Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the surprise winner of the NY-14 Primary upset has just proven that the problem with establishment Democrats is they just aren’t committed enough.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is the Climate Change Hardliner the Planet Needs
Becky Ferreira
Jun 28 2018, 1:01amOcasio-Cortez upset the NY-14 primary with a progressive agenda that included transitioning the US to renewables by 2035.
Progressive challenger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won the Democratic primary in New York’s 14th district (Bronx/Queens) on Tuesday, beating out her incumbent opponent Joe Crowley, who has been a member of Congress since 1999. The victory was a surprising upset and a key victory for progressives, who are eager to pull the Democratic Party left in spite of hand-wringing from its current moderate leadership.
“This is the start of a movement,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted in response to her win. “Thank you all.”
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Cleverly branding her plan to confront climate change as “a Green New Deal,” Ocasio-Cortez set an ambitious goal to fully transition the United States to renewable energy sources by 2035. Crucially, she spotlighted the economic and social justice impacts of climate change, and warned of the “worldwide refugee crisis” that will result from continuing to marginalize the issue.
“Right now, the economy is controlled by big corporations whose profits are dependent on the continuation of climate change,” her platform reads. “This arrangement benefits few, but comes at the detriment of our planet and all its inhabitants.”
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From Alexandria’s campaign website;
Mobilizing Against Climate Change
In order to address runaway global climate change, Alexandria strongly supports transitioning the United States to a carbon-free, 100% renewable energy system and a fully modernized electrical grid by 2035. She believes renewable fuels must be produced in a way that achieves our environmental and energy security goals, so we can move beyond oil responsibly in the fight against climate change. By encouraging the electrification of vehicles, sustainable home heating, distributed rooftop solar generation, and the conversion of the power grid to zero-emissions energy sources, Alexandria believes we can be 100% free of fossil fuels by 2035.
Furthermore, Alex believes in recognizing the relationship between economic stability and environmental sustainability. It’s time to shift course and implement a Green New Deal – a transformation that implements structural changes to our political and financial systems in order to alter the trajectory of our environment. Right now, the economy is controlled by big corporations whose profits are dependent on the continuation of climate change. This arrangement benefits few, but comes at the detriment of our planet and all its inhabitants. Its effects are life-threatening, and are especially already felt by low-income communities, both in the U.S. and globally. Even in NY-14, areas like Throgs Neck, College Point, and City Island are being affected by erosion and rising sea levels. Rather than continue a dependency on this system that posits climate change as inherent to economic life, the Green New Deal believes that radically addressing climate change is a potential path towards a more equitable economy with increased employment and widespread financial security for all.
Climate change is the single biggest national security threat for the United States and the single biggest threat to worldwide industrialized civilization, and the effects of warming can be hard to predict and self-reinforcing. We need to avoid a worldwide refugee crisis by waging a war for climate justice through the mobilization of our population and our government. This starts with the United States being a leader on the actions we take both globally and locally.
Read more: https://ocasio2018.com/issues#mobilizing-against-climate-change
I agree with Alexandria that the current Democrat leadership, whoever they are at this point in time, don’t seem to be taking climate change seriously.
Imagine for a moment that you truly believed anthropogenic global warming was an imminent deadly threat. If climate change really was an existential crisis, it simply wouldn’t make sense to campaign for or support the adoption of half measures. If you truly believed the future of your children depended on giving up your car, that your kids would all die if you and your neighbours continued to use fossil fuels, wouldn’t you demand everyone immediately give up their car? Wouldn’t you feel anger and frustration towards the self serving complacency of establishment politicians who kept trying to buy you off by offering tiny upward increments to their unambitious renewable targets?
The obvious explanation for mainstream Democrat moderation on climate issues is that most Democrat establishment politicians don’t really believe climate change is a serious issue. They offer a few token measures to win the votes of climate believers, while trying to avoid frightening off rich industrialists who are attracted to some of their other policies.
But hardcore climate fanatics aren’t complete fools. They might be wrong about climate change, but people know when they are just being used by politicians who don’t really care about their concerns.
It was inevitable that someone like Alexandria would arise – a true believer, someone who speaks to the hearts of fellow climate true believers, people who are fed up with being lied to and betrayed by the establishment.
A fool is a fool, no matter how sincere.
let me translate her “homes are a human right” policy
if she had the legislative power it would go like this.
Sir\Madam, you have a 3 bed house, but you are one person, you must take in two migrants
Sir\Madam, it is irrelevant to us that you put blood and sweat into that house and that the people we are giving 66% of your house to, never worked a hard day in their lives
Sir\Madam, the fact that you made more effort than the people we are giving your stuff to for free, means you are an oppressor.
Sir\Madam, we need to take that factory you worked hard to build over 30 years of your life. We need to it hand to these trusty ideologically pure socialists, yes we know they have no idea how to run a manufacturing plant but they are our ideological brothers, and that is what matters.
If her kind had power, they wouldnt wait for the millions of homes they’d need to build to be built (and would never have the money anyway) so they would just take them from the middle class.
The middle class, not the top 1%, are the class that is crushed by radical socialism, the 1% always remain, because the radical socialists need the 1% and their money.
The very real strategy in Cuba and now Venezuela is to officially promote seizure of housing units made vacant by fleeing residents.
