Democratic Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was reportedly involved in a “closed-door fight” on Thursday with Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), a top Democratic official, demanding that the party move even further left on climate change and create a special panel for the issue.
“New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, incoming chairman of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee — backed by a number of other committee members — slammed the creation of the new climate panel,” Politico reported. “Pallone argued that his committee and other existing panels within the House could take on the issue aggressively.”
“My fear is that if you have a select committee, by the time the select committee gets going, gets appointed and hires staff that it might actually delay what we’re doing,” Pallone told Politico. “We’ve got people who are in charge of these committees who are very progressive and I just don’t see the need for the select committee. I think it may actually delay what the progressives are trying to achieve.”
Ocasio-Cortez has used alarmist rhetoric this week to push her far-left agenda on climate change, tweeting: “We have 10 years left to plan and implement a Green New Deal before cataclysmic climate disaster.”
Regarding the fight that broke out, a spokesperson for Ocasio-Cortez told Politico, “We’re not going to comment on the internal discussions of a meeting.”
Immediately following the statement from her spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted: “This is completely false – I never even have a direct interaction with him today. When did Politico turn into TMZ?”
Ocasio-Cortez is clearly unsatisfied with the fact that the United States, after pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, is leading the world in reducing CO2 emissions.
Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly has brought up a report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which she uses to promote the idea that big new government programs are needed to save the world.
Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro wrote in October about the problems with the IPCC’s report:
Environmentalist doomsayers are back again, trying to frighten Americans into radically altering the American economy, supposedly to save the earth.
This week’s Armaggedon proclamation came courtesy of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which released a much-ballyhooed report suggesting that a 2 degree Celsius change in global temperature by 2040 would result in catastrophe. The New York Times quickly amped up the panic, reporting the possibility of “a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires, and a mass die-off of coral reefs as soon as 2040 — a period well within the lifetime of much of the global population.”
The report urges a 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions from 2010 levels by 2030 in order to prevent that imminent doom. According to the IPCC: “The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities.” Some of those changes could include an attempt to direct 5-10% of global capital revenues toward investment in public works projects, plus a $27,000 tax on each ton of carbon by 2100 – equivalent to roughly $250 per gallon tax on gasoline.
Read the rest of Shapiro’s report here.