During the September 29 presidential debate, Democratic candidate Joe Biden asserted that he does not “support the Green New Deal.” It “is not my plan.” Instead, he supports “the Biden Plan, which is different.”

Put aside Biden’s silly claim that the Green New Deal “will pay for itself,” and ignore the fact that the Biden Plan states explicitly that “Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.” What is much more central is the overriding policy objective of the Biden proposal: net-zero U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) “no later than 2050.” That policy goal is indistinguishable from those promoted by the several versions of the Green New Deal that have been proposed by various coalitions and organizations: All of them call for net-zero U.S. emissions of GHG by some year not very distant in time, typically between 2030 and 2050.

And so whether Biden prefers to call his plan a “Green New Deal” or the “Biden Plan for a Clean Energy Revo­lution and Environmental Justice” or anything else is utterly irrelevant. The net-zero goal inexorably drives the specific policies to be pursued, which cannot be anything other than a series of transformations — radical, massively expensive, and profoundly coercive. Transfor­mation of the technological features of the U.S. power-generation system. Transforma­tion of the technological features of the U.S. light-, medium-, and heavy-vehicle fleets. Transformation of the insulation and weatherization characteristics of tens of millions of industrial, commercial, and residential structures. Transformation of U.S. society by forcing much of the U.S. population into multi-unit housing in urban cores dependent upon public-transport systems. Trans­for­ma­tion of U.S. agricultural practices. Transforma­tion of the U.S. energy sector, substituting expensive and environmentally destructive fuels in place of conventional ones. And on and on.

Such are the necessary components of every net-zero proposal to address the purported climate “crisis,” whether labeled “Green New Deal” or not, and the Biden Plan is no exception. Accordingly, Biden can pretend that the Green New Deal “is not my plan,” but in reality it is: The likelihood is zero, literally, that a President Biden would veto Green New Deal legislation emerging from a Con­gress controlled by the Democratic Party.

The interesting question is whether such a Congress would pass such legislation. The proponents are not joking when they tell us that a net-zero Green New Deal policy is intended massively to transform America both economically and socially. Alas, central planners fancy themselves vastly smarter than they are, in part be­cause they assume that they possess information and incentives superior to those inherent in decentralized markets. Such self-delusion means that there will be no end to the dark and hugely adverse consequences attendant upon so radical a policy framework, whether intended or not, and those prospective results will elicit vociferous political opposition driven by both economic and ideological imperatives. This means that enactment of such legislation would require elimination of the 60-vote re­quirement in a Democratic Senate, an outcome less likely than often asserted. But let us assume that, in January of next year, there is a President Biden, a Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and a Senate operating under a simple-majority rule, with Chuck Schumer as majority leader.

It is easy to envision enactment of a bill mandating net-zero U.S. GHG emissions by 2050, with the details to be left to unspecified pieces of legislation to follow at some unknown dates. But that path will not satisfy the Democratic Party Left, and specifically the left-wing environmental groups. For them, a detailed and comprehensive net-zero bill is an absolute sine qua non for satisfaction of their ideological opposition to fossil fuels. That this opposition is fundamentally antihuman is not an accident. Schumer in particular, with his eye on 2022 and a potential primary challenge from the party’s left wing, will strive mightily to move a bill that will protect him from any such political attacks. Pelosi will find no reason in principle to object; it is unclear whether she will allow those members of her caucus who need to oppose it to do so. Accordingly, there will be a Herculean effort to produce a massive omnibus-type bill, the details and implications of which will be understood by few, but which will enact broad policy pathways under explicit time deadlines, to be implemented by the regulatory agencies.

And it is precisely at that point — the construction of specific, broad legislative provisions — where large political problems will emerge. “Climate policy” in its essentials is an attempt to impose a huge increase in the cost of energy, a heavy political lift for any group of politicians facing real competition. Congress generally and the Senate in particular are different from such one-party states as California, where a vote in the legislature for preposterous energy policies carries no political penalty. Was there any other basic reason that the Obama-Biden Climate Action Plan (CAP) involved virtually no legislation at all? No such legislative proposals had any chance of congressional enactment; instead, the CAP was a vast regulatory effort ostensibly authorized under various provisions of the Clean Air Act. Its legality was dubious, and the courts stayed implementation of central parts of it in the face of several lawsuits.

Moreover, the mandates, coercion, penalties, subsidies, and other provisions required to make something like the Green New Deal feasible even in theory imply a systematic transfer of wealth among industries, interest groups, and regions unlike anything ever observed in U.S. history. Legislation emerging from Congress is shaped by a bargaining process that we understand poorly. But it is not plausible that a determined majority will find itself able to impose such costs on its opponents without suffering large political losses in seemingly unrelated areas of the larger legislative playing field. Again: The Green New Deal in its many dimensions represents a fundamental reordering of society, which is why it is the Mother of All Goals for the political Left. Some earmarks, bridges to nowhere, water projects, grants to various local interest groups, special tax breaks, appointments of the idiot cousins of congressmen and senators to various deputy-assistant-secretary slots, and so on will prove woefully inadequate in terms of forging the requisite political coalition in support.

