Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., already has warned that global warming will “destroy” the planet in 12 years unless drastic action is taken. Now, she is warning that residents of Miami don’t even have that long.
Unless her radical Green New Deal is implemented, she said at an NAACP forum, Miami will not be “existing in a few years,” the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“When it comes to climate change, what is not realistic is not responding … with a solution on the scale of the crisis—because what’s not realistic is Miami not existing in a few years,” she said to applause.
“We need to be realistic about the problem,” the freshman congresswoman added.
Ocasio-Cortez proposed the Green New Deal in Congress as an “aspirational” plan, the Free Beacon noted.
But in March, the Republican-led Senate forced a vote on the measure to put Democrats on the record regarding what leadership described as an unworkable “far-left wish list.” It failed in a 57-0 vote, with all 53 Republicans rejecting it along with four Democrats. Forty-three Democrats voted “present,” including the senators who introduced the Green New Deal and all of the 2020 presidential candidates in the Senate.
Nevertheless, fellow democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders has released a version of the plan as part of his presidential platform.
It would cost $16 trillion, which the Free Beacon pointed out is more than 20 times as expensive, adjusted for inflation, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Fellow 2020 hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris, D., Calif., has also made the Green New Deal part of her platform.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said after the March 26 vote that the proposal “addresses the small matter of eliminating the use of all fossil fuels nationwide in a 10-year time frame.”
“This might sound like a neat idea in places like San Francisco or New York, the places that the Democratic Party seems totally focused on these days,” he said. “But communities practically everywhere else would be absolutely crushed.”
