THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY

No proposals for policies to be contained within the Green New Deal should be predicated on the development of new

technologies. Although some predictions, such as Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors in a microchip doubles every eighteen months, have remained extremely consistent throughout time, specific technologies have a much more erratic timeline. Half a century ago, it was almost a certainty to some that by the year 2020 humanity would have cracked open cold fusion, or that humans would have reached Mars. It may have seemed equally unlikely, by contrast, that in 2020 a toddler could discover the number of stars in the universe at the touch of a few buttons on an iphone. The development of technology is simply unpredictable, and assuming the existence of new technology when creating policy is a recipe for disaster.

Despite this, it would be remiss to not touch on how current and future technologies could impact the landscape of the Green New Deal in the upcoming decade. In recent years, rideshare services and micro-mobility have had varying levels of success.

Mobility services such as Uber and Lyft, have exploded in popularity and substantially impact the way we move between places. On one hand, these services require additional miles to be driven. Instead of moving from origin to destination as is conventional, a rideshare vehicle must first move to the origin from wherever it may be. This also results in an increase in congestion on the roads as rideshare drivers frequently circle popular locations in an effort to draw more rides. 95 On the other hand, rideshare services allow for fewer people to own their own vehicles, and lower the monetary barrier to travel in locations not thoroughly covered by public transportation routes. While public transportation is almost certainly more efficient and accessible in dense urban settings, rideshare services may have a place in the Green New Deal in less dense rural environments.

Moving past rideshare, micromobility services such as Lime and Bird, create pay-to-use networks of electric bikes, dockless bikes and electric scooters. These forms of transportation offer a solution

to help alleviate traffic congestion and provide alternatives to the standard modes of transit, but can only move at low speeds and therefore are realistically only applicable in urban settings. The main concerns posed by micro-mobility in particular, are safety and whether current infrastructure can support the massive influx in these alternative modes of transit.

Electric vehicles create a pathway towards clean transportation, but that pathway has not yet been

realized. One of the biggest motivations for the discussion of public and private transportation is the need to minimize greenhouse gas emissions. A transition to a fully electrified fleet could minimize the greenhouse gases that standard cars emit, but at the current moment, it is not as easy as advertisements may make it seem. While it is true that current-day EVs do not directly emit greenhouse gases, it is also true that the energy required to operate these vehicles still must come from somewhere. In an idealized world where all power comes from renewable sources like solar and hydro, a fleet of fully electrified vehicles would be pivotal. However, the power used to charge most EVs today still comes from oil and gas, with the only difference from conventional cars being that the greenhouse gases are released in power plants instead of on the road. Burning fossil fuels in power plants is more efficient than in small car engines, but the difference is inconsequential. The bottom line -- electricity is only as clean as the grid producing it.

Technology only has a substantial impact when it is accessible to all.

A future where every person owns an electric car, has a home with a solar roof, flies on electric jets, and cools their home with super efficient air conditioning units is a tantalizing one. It is easy to want to make the jump from a technology entering the market to it being ubiquitous, but the fact is much of this new technology is only accessible to a fraction of the population. The median retail price for all vehicles in the U.S. in 2019 was $36,600, while the median EV cost was $55,600. 96 Spending $20,000 extra for a cleaner vehicle is not a reality for most people, and while this price gap exists the transition to a fully-electrified fleet will remain a dream. The incentives discussed earlier in this proposal do help to alleviate this problem, but not nearly enough. To drive down the price of clean technology, all subsidies for dirty tech must be reallocated to the development of cheaper, cleaner technologies in order to ensure a just transition.