Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Controversial New Deal
One of the most pressing concerns worldwide today is the very survival of it. A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change study released that an urgent 45% reduction of carbon emissions within the next 12 years was of the utmost importance if planet Earth were to be conserved. Student marches for climate have appeared worldwide as this came into the popular news, from Stockholm, Sweden to Melbourne, Australia, to here in the United States.
In February 2019, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez along with Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey, released a comprehensive plan dubbed the “Green New Deal,” with ambitious objectives that hope to neutralize human-influenced climate change. This is dubbed after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal over 70 years ago, which took action to revive economic prosperity to the United States after the Great Depression.
Such objectives within Ocasio-Cortez’s New Deal include cutting down carbon emissions significantly. In fact, this deal requests for “meeting 100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources” by 2030. Extensive funding for a large-scale, cross-continental railway system was also brought up in the proposed bill, to the point where “air travel stops becoming necessary”.
The call for upgrading all existing buildings to achieve maximum possible energy and water efficiency, cleaning up waste, and revising the current agricultural system of the United States to be more sustainable have also been noted within the document.
While many of these environmentalist ideals were met with support, this bill was nonetheless met with controversy from both conservative and other environmentalist voices. Main criticisms are targeted towards its exceptionally high demands, meant to be met very soon, with an exceptional amount of government spending.
“Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels or get the food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death,” tweeted Patrick Moore, former director of Greenpeace Canada, an affiliate of the nonprofit organization Greenpeace, dedicated to international environmental protection.
On March 25, 2019, this resolution also failed to pass in Senate by a unanimous vote of 0-57.
However, some commentators have acknowledged this Green New Deal as a necessary burden.
“As with every great engineering challenge our nation has faced — the Erie Canal, the 20th-century power grid, the Interstate Highway System, the civil aviation system and the moonshot—we need bold timelines, clear milestones, breakthrough engineering and public-sector leadership,” said Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist in an interview with The Hill. “No doubt, when properly regulated and guided by engineering plans, the private sector will do its part with excellence and timeliness.
Despite the confounding combination of both undying support and harsh backlash received, Ocasio Cortez continues to advocate for her idyllic Green New Deal. “I just introduced the Green New Deal two weeks ago and it’s creating all of this conversation, why? Because no one else has even tried,” she said at a New York Hall of Science Event late February.
This Green New Deal has indeed generated conversation, and conversation it will continue to generate—while some call it a socialist ploy, others see it as the only way for the future generations to be able to live in a world unconcerned of environmental breakdown.
by ATHENA LI