The proponents of the Green New Deal will obviously have to address transportation and building efficiency if they want the program to succeed. Dealing with new cars and buildings is conceptually simple; you just mandate green buildings and electric vehicles. But what about the tens of millions of existing cars and buildings? What do you do with them?
Retrofitting all of our existing buildings and replacing the entire fleet of gasoline-driven cars will be hideously expensive. You can try to address that problem by creating incentives through a very high carbon tax, and with massive subsidies. I cannot, however, imagine any subsidy that, in the real world, would be sufficient to compel everyone to retrofit. Most of these costs would consequently be borne by the individual owners, if at all.
That is part of the GND that simply hasn’t received enough attention to date. It isn’t enough to blame the evil fossil fuel industries for our greenhouse gas issues; the GND will require major lifestyle changes and sacrifices from the general public if it is to succeed. Is America ready for that? Not without a sales job the likes of which we have not seen to date.