Posted on 02/29/2020 3:15:46 AM PST by Kaslin
MADISON — It’s been pretty clear that the New Green Deal would be a disaster for business and for consumers. Now a new study confirms just how disastrous the environmental/wealth redistribution plan would be for Wisconsin.
Wisconsin families would be shackled with $40,000 in new costs, and the Dairy State’s struggling agricultural sector would be crippled, according to the multi-state analysis authored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Power the Future. Will Flanders, research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, contributed to the study.
The Green New Deal — as championed by liberals such as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) and many of the Democratic presidential candidates — would cause $200 million in losses to Wisconsin farmers, while clobbering the state’s iconic dairy industry with $2.5 billion in additional costs.
CEI President Kent Lassman said the Green New Deal is not a serious proposal.
“At best, being most generous, it is simply negligent in getting its arms around the transition costs to the to the American life,” he said during a press conference at a Franklin manufacturing center. “At worst, it is political malpractice.”
The broader research looks at the Green New Deal’s impacts on 11 states. It measures additional electricity demand, costs associated with shipping and logistics, new vehicles, building retrofits, decreased crop yields, and the carbon tax on farmers.
In Wisconsin, households in the first year of implementation would face $75,000 in additional costs on the Green New Deal’s expensive ride to zero CO2 emissions within a decade. The increased costs would top $40,000 every year thereafter.
Flanders said the Green New Deal may play well in Washington, D.C., but it doesn’t cut it in get-real places like the Midwest, which rely on affordable, reliable energy. The Climate Change alarmist plan would “drive middle class families into poverty by imposing staggering annual costs,” he said.
For Green Deal-backing Democrats who have talked so much about the plight of the U.S. farmer, the sweeping CO2 reductions would be a liberal-inflicted blow on the ag industry. Wisconsin’s dairy farmers have slogged through a four-year milk price recession, protracted trade wars, anti-animal agriculture activists, and a punitive regulatory climate, said Cindy Leitner, president of the Wisconsin Dairy Alliance.
The study finds the Green New Deal would force dairy farmers to pay an additional $500 to $2,000 per cow per year in compliance costs.
“How does that translate? That means an average farmer in Wisconsin of 150 cows will pay between $75,000 and $300,000 per year in addition to what they are doing now,” Leitner said. “And if we think that we have seen a high exit of farms in Wisconsin in the past several years, this policy will close the door on any dairy surviving. It will be gone. This is very serious. This should not even be considered as a policy.”
Big Milk™ is one of the biggest employer of imported and illegal 3rd world labor. No pity...
Here in north central Florida a gallon of milk is $4.15 at Publix but only $2.33 at Walmart.
This is news? I thought getting rid of “farting cows” was a goal of the Green New Deal.
“farting cows” are to be replaced with buffalo which everyone knows do not fart.
The new green, otherwise known as the same old same old leftist nonsense, would destroy America.
Which is the real plan.
I think the American consumer is what’s killing America’s dairyland. We had two large dairy proessors enter bankruptcy last year, and that had nothing to do with the Green Nee Deal.
The American farmer has been caught in an old trade deal that held them to certain prices for their milk, and when THEIR costs went up, they couldn’t raise the prices of heir milk.
We have a ever increasing population. Dairy products are used in almost every home every day. Dairy farms are needed & AOC can go pound sand. She is crazy.
Putting any such tax on a farmer on each of his cows is insanity.
Along with many other businesses.
Don’t forget some of hte biggest factory farms are “organic.”
If we changed how milk is priced, away from fluid milk and based more on components such as protein, that might help. But the archaic prcing formula doesn’t help, either.
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