Democratic socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made multiple false claims during her MSNBC town hall event on Friday as she also doubled down on her belief that cow farts pose a grave threat to the planet.
The MSNBC town hall, which was essentially a PR intervention for Ocasio-Cortez, came after her poll numbers crashed to new lows in recent weeks and her $93 trillion Green New Deal failed to garner a single vote of support in the Senate.
During the event, Ocasio-Cortez was allowed to make false claim after false claim with no pushback from MSNBC host Chris Hayes. This should not come as a surprise given the fact that MSNBC was credibly accused last week by a journalist of acting on behalf of the DNC in an unrelated matter.
Early on, Ocasio-Cortez once again addressed “cow farts,” which were infamously mentioned during the rollout of her “Green New Deal,” suggesting cows need to have their diets changed.
“We need to innovate and change our, our grain, uh, our, our cow grain from which you know they feed in these troughs,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We need to look at regenerative agriculture. These are our solutions.”
During the event, the freshman congresswoman made multiple false claims, including her repeated claim that the earth is facing cataclysmic climate disaster if carbon emissions are not drastically cut in the next 12 years.
“We have an expiration date and the IPCC report says we’ve got 12 years to turn it around!” Ocasio-Cortez warned. “12 years! My concern is we are going to be the frog in the pot of boiling water…and our kids are doomed.”
Multiple top climate scientists have refuted Ocasio-Cortez’s claims in recent weeks, including Kate Marvel, who works at NASA.
“12 years isn’t a deadline, and climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off — it’s a slope we slide down,” Marvel said. “We don’t have 12 years to prevent climate change — we have no time. It’s already here. And even under a business-as-usual scenario, the world isn’t going to end in exactly twelve years.”
Gavin Schmidt, who leads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told Axios: “All the time-limited frames are bullsh**. Nothing special happens when the ‘carbon budget’ runs out or we pass whatever temperature target you care about, instead the costs of emissions steadily rise. The thing to push back against is the implicit framing that there is some magic global mean temperature or total emissions that separate ‘fine’ from ‘catastrophic’. There just isn’t.”
Andrea Dutton, a paleoclimate researcher at the University of Florida, said regarding the IPCC report that Ocasio-Cortez constantly references: “For some reason the media latched onto the 12 years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action. Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.”
Ocasio-Cortez also falsely claimed that Republicans amended the U.S. Constitution to prevent President Franklin Roosevelt from getting reelected. “They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure Roosevelt did not get reelected,” she said.
The Washington Examiner notes that “Ocasio-Cortez was referring to the 22nd Amendment of the Constitution which passed in 1947,” two years after Roosevelt died in 1945 after winning a fourth term in office.
Ocasio-Cortez tried to brush off a recent expert analysis of her plan, which she has admitted to being a massive government takeover of private industries, that estimates it will cost $93 trillion.
“They wave this wand and they say, ‘Oh, it’s going to cost a bazillion dollars,’ like they sound like Dr. Evil,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “You know, let’s just start. Now!”
Ocasio-Cortez’s attempt to downplay the economic devastation that her plan would cause comes after the American Action Forum concluded: “The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive. Its further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”
The $93 trillion price tag amounts to over $650,000 per U.S. household over a 10-year span and covers “a low-carbon electricity grid, net zero emissions transportation system, guaranteed jobs, universal health care, guaranteed green housing, and food security.”
The AFL-CIO, America’s largest organized-labor group, ripped Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal last month, writing that it “is far too short on specific solutions that speak to the jobs of our members and the critical sections of our economy.”
“It is not rooted in an engineering-based approach and makes promises that are not achievable or realistic,” the letter from the AFL-CIO Energy Committee said. “We will not accept proposals that could cause immediate harm to millions of our members and their families. We will not stand by and allow threats to our members’ jobs and their families’ standard of living go unanswered.”
Ocasio-Cortez compared climate change to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which resulted in the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans, and suggested that she did not agree with America’s decision to use the military to respond to the terror attack.
“On the events on September 11, 2001, thousands of Americans died in the largest terror attack on US soil,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Our national response was war in one then eventually two countries: 3,000 Americans died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria. Where is our response?”
Ocasio-Cortez also spoke dismissively about her colleagues, portraying herself as the populist leader of her party. “The way the GND was designed, and I encourage everyone … to actually look it up because we intentionally wrote it for the people of the U.S. because I’m not here to convince my colleagues, I’m here to go straight to the electorate,” she said.
Update: A previous version of this article stated that FDR was elected to three presidential terms. FDR was elected to four presidential terms and died during his fourth term.