On Thursday, amid much hype and fanfare, freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the “future” of the Democratic Party, unveiled her “Green New Deal” — and even the sympathetic media had a hard time figuring out how to report its proposals without opening up the self-described democratic socialist congresswoman to derision due to the plan’s goals of eliminating all use of fossil fuels, including natural gas, in ten years, creating so many high-speed railways that we can abolish planes, giving every American a job with a livable wage and “financial security” for those “unwilling to work,” — oh yeah, and abolishing “farting cows” (actual quote).
In a piece titled “The Impossible Green Dream of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Politico’s Michael Grunwald offers his best attempt at a defense of the freshman Democrat’s highly anticipated, stunningly naive document. While Grunwald does acknowledge that all of her major proposals are, simply put, “impossible,” he says that “none of that matters.”
“Let’s get real: The United States is not going to achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions in 10 years, the key goal of the Green New Deal resolution that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) unveiled Thursday,” Grunwald writes. “More real talk: America won’t get 100 percent of its power from zero-emissions sources within a decade, either, another audacious Green New Deal goal. And we’re not going to upgrade the energy efficiency of every single building in the country, as the resolution proposes. If we were getting all our energy from zero-emissions sources, it wouldn’t even make sense to try.”
Then he gets to the premise of his attempt to defend the embattled Democrat darling: “But here’s one more reality check: None of that really matters.”
Grunwald portrays the Green New Deal and AOC as a victim of an unfair “barrage of skepticism” from “well-intentioned fact-checkers, badly intentioned climate trolls, and desperate-to-look-savvy pundits, all focusing on the logistical and political impossibilities of transforming the economy as rapidly as the Green New Deal envisions.” The only problem is, he admits, “they’re right.”
“And they’re right: Its goals really do seem impossible to achieve,” he writes, now qualifying his unqualified “impossible” headline. “But they’re all missing the point. If anything, they’re helping the Green New Deal’s backers to make their point, which is that climate change is an unprecedented emergency that requires unprecedented action, so America needs to try to do seemingly impossible things.”
But what’s the point of doing something that’s impossible? Grunwald insists that, while “seemingly” impossible, the much-mocked document really is useful because it serves as “a political manifesto, a messaging device designed to commit the Democratic Party to treating the climate crisis like a real crisis, pressuring its presidential candidates to support radical transformation of the fossil-fueled economy.”
He also maintains that the “seemingly” impossible proposal also serves as “a policy proposal — or at least a sketch of one, a way to launch a substantive debate over how Democrats will attack the crisis if they do regain the White House.”
If the Green New Deal is even the “sketch” of how the Democrats propose to “attack” global warming, then there truly is no hope left for the party.
Grunwald goes on to try to convince the reader that the proposal is “much less radical” than it’s being described, but then admits its underlying assumption is this utterly socialist and unfounded premise: “The underlying philosophy of the Green New Deal is that only the power of government can create the revolutionary change that’s needed, just as the green investments in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill helped jump-start the revolution.”
Along with the whole “impossible” thing, Grunwald does acknowledge another glaring problem with the GND: “by converting the Green New Deal into a catch-all left-wing wish list, its supporters are undermining their argument that climate is a unique emergency.” Translation: It too openly reveals that the climate change agenda is really about replacing capitalism with socialism.
Related: Limbaugh: Ocasio-Cortez And Her ‘Green New Deal’ Just Blew The Lid Off Leftism