That is why the major proposed versions of the Green New Deal incorporate other large and expansive social-policy initiatives. Examples: “Guaranteeing universal access to clean water.” “Providing high-quality education to all people of the United States.” A “guarantee[d] job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States.” Strengthening of unionization rights, and of “labor, workplace health and safety, antidiscrimination, and wage and hour standards.” “Providing all people of the United States with high-quality health care; affordable, safe, and adequate housing; economic security; and clean water, clean air, healthy and affordable food, and access to nature.”

Put aside the irrelevance of such objectives to the climate “crisis.” The Green New Deal merely in its narrower climate dimensions is so massive as an energy policy and in its unavoidable economic and social distortions that its proponents in effect are acknowledging that it cannot stand politically without the huge, unrelated policy dimensions just noted, in­cluded as a tool with which to forge the needed political coalition. Just how realistic would such a gargantuan contraption prove politically? It is not unreasonable to predict that the whole political exercise would collapse of its own weight.

The adverse economic effects of a net-zero policy, even in its narrower dimension, would be huge, emerging sooner rather than later, and carrying with them serious political impacts. My estimate of the direct cost of only the electricity component of the Green New Deal is about a half trillion dollars per year, or about $4,000 annually per U.S. household, and that is based on a set of highly conservative assumptions.

Do the proponents of net-zero policies actually believe that such costs can be hidden with subsidies and regulatory subterfuge and other such smoke and mirrors? If so, they are deluding themselves: It is no accident that electricity prices in California are the highest in the lower 48 states. So much for the assertion that wind and solar power now are competitive, a deeply disingenuous argument that shunts aside the costs of their inherent unreliability and the massive subsidies, guaranteed market shares, and other forms of favoritism bestowed upon them. And this outcome has obtained despite the fact that various federal tax credits and other policies allow California to shift a substantial part of the costs of its electricity policies onto taxpayers in other states, a dynamic that would not be available were such policies to be imposed upon the nation as a whole. How likely is it that such a prospective result will receive majority support in Congress?

Moreover, a net-zero power system will be characterized by blackouts that will prove frequent but unpredictable, both because of the inherent unreliability of wind and solar power and because of the most basic of electrical-engineering realities: Generation from wind and solar units cannot be ramped up and down in response to disequilibria in power frequencies in a grid. These fundamental reliability and engineering problems can be solved only with large investments in conventional gas-fired backup units, which means either that a net-zero power system will experience blackouts frequent and widespread or that the net-zero goal will be self-defeating. The proponents’ nostrums in response about batteries and carbon-capture technologies are preposterous.

Such direct cost increases will be massive, the regular service interruptions will be highly visible, and both impacts would emerge long before the 2050 deadline for net-zero GHG emissions. The office­holders who vote “Aye” on a gargantuan net-zero bill would suffer increasing adverse political impacts, a result that at least some of them will be able to foresee. Can anyone believe that this prospect would not affect their votes at the outset? And it is easy to predict that the emerging costs and distortions would require over time ever more perverse legislation to deal with those issues, in a never-ending process requiring a series of politically difficult votes in Congress. How many centrist congressmen and sena­tors will be willing to sign up for this?

The basic premise of the net-zero proponents is that we can destroy a substantial part of the economic value of the energy-producing and -using capital stock without impoverishing tens of millions of households and destroying employment opportunity on a massive scale. Not to worry, say proponents of net-zero policies and sharp increases in the cost of conventional energy: We will subsidize and otherwise mandate the creation of millions of replacement “green jobs,” a hallucination driven by utter ignorance about the close relationships among aggregate economic growth, resource shifts among sectors, and employment. In a nutshell: More-expensive energy means a smaller economy and less employment. Period. And, say the proponents: We can force the rest of the world to follow our lead by imposing equivalent tariffs on imported goods, a proposal that would be an administrative nightmare and ironically Trump-like in its myopia.

And all for what? A U.S. net-zero GHG policy would reduce global temperatures by 2100 by 0.104 degrees Celsius, using the EPA climate model under assumptions consistent with the modern peer-reviewed literature. That effect would be virtually undetectable, because the standard deviation of the surface-temperature record is 0.11 degrees. (As an aside, the effect of the entire Paris agreement, if implemented immediately and enforced strictly, would be 0.17 degrees.) Do the net-zero proponents believe that no one will notice this?

Put aside the fact that there is no systematic evidence of a climate “crisis” in terms of cyclones, flooding, polar ice, drought, and other such phenomena in the data reported by government agencies, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or in the peer-reviewed literature. Net-zero policies can be predicted confidently to yield an inexorable horror show of outcomes: skyrocketing costs, greater impoverishment, reduced reliability, more pollution, other serious adverse environmental effects, and a marked ex­pansion in government coercion, even as the stated climate-policy goal remains virtually unaffected. Such are the fruits of leftist fantasies and mendacity. These predictable endpoints of GHG fanaticism will lead even a Democratic Congress to reject the Green New Deal in favor of a series of tax subsidies and other such wastefulness that, however silly and narrowly destructive, will not pose a threat to our constitutional republic.