I’m reading a lot about the Green New Deal today. But after reading about it, I decided to just go and read the actual thing itself. It’s easy to be cynical about something like this by saying it has not been developed into an implementable plan or set of projects yet (even though it mentions “projects”, it doesn’t really contain any), and that would be true. It’s really a vision and goal-setting document. Getting people on board with a vision is the first step in a successful plan. It’s a hard step and it appears to have been done pretty well in a pretty short period of time.

The second step is developing an implementable plan to achieve the vision and goals. This is a harder step. Some people are comparing this to the 2008 stimulus program, but that was not a plan because it had no clearly articulated objectives or goals other than to throw a lot of money at a lot of projects that had already been defined by someone in the past according to whatever their goals were at the time. There was no time to develop a plan in that case – in fact, the projects had to be “shovel ready” meaning taking the time to plan anything was explicitly forbidden. This time, there actually is the possibility of taking the time to develop a plan. Developing a really good plan takes some time though. To do it well, you have to look at an enormous number of projects, policies, and other measures, consider them in various combinations, and pick a set of them that is reasonably technologically and economically efficient at achieving your goals, acceptable to your major stakeholders even if not their first choice, and implementable. I think some of this planning would have to be done at the local and regional level, preferably at the metro-area scale, although the states could maybe be involved in agriculture and inter-city transportation planning.

Finally, there is implementation. This is the hardest step. Complex institutions have to be created or existing ones repurposed; money has to be disbursed; contracts have to be written, awarded, and administered; job descriptions have to be written and people hired and trained and deployed; projects have to be managed; progress has to be tracked and laws have to be enforced. A critical mass of people involved at all levels has to understand and buy into those goals and how their little cog in the massive machine contributes to them. They have to make all kinds of little decisions and course corrections every day that keep the whole massive enterprise aimed at those goals.

So hard, harder, hardest. But like I said, the hard part is already done! In my career, I’ve seen groups of intelligent and well-educated people try to jump into implementing a bunch of projects without defining goals or having a plan for how they are supposed to tie together and meet the goals. I’ve also seen a brilliant vision translated into a reasonably technologically and economically workable, implementable plan, and then fail because key stakeholders were not on board, or because the people responsible for implementing the plan never understood the vision or how their little piece fit into it, so their millions of small daily decisions gradually caused the program to drift away from a path that was aimed at the goals, and there was no mechanism to bring it back to the path. But to end on a brighter note, if you come up with a brilliant vision, a brilliant plan to achieve it, and then you only implement 25% or even 10% of it, you have achieved something that never would have been achieved if you hadn’t come up with the vision and plan. And you show that it can be done and give others a chance to pick up the fight after you have moved on.

If I have time, I’ll try to tease out in another post what I think the vision and goals actually are, and how I think they could be achieved if I were somehow made emperor.