If her and her kind ever got any real chance of getting power, the media class would nuke them from orbit.
CNN and MSNBC people get $30k a day. They would do everything in their power to destroy any movement like this, Guaranteed. Amazon, google, Apple Microsoft and all the others would invest fortunes into destroying them.
Not that I say that is a good thing, just a reality, they’d sooner see her “disappear” than pay radical socialist taxes and have their wealth redistributed.
Mind you Google and others might get a free pass, because the information machine would be the first to be completely co-opeted by these radical socialists.
Fortunately, the young people who support this lady now, once they enter the real working world and have kids and a future to plan, will not be supporting her then, or her kind.
Most radical socialists are people who never contributed anything to society
Mark,
You do not understand the nature of the degenerate elites.
The way I hear it she won by taking on incumbent Crowley’s Wall Street ties.
Bloomberg got it right – “She called for reviving the Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression era-law that kep investment banking and consumer lending separate formore than six decades until it was scrapped in 1999. Some lawmakers blame the repeal for contributing to the 2008 meltdown, an argument that Wall Street flatly rejects.”
She was Socialist Party, and a Bernie activist.
Italy’s new Gov’t also campaigned on this, and there is a kind of “green” New Deal there too.
FDR’s New Deal after enforcing Glass-Steagall catapulted the US out of the depression. It’s a proven tool. Of course the neo-lib, neo-con nutters of the von Hayek mold get conniptions at the very thought of directed mission-oriented economics citing the straw dog of central bank-bailouts. von Hayek ideologues call FDR socialist, which is bunkum. Bloomberg notes the wind thats blowing.
Of course a New Deal must involve fission, fusion, better “fossil fuel” energy
Trump tweeted delight that Crowley is gone.
Glass-Steagall was quietly scrapped in 1999. A friend warned me in 2000 of major crises to come. And the first one came in 2008. Does Wall Street believe in climate change?
FDR’s poor handlibg of the Depression kept America suffering nearly to the start of WW2.
His first “New Deal” was tossed out by the USSC.
Glass Steagall, however was actually a good thing and should be, withmeaningful updates, considered for reintroduction.
I don’t really see how she’s any different. It’s not like she’s given up any of her modern conveniences or even tried to get off the dirty grid.
She merely wants the privilege of dictating to others how they must live, and can speak very passionately about it.
Basically, Democrat voters support someone who wants to implement communism in order to fight climate change.
That probably has extensive peer reviewed research to back it up ….in the UK and Australia.
Uff dah. The Chutzpah! Only redeeming factor of this newly elected dum dum is that she is pretty.
Scotty said it best: “You cannae change the laws of physics.” No matter how hard a dewy-eyed Millennial idealist strains.
She has all the tactics of the former USSR, class warfare and gifts. And nothing under the US Constitution.
Well here in NY we elect the best and brightest…(sarc)!
It’s a political given that the left wants to convert American states that consistently vote for rightists to their side. That’s why Democrats are so lenient on law-breaking immigrants. They want to eventually allow enough liberal Latin Americans into the country, that those people’s children will eventually become victims and identity politics voters who reliably vote for Democrats. In this way, America continues to slide away from E Pluribus Unim, but towards the day when Democrats an ultimately win Texas.
However, in politics, like in climate, everything is always changing. People like Ms. Ocasio-Cortez could also have something of the opposite effect. To the degree that they become successful in driving up everyone’s costs for electricity, and driving up the risk of major blackouts, as is happening in Australia right now, maybe these renewable energy zealots will have the unintended consequence of one day turning California or New York back over to Republicans. It is my hope that Latin American youngsters (dreamers) still have enough ambition and drive to want to succeed in the old-fashioned American way, through hard work and individual merit, to reject this stampede of brainless Democratic climate lemmings over the proverbial renewable energy cliff.
I guess she wants an electical grid as good a Peurto Rico. One of her parents if from there!
It looks like the new tactic of random assortment of catch phrase terms like refugee crisis and climate justice is the winner with random assorted brains of liberals. Go for it.
Okay, but make sure NY is the crash test dummy state ahead of the nation.
Hmm, I am a “Climate Justice Denier” now? I kind of like the ring of that.
They have convoluted the words to the point I can not make any meaning out of their “policies”. If you fed it into a computer to translate the words into only those portions that have meaning, the computer would spit out a blank space. Which I guess is a fair representation of what is in their heads.
Its going to be entertaining to watch people like this in Congress. Assuming any get that far.
I do hope James Hansen lives long enough to witness Climate Political Chaos and its very real economic impacts on communities, families, and other carbon units.
Just remember to pay your carbon taxes in Bolivars and not dollars.
Like I said before, the Clinton supporters just don’t turn out like they used to. A lot of them moved off to nursing homes or cemeteries but they all still turn out for the general election…. dead or alive.
……And this extremist apparently wants to practice her extremist innumeracy and lefty imperialism from the Oval Office.
She’s right, they should all be committed.
Yeah, this woman’s a piece of work.
We also, at one time, thought the world was flat and were almost assured it was true.
She will fail and waste a ridiculous amount of taxpayers money in the process.
Well, this certainly looks good for the future. Millennial social-justice air-heads in charge of things. OMG, awesome!