‘Green New Deal’ bill has slim chance of passing
WASHINGTON — Liberal Democrats put flesh on their “Green New Deal” slogan Thursday with a sweeping resolution intended to redefine the national debate on climate change by calling for the United States to eliminate additional emissions of carbon by 2030.
The measure, drafted by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., is intended to answer the demand, by the party’s restive base, for a grand strategy that combats climate change, creates jobs and offers an affirmative response to the challenge to core party values posed by President Donald Trump.
The resolution is so ambitious that Republicans greeted it with derision. Its legislative prospects are bleak in the foreseeable future; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has no plan to bring it to the floor for a vote, according to a Democratic leadership aide with direct knowledge of her plans.
But as a blueprint for liberal ambition, it was breathtaking. It includes a 10-year commitment to convert “100 percent of the power demand in the United States” to “clean, renewable and zero-emission energy sources”; to upgrade “all existing buildings” to meet energy efficiency requirements; and to expand high-speed rail so broadly that most air travel would be rendered obsolete.
The initiative, introduced as nonbinding resolutions in the House and Senate, is tethered to an infrastructure program that its authors say could create millions of new “green jobs,” while guaranteeing health care, “a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security” to every American.
“Climate change and our environmental challenges are the biggest existential threats to our way of life,” Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday. “We must be as ambitious and innovative in our solutions as possible.”
The resolution, modeled on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, will not move in its current form, but some ideas could advance as part of more modest legislation to address the climate crisis. Yet on Thursday, when Pelosi named the Democrats who will lead a new special select committee on climate change, the chief architect of the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez, was not on the list.
“Frankly, I haven’t seen it,” the speaker told reporters when asked about the Green New Deal proposal during her weekly media availability at the Capitol on Thursday. “But I do know it is enthusiastic, and we welcome all the enthusiasm that is out there.”
Pelosi is likely mindful of her own past mistakes. A decade ago, she pushed the last major climate change measure hard, an ambitious bill to cap emissions of climate-warming pollution, then allow industries to trade emissions credits on a pollution credit market. Through force of will, she got the capand-trade measure through the House, only to see it die in the Senate without a vote. The next year, Democrats were swept from power.
Republicans seized on the proposal with relish, portraying the entire resolution as absurd.
“The socialist Democrats are off to a great start with the roll out of their ridiculous Green New Deal today!” said Bob Salera, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the political arm of House Republicans, who called the idea “zany.”
Markey said he thought the public was far more ready than in 2009 to support climate change legislation. A decade ago, he said, fossil-fuel backed interest groups poured money into convincing the public that climate change was not real.
“The green generation has risen up and they are saying we want this issue solved,” Markey said.