In an hour-long MSNBC town hall in the Bronx Friday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined youth climate leaders and policy experts to declare that leisurely committee hearings, “half-baked” positions, and timid market-based policy tweaks are no longer tolerable in the face of the planet-wide climate crisis.
“The initial response was, ‘Let the market handle it. They will do it.’ Forty years and free-market solutions have not changed our position.”
—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
A comprehensive Green New Deal, said the New York congresswoman, is the only solution that truly matches the scale of “our greatest existential threat.”
“This is urgent, and to think that we have time is such a privileged and removed-from-reality attitude that we cannot tolerate,” Ocasio-Cortez told a packed auditorium at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
“Historically speaking we have mobilized our entire economy around war. But I thought to myself: It doesn’t have to be that way,” she added. “And so to get us out of this situation, to revamp our economy, to create dignified jobs for working Americans, to guarantee healthcare and elevate our educational opportunity and attainment, we will have to mobilize our entire economy around saving ourselves and taking care of this planet.”
In just a few months, the persistent activism of youth climate leaders with the Sunrise Movement and members of Congress like Ocasio-Cortez has catapulted the Green New Deal into the mainstream political conversation.
Previously a fringe left-wing idea, a Green New Deal resolution—introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.)—now has over 90 Democratic co-sponsors in the House and 12 in the Senate.
According to one survey, 81 percent of Americans support the idea, which calls for the U.S. to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 through a mass mobilization of economic resources.
At the town hall Friday evening, Ocasio-Cortez said she was there to make the case for the Green New Deal to the U.S. public, not to her fellow lawmakers.
“This is not a partisan issue, because there are Democrats who will get in the way of us saving ourselves,” said the congresswoman. “We encourage everyone here to look it up. I’m here not to convince my colleagues, but the electorate.”
“If the electorate prioritizes it and overwhelmingly supports it, then we create the political room to pass it,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
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