As progressives have coalesced around the Green New Deal, its proponents say that its ambitious targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions would, if adopted, protect the Earth from catastrophic global warming.
An article in the Nation called the Green New Deal “our best hope for saving the planet,” because it would “confront climate change on the scale that this crisis demands.” Some present averting climate disaster as a kind of national race against a foreign enemy, like a Manhattan Project for the whole economy.
“In the 1960s, the U.S. pointed the full power of its military-technological industry at going to the moon,” wrote the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer.