Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) excluded democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) from serving on the new climate change committee on Thursday, as she announced the Democratic members who will serve on the committee.
The New York Post reports that Pelosi “threw some serious shade on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — denying her a coveted spot on a special panel on climate change and brushing off her Green New Deal.”
When asked about Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” during an interview with Politico on Wednesday, Pelosi appeared to dismiss Ocasio-Cortez’s plan.
“It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said. “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
The Tampa Bay Times reports that the following Democrats were selected to the new climate change committee: “Reps. Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, Julia Brownley of California, Sean Casten of Illinois, Jared Huffman of California, Mike Levin of California, Donald McEachin of Virginia and Joe Neguse of Colorado.”
“We have a moral responsibility to protect God’s creation for generations to come,” Pelosi tweeted. “That is why today, we named members to the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis.”
Pelosi’s announcement coincides with Ocasio-Cortez’s Thursday release of “a ‘Green New Deal’ resolution … that calls on the United States to mobilize against climate change just the way the nation mobilized to fight World War II.”
“This is such a major watershed moment and I am so incredibly excited that we are going to transition this country into the future and we are not going to be dragged behind by our past. I’m so excited by that,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“Today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “That’s what this agenda is all about.”
But the “Green New Deal” has many detractors.
“The excessive intervention Rep. Ocasio-Cortez calls for would be crippling for the environment, simply because it would slow the economic growth that makes green-energy advances possible to begin with,” Jason Pye opines at RealClearMarkets. “Seemingly missed by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and other environmentally focused Democrats is that economic growth itself is the greatest friend of all to the green movement. Without addressing how effective are Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s solutions, they’re most likely to reveal themselves not through force, but thanks to prosperity that provides people with the means to alter their driving habits, use of electricity versus solar, along with how they eat, travel, dispose of trash, and seemingly everything else. Simply put, growth is what frees us up to focus our energies on fixing the world around us.”
“It’s no exaggeration to say that if implemented, the Green New Deal would upend our way of life and destroy the liberty and prosperity that Americans, of all backgrounds, currently enjoy,” Jarrett Stepman writes at The Daily Signal. “The Green New Deal doesn’t just include environmentalist proposals: It also includes a grab bag of other left-wing goodies to ‘mitigate deeply entrenched racial, regional, and gender-based inequalities in income and wealth (including, without limitation, ensuring that federal and other investment will be equitably distributed to historically impoverished, low-income, deindustrialized, or other marginalized communities in such a way that builds wealth and ownership at the community level.)'”