Guess was basing her thing on f d r Franklin Delano roosevelt and his new deal so the Green New Deal is supposed to be a jobs program and a Climate Change deal we have with us James Howard Kunstler and randy volar jim now tell us what you think of a Green New Deal is it a great jobs program is it a bad jobs program is it a good reason to have a deal its when you wish upon the star program because you know weve entered a kind of period in our history which is a era of Wishful Thinking and i think the truth of the matter is unfortunately were not going to run while disney world the u. S. Military suburbia the interstate highway system. And our great metroplex cities on any combination of all to fuel and all to energy and im afraid its going to come as a is a big disappointment to the American Public the main reason for that is you really cant fabricates. The equipment for all these things and service them and maintain them without an underlying fossil fuel economy platform for that to happen under and unfortunately this is the country has not figured that out including a lot of pretty intelligent people and people with good intentions you know wed love to keep running our stuff the way were running it now by other means its just really unlikely to happen you know this combines 2 things that are really shouldnt be combined one is Climate Change denial the green part and one is that governments can possibly do anything positive the new deal part so these are 2 areas that the predominant Political Forces like to tell us are socialist or theyre impossible or we dont have the money for them so all the branding on this is horrible is there a way to present this that would be more palatable because clearly infrastructure needs to be upgraded that thats something that i need to do somebody needs to do it but and its crumbling how is that going to happen and clearly with Sea Levels Rising and with asif occasion of the oceans and with all the other problems that come with the toxicity of industrialization there is a problem in the climate how to brand this in a better way maybe why do you think branding it is a Green New Deal is a bad idea the new deal was a vast a successful idea and one of the problems i think that weve had in america is not having aspirational programs that we had in the past that actually moved the needle we had the new frontier thats what j. F. K. Around on we had the Great Society i think for the last 40 years weve had the raw deal isnt it time to have a better deal whether you call it the Green New Deal or whatever you do isnt it time that we aspire to doing something to fix these problems or the front new frontier was had a great like man landing on the moon and. Appeal to the infantile ization of the population in a great way kid little boys want to land on the moon. And how do you get you know the infantilization which is the name population in america to agree that cleaning up to room and eating broccoli is a good idea in us not the oprah for cation of the economy how do you brand it make it appealing to those hordes of millions that go see superheroes every weekend at the box office you know you have to appeal to this kind of inner teen angst to get anything done in america if you should be the avenging new deal but look the point is my friend here was talking about whether this can actually be done and youre getting to the energy issue i mean one of the challenges when youre dealing with solo with photovoltaics or youre dealing with wind power is how do you store the excess energy well Battery Storage is in development and that is improving and you know and i would posit like in states like North Carolina when they studied the amount of excess energy you can get from wind if you could use it in an industrial process for instance you started you put a windmill and you started making batteries and you you split water and took your hydrogen over here and your actions over there you could use that to provide the energy of a manufacturing plant that created jobs and you were trying to make batteries by you know splitting water i mean just an idea but there are things you could do with this excess power in the interim that are job creating well my sense of all this is that there are a lot of technological stunts that you can run and a lot of science projects that you can accomplish successfully that simply dont scale for our way of life the general belief out there for example is that because were running suburbia and so many people live in it we have to find some way to continue to run it and mitigate all the problems with with it by running it differently and then the the proposed solutions do your are that were going to everybodys going to drive electric cars were going to change out the internal combustion. Fleet for an electric fleet i think that thats another thing that people are going to be very disappointed about is that there are all kinds of weird currents that are running in the background of this set of problems in predicaments that we face for example the the motoring system in america is probably not going to fail on the basis of the fuel issue how you power the vehicles whats really happening is because the Financial System is in such distress there are fewer and fewer people who are capable of buying cars the way americans are used to buying them on installment loans and making payments on them every every month and weve been to every possible method we can to allow them to continue to do that like 7 year loans for used cars a parallel proposal is that will have this driverless car fleet of vehicles that operate like taxicabs and there will be there for that that many fewer vehicles to run the problem is that the way the car industry is scaled they have to sell about 17000000 cars a year in order to maintain their Business Model they cant just sell 3000 cars a year or you know a 1000005 cars a year so there are many hidden problems in this whole matrix of of green energy predicaments in terms of this green energy of course barack obama held himself as making america the greatest Energy Producer in the world as a result of fracking in particular natural gas natural gas by many on the left and the democrats hail as a great you know green energy when in fact the new data shows that indeed all of the Global Warming the massive excel aeration of the last 3 years is due to the methane from fracking so that has increased the output lets you know where that is whats more the whole fracking interest. 