Apparently, the inmates have taken over the asylum, led by the former barmaid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now a member of Congress. The Green New Deal is a bizarre plan to create a cultural revolution in the United States. The role of Mao’s little red book is replaced by the musings of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After the green revolution, happiness will reign throughout the land.

Ms. Ocasio can’t even make a credible threat to our economic well-being. According to the Green New Deal, if we don’t prevent global warming, we will lose $500 billion of annual economic output by 2100. The current GDP of the U.S. is $20 trillion. Assuming modest real growth of one percent per year, GDP will be $44 trillion (in current dollars) by 2100. Losing $500 billion or 1.1 percent of 2100 economic output is clearly minor and would be made up by 2101. The Green New Deal advocates instantly destroy their own argument with their own numbers.

We are told that the United States must adopt a leading role in reducing CO2 emissions because we are responsible for 20% of cumulative emissions. Referring to cumulative rather than current emissions is sleight of hand. The U.S. is responsible for about 14% of CO2 emissions and these have been declining due to increased use of carbon-light natural gas. The rest of the world is responsible for 86% of the emissions and the rest of the world is not adopting a Green New Deal. The words “China” or “Asia” don’t appear in the text of the Green New Deal. If we are to be serious about reducing CO2 emissions, isn’t it necessary to discuss the source of the vast majority of those emissions?

The reports of the IPCC and of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) are political documents masquerading as scientific studies. These organizations produce fantasy reports that illustrate the computer rule of garbage in, garbage out. The organizations have been discredited by dozens of books, and many reports from disaffected scientists. But the political utility of the doomsday predictions is so great that the political left proclaims that the doomsday predictions are "settled science." Marx and Engels called their evil theories scientific socialism in order to borrow the prestige of science. If you need evidence that the IPCC is a fraud, you only have to know that it received the Nobel Peace Prize. The Peace Prize promotes leftist ideology by borrowing the scientific prestige associated with the separate Nobel prizes given for science. The Peace Prize has often been given to frauds and fashionable tricksters.

My favorite IPCC story is the career of Rajendra Pachauri, a railroad engineer who headed the IPCC for many years. Mr. Pachauri wrote the soft-porn book Return to Almora. The protagonist in that book bears an uncanny resemblance to Rajendra Pachauri. As the head of an Indian nonprofit, the 70-something senior citizen terrorized young woman who worked for him. But can’t one be a sexual predator and a good head of an international organization at the same time?

The Green New Deal mostly has nothing to do with climate change. The program has a strong resemblance to the Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens found in the 1936 Constitution of the Soviet Union (the “Stalin” constitution).

The Green New Deal guarantees high-quality health care, maternity leave, annual vacations, free education, the right to organize trade unions, healthy food, and affordable housing. It is proposed that frontline and vulnerable communities will have special privileges and vanguard roles. Frontline and vulnerable communities seem to include everyone except white men. Although for inexplicable reasons they neglected to include LGBTQs as members of frontline and vulnerable communities.

There was an earlier version of the Green New Deal that was cleaned up to remove the less politically palatable items. The earlier version included money for "persons unwilling to work." That version explicitly denounced nuclear energy. It also proposed printing money to pay the expenses of implementing the Green New Deal. The socialist vanguard country Venezuela also prints money. It enjoys 80,000% annual inflation and thieves that employ the kill first, steal second operating philosophy. Soldiers avoid public places after dark because thieves steal their weapons. Venezuelans have lost an average of 24 pounds due to either healthy socialist lifestyles or food shortages.

Trying to operate the electric grid of the United States on wind and solar power is simply ignorant. Wind and solar are erratic sources of power and have to be backed up by conventional plants that take over when the wind or solar is on standby. Those backup plants as a practical matter use fossil fuels, the more so if nuclear is ruled out. Further, it is extremely impracticable to get more than about 30% of the grid’s electricity from wind or solar. Conventional plants have to be online to take over when the wind or solar stops. Batteries are not a solution because they are unbelievably expensive for the role of backing wind and solar. The reality is that nuclear is the only feasible source of carbon free power in large and reliable quantities.

In any case, the global warming crisis is manufactured and overblown. The name of the crisis was changed from global warming to climate change because the globe was not warming according to the predictions. But it is clear that the real motive for the Green New Deal is the installation of socialism, not protection against an imaginary climate crisis. Environmentalists are called watermelons because they are green on the outside and red on the inside.

The Green New Deal is propped up by fake science and fake statistics. The fake statistics paint a picture of an imaginary wonderful time that ended sometime in the 1960s when workers all had great union jobs and wonderful pensions. I was a worker in the 50s and thereafter. The idea that everything was better back then is nonsense. We are in a golden time of great prosperity and opportunity. Trump has made it even better by deregulation, lower taxes, and protection from predatory imports. Socialism has been tried again and again and always with disastrous results. The European countries often held up as successful implementations of socialism are not socialist countries. Real socialism is always a disaster. But those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

Although we live in a golden age of prosperity and opportunity, we also live in an age of ignorance. Ms. Ocasio has a college degree in economics but is apparently a sucker for socialistic ideas that were already thoroughly discredited by 1950. Think of George Orwell’s books 1984 and Animal Farm, and the seminal critique of socialism The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek.  Somehow socialism always turns cruel and brutal. There is no better recounting than the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. But facts and history are less important than the feeling of being ignored suffered by so many intellectuals and academics. Those intellectuals and academics fill the void in their lives with leftist religion.

Norman Rogers is the author of the book: Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.