Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said that the world is going to end in 12 years unless something is done to stop climate change.
The newly elected congresswoman made the comments during a talk with liberal author Ta-Nehisi Coates Monday at the MLK Now event in New York City on Monday, in which she made the case for the urgency of addressing climate change, which she compared to World War II.
AOC warns of imminent climate disaster
While hardly the first Democrat to warn of impending climate apocalypse, Ocasio-Cortez has made waves in her party as a prominent voice on the issue. Ocasio-Cortez said climate change is a “generational issue” that younger Americans are more invested in and that they don’t care about the cost of fixing it. The 29-year-old Democrat, who has been criticized for making pricey and vague proposals to address inequality and the environment, shrugged at those concerned about paying for her likely multi-trillion dollar proposal to stop climate change, the Green New Deal.
“Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'”
Ocasio-Cortez continued, “Like, this is the war, this is our World War II. And I think for younger people looking at this are more like, how are we saying let’s take it easy when 3,000 Americans died last year, how are we saying let’s take it easy when the end person died from our cruel and unjust criminal justice system?”
Ocasio-Cortez was referring to 3,000 Americans who died in Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The congresswoman continued to ramble on about how the United States is “dystopian” and the need to take action now.
“How are we saying take it easy, the America that we’re living in today is dystopian with people sleeping in their cars so they can work a second job without healthcare and we’re told to settle down. It’s a fundamental separation between that fierce urgency of now, the why we can’t wait that King spoke of,” she said. “That at some point these chronic realities do reach a breaking point and I think for our generation it reached that, I wished I didn’t have to be doing every post, but sometimes I just feel like people aren’t being held accountable. Until we start pitching in and holding people accountable, I’m just gonna let them have it.”
Climate change alarmism?
In a response to critics, Ocasio-Cortez pointed to a UN report which claimed that the earth has 12 years to go before it’s too late to stop carbon emissions from destroying the planet. The White House reported in November that climate change was exacerbating extreme weather events and natural disasters that will worsen and which have already cost the U.S. economy some $500 billion. But many conservatives are skeptical of the man-made contribution and of the severity of the threat.
Addressing climate change has been one of Ocasio-Cortez’s sticking points, and her ambitious and extremely expensive plan to stop it, the Green New Deal, calls for America to ditch fossil fuels completely within ten years, a timeline which would give Americans about two years of breathing room before climate Armageddon finally sets in.
Despite its high price tag — it’s estimated that it could cost trillions of dollars in sticker price and lost productivity in the gas-powered economy — the Green New Deal is relatively low on details for how to achieve the clean energy utopia. What information is in the draft plan sketches a revolutionary overhaul of the entire economy and energy supply that would require every single home, office building and car to use renewable energy.
Ocasio-Cortez criticized President Donald Trump’s administration as well as Democrats who neglect the climate and said that activists need to “breathe fire.”
“Right now, with the current administration, with the current circumstances, with the abdication of responsibility that we’ve seen from so many powerful people, even people who abdicate that responsibility by calling themselves liberal or a Democrat, or whatever it is, I feel a need for all of us to breathe fire,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez has been bucking norms and expectations of governance ever since her surprise primary victory against long-time New York representative Joe Crowley over the summer. She has amassed a huge social media following, and her methods of reaching voters, including through Instagram Live video, are already reaching older Democrats as well. She has notably criticized fact-checkers’ treatments of her statements, whom she accused of “false equivalency” and “bias” before walking her comments back.
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