3 has really amounted to a financial stunt yes providing a lot of 0 interest loans and very ultra low interest loans to the Fracking Companies who have spent the last 10 years demonstrating that they cant make a red cent fracking oil yes but it did create some great jobs very high paying jobs and yes also in a very impressive rise in Oil Production but for a very brief amount of time even Something Like the economist just had a headline saying we dont actually know about fracking we dont know what its doing and this is 10 years after it happened so we dont know the consequences we dont know about the radioactive waste involved and we dont know about what its doing to our water supply we dont know those things thats from saying with the Green New Deal is there a chance that they could just be running into a similar thing possibly but the move toward natural gas was in part about air quality and this whole issue was about coal and coal fired plants and other Legacy Industries and so they were saying ok how can we improve the air quality and have a clean burning gas thats thats abundant and cheap and to into his point there are saying were going to fuel an electric fleet with that well the problem with fuel in the lecture fleet of course as we pay for highways by the gas tax we dont pay by vehicle miles traveled so consequently in states that you get an uptick or if youve got a lot of electric vehicles you would start getting declining revenues to pay for fixing these highways so jims right and youre right theres a lot of other unintended circumstances of making these moves but when they made these moves they thought they were moving to something that was more environmentally sound but there were a lot of us who had seen gas land in its infancy and read up on hydraulic fracturing and warned that its not something thats proven yes it could actually help us in the interim but there are unintended circumstances expression with the methane right but as i also understand from the very beginning that this was a net cash flow negative industry that can never be cash flow positive. And it reminds me so much of the other part of the economy like the gig economy that goes public on wall street whether its in a bar or these other big economies that are just burning money all the time and they never have any hope of making any profits it seems to your point on the scaling issue if the basic underlying assumption is that nobody will ever make money ever that you can always borrow money for 0 or less than 0 and its just about getting an incremental quarterly gain how can you do Something Like infrastructure that needs you to look out 51015 years into the future and eisenhowers interstate Highway Program took some you know looked at the big map created the big highways you know that was a big project for strategic reasons for a lot of Different Reasons but so if no one can look out and make those types of decisions and theyre only look at quarter to quarter point can you ever ever get to the point where youre going to have an infrastructure no matter how your brand is green or a new dale or what have you if youre just looking for quarterly profits there are a number of additional thinking problems that attend this whole discussion notice for example that in our discussion about how were going to mitigate suburbia you know with our petroleum quandary theres almost no discussion at all about walkable communities in walkable cities and the reason for that is simply that americans are not interested in that and the reason theyre not interested is because of what i call the psychology of previous investments the idea that weve sunk so much of our National Wealth into this living arrangement with no future that we cant imagine letting go of it or even reforming it substantially and so you know the the one thing that we could do probably just to reduce the the general larger problem of too much mass motoring and burning of gasoline and diesel fuel would be. Places to live that people could walk around in or. You know take Public Transit in or a combination of both of those and in fact in point of fact the places where those exist in the world like the the city many of the cities and towns of europe are the places that are the most rewarding and psychologically pleasurable places to live in the world and yet americans refuse to think about making those kinds of changes which they get a lot more bang out of than they would from all of this fantasizing about. Green energy right lets take a quick break and is the grain adeles that our nic anomic problem or is it a mass psychological problem much mark coming away on front running. Time after time called parisian to repeat the same mantra sustainability very important. Transition to sustainable prize board sustainability spain overmanned a more equitable and sustainable world. They claim their production is completely harmless. It. Companies want us to feel good about buying their products while the damage is being done far away and this is something ill just keep going dont even and i mean