She’s not as ambitious as Stalin or Mao with their five-year plans — she needs 10 years. But that’s all it will take, claims Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), to completely overhaul the American economy, achieving net-zero CO2 emissions, a total fossil-fuel phase-out, and the combustion engine’s and air travel’s elimination. A long way from stealing tips at the bar, it’s her version of Year Zero.
But zero is precisely what our economy would be if the greenhorn congresswoman got her way with her “Green New Deal.” Unveiled Thursday morning, it’s a top-down, Big Brother scheme that promises the world and to save the world and, fancifully, to turn a profit in the process.
Calling it perhaps “the most far-reaching proposal to ever be considered in Congress,” Fox News writes that Ocasio-Cortez’ plan would also “upgrade or replace every building in America to ensure energy efficiency and give economic security even to those ‘unwilling’ to work.” (By the way, if this comes to pass, count me “unwilling.”)
“‘Today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America,’ she said alongside Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and other lawmakers outside the Capitol. ‘That’s what this agenda is all about,’” Fox also reports.
The resolution is non-binding, a mere vision at this point of Democrat “thought leaders’” intentions for our future. These thinkers don’t, however, include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — who assuredly finds Ocasio-Cortez an irritating threat to her power — as she dismissively characterized the upstart’s scheme as the “green dream or whatever they call it.”
Yet 2020 Democrat presidential hopefuls were much more receptive, with figures such as senators Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.), and Cory Booker (D-N.J) all happily co-sponsoring the resolution. As they tweeted:
Of course, these politicians know a certain principle well: It costs nothing to promise and posture.
That is, unless it ultimately makes you look radical and stupid. Fox News’ Dana Perino, appearing on Tucker Carlson Tonight’s Thursday edition (video below), theorized that this just might, in fact, happen with these Democrats.
Carlson called the proposal “reckless and dumb.” Yet it’s hard to really get a sense of how truly radical and risible but yet dangerous the resolution is without reading it yourself. Aside from what has already been mentioned, however, here are some highlights (lowlights?). The plan promises
• the development of high-speed rail “at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) noted that this “would be pretty hard for Hawaii” (nah, not once we complete Obama’s intercontinental railroad);
• a “job with a family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and retirement security”;
• “access to nature” (whatever that means);
• to build electric “charging stations everywhere”; and
• to eliminate all nuclear power plants.
The resolution ignores science and sanity and can read like Bart Simpson meets the Bolsheviks. Just consider the following passage from the Green New Deal FAQ released by Ocasio-Cortez’ office to PBS:
“We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.”
The resolution is rife with divisive lies. It cites as a problem the male-female wage gap, when it has been definitively shown that it’s a function of the sexes’ different career and lifestyle choices, not discrimination, and that trying to eliminate it hurts married women and their children. It bemoans how white families have 20 times more wealth than black families, ignoring that Asians earn more than whites. Why?
Because whites are the “intersectional” leftists’ scapegoat and the common enemy used to help bind the disparate left-wing groups together. There’s no percentage in attacking Asians (yet).
Ocasio-Cortez’ one saving grace in her Green New Deal is that, like a doctrinaire Marxist, she’s often blunt about her intentions. “Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases,” the FAQ acknowledges. And the FAQ’s “Overview” section boasts: “This is a massive transformation of our society with clear goals and a timeline.”
Yet clear goals don’t necessarily denote clear thinking. Comically tragic here is that this whole scheme is based upon the unscientific global-warming thesis, whose adherents’ computer-model predictions have failed time and again. Yet the alarmists still insist that, this time, they surely must be right.
This just reflects environmentalist doomsayers’ history, though. How bad have their predictions been? Hint: We’re all supposed to be either dead of starvation by now or living among 22.6 million other miserable American survivors.
The kicker is that even if man’s CO2 emissions were creating a warmer planet, so what? The Left often touts “science,” but here’s what science also has told us:
• Plants and animals do better in warmer times with higher CO2 levels.
• The world will end because of too little CO2 — in approximately 1,000,000,000 A.D.
• We’re poised to enter a new ice age.
• Reducing the global temperature three-tenths of one degree by the century’s end — meaning, postponing so-called “global warming” less than four years — would cost $100 trillion.
And believe these assertions or not, perhaps countless trillions are what the Green Raw Deal would cost. Ocasio-Cortez blows this off like a valley girl with daddy’s credit card. She says this is our WWII; it’s more like our Waterloo.
The freest nations (e.g., us) have the cleanest environments, and, in fact, China emits more CO2 than the United States and the European Union combined. We can morally preen and posture, but do you think China and, for that matter, India will follow us over the green cliff?
It has been fashionable to make jokes about Ocasio-Cortez, but don’t laugh. For what makes her set so dangerous is that they’re ignorant of most everything — except how to gain power.
Photo: AP Images
