There’s fresh international interest in the flagship green-growth project. What is the Green New Deal and where did it come from? Paul Hockenos takes a look. About a decade ago, the European Greens’ visionary Green New Deal (GND) program – a full-scale environmental overhaul of our economies driven by public investment – had been put on a high shelf in a backroom somewhere in Brussels. The brainchild of several circles of environmentalists and then picked up by the European Greens in the late aughts was, perhaps, ahead of its time (critics, on the contrary, sniped that it was really nothing more than a naïve wish list.) The idea was twofold: to finance green infrastructure projects with state investment, which would put people to work and act as a stimulus is the crisis-racked recession economy. And also to give incentives for private capital. The GND brought together economic growth and environmental protection – an attractive win-win strategy, it was thought. But it didn’t get a lot of traction in Europe at the time. In the 2009 … Continue reading The green new deal is back