look. This is the mood stimulus and we didnt. Seem to me understood so when in. My hear the news in my day im not one. Of them saddam. Was of a time about what it was it was a bit and i was in a sense as if im up as a moron about. What women are putting aside the fulfillment. Scene that im going to fit in but im before. Them but i. Give up and now im body im not move on. Welcome back to front running 2020 you know stacey in the 1st half on the screen new deal we were talking mostly about the green you know but then theres the new deal and that implies jobs and war and we go from there well jim consol i want to turn to you because you ended on the last half saying that we have this psychological commitment to our prior investments and thats why we have the suburbia but many studies have shown that the new millennial is the generation z. Who made brooklyn a livable place theyve turned this into a livable Thriving Community and so they do like to live in livable places but how do you turn that into a huge jobs program because this is what they want they want to Shovel Ready Projects the question for the millennium really for all of us is what are the assumptions were making about the structure of what work is going to be and what Economic Activity is going to be and right now i think the assumption is well well just continue to have these lower this large corporate matrix of giant companies that you know provide enormous amounts of just for people i think what were going to see really happen in what will be a long range contraction of Economic Activity will be the real localization and the downscaling of of Economic Activity and what we really need are not so much jobs but vocations and Economic Needs is for people to apply that also come with a social role in their community and this was in fact the kind of country that we were pretty much before 950 you know that was the that this is the country that we were from the Jimmy Stewart movies of its a wonderful life you know where people had a role in their community and they had an economic place in their community and the place listen this of. Birbiglia is very much like the place listen this of people who have no place in this country and in their community because there is no community for them to be and you can see a lot of this behavior for example in the rise of the chain store world of the 19 eighties nineties and present time in which we eliminated all of the local business in america and we forget that those people who ran businesses in small town america and the cities of america they employed people in their community they had a vested interest in the success of their community a lot of the money stayed in their community they supported the civic life of the community they pay supported the Little League teams they sat on the hospital boards they set on the Library Boards and none of this happens with the k. Marts the walmarts the in numerable chain store operations of america that is not only does it have to change you can bet that its going to change but what about the jobs because where you live in upstate new york east have mills paper Mills Clothing mills you had all sorts of jobs there and then those sort of communities those local communities developed around that now we just have finance capitalism or we have hollywood or Silicon Valley so of course new york city is getting a huge infrastructure spend with that building up the seawall along there to prevent flooding in the future but is it does it have to be a more local mayor state level thing or can the federal government can a Green New Deal can i say in ed markey new deal help across america i think the assumption that the federal government is going to continue to be a competent and effectual Management System for this part of north america may be assuming too much i would say that the trend head is because were going to have to reload and were going to have to go down the hierarchy of governance that the federal government is we could expect it to become 0. Only more ineffectual more impotent and more incompetence on the side there. The local is ation has become completely toxic if you look at like los angeles or San Francisco or the reintroduction of medieval diseases where you have these encampments on the street where the tech giants and the hollywood giants theres a cognitive dissonance going on right there in their backyards is a devolving degrading collapsing economy and a country that they dont seem to think there have any role in having created that mess so we cant even go back to localization because were going back to the middle ages when we yeah well we can go back to it but but my guess is that were going to be dragged kicking and screaming back to it not because we want to go there or have an organized plan to go there i think the key to understanding where were at in this country is that we cannot construct a coherent consensus about whats happening to us and therefore we cant construct a coherent plan for what to do about it yeah i think thats an excellent point actually its like we cant really describe whats going on whats happening what what what are the elements that are contributing to this and the discussion seems to be relying on the tropes and the talking points from 20 years ago 30 years ago but so much is happening and a lot of those troops are dedicated to a program magic destruction of the common good and the sense of a common culture and a common purpose i mean as far as im concerned and you know i remain a registered democrat as strange as that seems but but you know the Democratic Party is all but destroyed the idea of a common culture and common purpose in america with their program of multiculturalism which is really at all odds with the idea of a common culture randy you w