the 1930s. Climate advocates, among the most forceful supporters of this philosophy, assumed that the economy’s real constraints—the cost of buying raw materials or hiring workers for any large project (public or