Tag: Green New Deal

Marjorie Greene wants to debate AOC over the Green New Deal — but admits she’s yet to read ‘all 14 pages’ of the bill

AlterNet Logo

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) claims she is interested in debating Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over the details of the Green New Deal. According to Business Insider, Greene on Wednesday, April 21, tweeted about the possibility of her and the Democratic lawmaker scheduling a debate in the near future. 

Greene’s tweet came shortly after the two lawmakers talked on the House floor about Ocasio-Cortez’s environmental proposal. However, Greene insisted she would only be willing to debate after reading “all 14 pages.”

“I’m glad I ran into you today [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ] to plan our debate about the Green New Deal,” Greene tweeted. “After I finish reading all 14 pages, like we agreed, I’ll schedule time for our debate.” Continue reading.

Naomi Klein reveals the real reason Republicans are afraid of the Green New Deal

AlterNet logo

Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein argued in a New York Times column Sunday that Republicans rushed to attack the Green New Deal as disaster struck in Texas because the popular push for a sweeping transformation of the U.S. energy system poses a genuine threat to the deregulated, fossil-fuel dependent status quo that left the Lone Star State vulnerable to extreme weather driven by the climate crisis.

“Texans are living through the collapse of a 40-year experiment in free-market fundamentalism, one that has also stood in the way of effective climate action,” Klein wrote. “Fortunately, there’s a way out—and that’s precisely what Republican politicians in the state most fear.”

Klein characterized the ongoing power, water, and food crises in Texas as the consequence of “an energy-market free-for-all” stemming from “a fateful series of decisions [that] were made in the late-’90s, when the now-defunct, scandal-plagued energy company Enron led a successful push to radically deregulate Texas’ electricity sector.” Continue reading.

Pence’s funny math on Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all costs

Washington Post logo“You know, watching the debate the other night, with all the Democrat candidates standing so far on the left, I thought that debate stage was going to flip over. … In fact, if you add up every budget-busting proposal they offer — from Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal — it would actually cost every household in America over $900,000 over the next 10 years.”

— Vice President Pence, in remarks at the Detroit Economic Club, Aug. 19, 2019

Pence said every U.S. household would have to pay $900,000 over the next decade to cover the cost of Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal.

The median U.S. household income was $61,372 in 2017, so the vice president is making one of those huge, scary claims that immediately draws our attention — and skepticism.

We’ve never seen such an exorbitant estimate. Pence is saying these two Democratic proposals would cost more than $100 trillion, or roughly five times the national debt.

Four Pinocchios

View the complete August 22 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

GOP Senator Says Having More ‘American Babies’ Is The Solution To Climate Change

 

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah raised eyebrows with his strange and cheeky attack on the Green New Deal.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) tore into the Green New Deal on Tuesday, stating on the Senate floor that the only thing needed to combat climate change is for Americans to “fall in love” and have “more babies.”

Lee, who has expressed doubt before over the climate science finding that human activity is the main driver of global warming, bashed a resolution laying out the tenets of the Green New Deal. The congressional resolution was introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) last month.

“I’m not immediately afraid of what carbon emissions unaddressed might do to our environment in the near future, or our civilization or our planet in the next few years,” Lee said during a Senate debate. “I’m mostly afraid of not being able to get through this speech with a straight face.”

View the complete March 26 article by Hayley Miller on the Huffington Post website here.

Climate deniers reveal true fear about Green New Deal: That it will force Republicans to the left

A hiker in Glacier National Park. Credit: Ben Herndon

“Green New Deal-lite.”

Climate science deniers fear the building momentum behind the Green New Deal will force Republicans to introduce their own version of climate action, a so-called “Green New Deal-lite.”

Speaking at a policy forum Wednesday hosted by the Congressional Western Caucus and chaired by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), longtime climate science deniers and opponents of the ambitious climate resolution expressed concerns that calls for climate action will push all politicians to the left.

One of the “dangers” of the Green New Deal, said Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is that “by expanding the political spectrum of what’s in the debate, it’s moving the debate left and it’s creating a very large space for a certain class of people, many of them in the Republican Party, to start talking about how we need to have moderate solutions, or reasonable solutions.”

View the complete February 27 article by Kyla Mandel on the ThinkProgress website here.

McConnell to set up vote on Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’

The Senate will hold a vote on the Green New Deal, an environmental and energy plan touted by progressives, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on Tuesday.

McConnell told reporters after a meeting of the Senate Republican caucus that he has “great interest” in the plan, which would spell an end for coal, a key economic driver in McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, while promising new jobs for out-of-work miners and other workers.

“We’ll give everybody an opportunity to go on record and see how they feel about the Green New Deal,” McConnell said.

View the complete February 12 article by Jordain Carney, Timothy Cama and Miranda Green on The Hill website here.

Democrats unveil Green New Deal that would push government to make radical changes

The resolution would force lawmakers to take a position on the deal, and its goals of remaking the U.S. economy within a decade

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez listens as Sen. Ed Markey speaks as Democrats announce their Green New Deal resolution outside of the Capitol on Thursday. Credit: Bill Clark, CQ Roll Call

A resolution outlining the goals of an ambitious progressive plan to overhaul the U.S. economy across all sectors, from finance to energy to social services, was rolled out Thursday with the aim of driving future legislation.

The Green New Deal resolution sponsored in the House by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and in the Senate by Massachusetts Democrat Edward J. Markey cites urgent warnings in two recent major climate reports to compel the federal government to act urgently on the radical changes they say would make the U.S. resilient and sustainable across all sectors.

In an October report, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that unless urgent and drastic action is taken, global temperatures could rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) between 2030 and 2052, which could have catastrophic repercussions for the economy, the environment, humans and wildlife.

View the complete February 7 article by Elvina Nawaguna on The Roll Call website here.