Green New Deal: news and updates about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s climate plan

The first intro-to-economics class often starts with the question: why are diamonds expensive and water cheap? After all, we need the latter to survive.

The answer, of course, is scarcity, a concept at the core of economics. Diamonds are rare and water literally falls from the sky. Were there no scarcity, we wouldn’t need economics. But given that scarcity exists, we have a price system to signal the economic value of stuff — how much of it there is and how badly we want it.

On Monday, the Jay Inslee campaign released the fifth part of its comprehensive climate policy agenda. Cumulatively, the package of policies, called the “Climate Mission Agenda,” is close to 170 pages. Here are the five parts, all together:

Let’s take a look at this latest piece, the climate justice plan.

As a statement of principles and goals, the Green New Deal seems to take economic justice and workers’ rights pretty seriously. It calls for a federal jobs guarantee. It says we need workforce retraining, strengthening collective bargaining rights, retirement security, and universal health care.

The resolution decries “antilabor policies” and says it must be fleshed out with input from “frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, [and] worker cooperatives,” with the goal of creating “high-quality union jobs.”

The release of the 14-page Green New Deal resolution was well-timed.

It was shortly after the world’s top climate scientists told us we had 12 years to limit a global catastrophe. It was amid the worldwide student strikes and during the ramp-up of 2020 presidential coverage, which has made climate change one of the top issues in the 2020 Democratic primary.

The Green New Deal resolution was introduced to Congress in early February. Since then, there have been more than 70 days of discussion, debate, and news coverage.

So, how is the public feeling about it?

“Pretty much everyone on the plane threw up” is not a sentence most travelers want to hear.

But that’s a direct quote from the pilots’ report after United Express Flight 3833 operated by Air Wisconsin hit extreme turbulence on approach to Washington, DC, in 2018.

Update, 3/30/2019: Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution on February 7 that lays out the goals, aspirations, and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. Read about it here, and read about the criticism that followed here and here. The Senate voted the resolution down on March 26, but Ocasio-Cortez is now drafting a series of smaller, related bills. Our initial explainer, first published on December 21, follows.

If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.

The public debate over the Green New Deal has taken on a surreal quality.

The non-binding resolution introduced to Congress last month, meant to address the dual crises of climate change and growing inequality, is just 14 pages long. It only takes a minute to read it. Yet the debate has been dominated by phantasms and lurid projections, all sorts of things imagined to be in the GND, or imagined to be prohibited by it (e.g. cars and airplanes). The reality of what’s on those pages has made only glancing appearances.

Senate Democrats aren’t having it with Republican trolling on the Green New Deal.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held a procedural vote on the resolution — a wide-ranging progressive wish list aimed at making the US carbon-neutral by 2030 — this week, in an effort to get Democrats on the record about their support for the ambitious proposal. And Democrats, largely, didn’t bite.

Update 2/25/2019: The Senate is expected to hold a vote on the Green New Deal on Tuesday, March 26. Read more about the vote here. The following post, which has been lightly updated, was originally published on March 6.

The introduction of the Green New Deal resolution in Congress by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) has unleashed a cascade of events that have left Democrats poised on the edge of some fateful decisions, decisions that could determine how the Green New Deal and the larger effort to decarbonize the US economy are viewed in the coming election cycle.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, who is inching closer toward taking over the agency in a permanent capacity, took aim at the Green New Deal this week.

The Senate invoked cloture Thursday evening to advance Wheeler’s nomination to become the full administrator of the EPA. Speaking with Devin Dwyer on ABC News Live, Wheeler said the resolution proffered by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) overlooks energy stability, with major implications for health.

Ever since the midterm elections, there’s been quite a bit of buzz about the possibility of a Green New Deal, a comprehensive national plan to tackle climate change and inequality all in one. On February 7, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) finally unveiled a resolution on Capitol Hill. Rather than a set of distinct policies, it’s more of a set of goalposts with ambitions for fighting climate change and transitioning the economy in a just way.

Because it’s so vague in its particulars, the resolution has become something of a Rorschach test as observers try to figure out how a Green New Deal would materialize in the real world. Some clues emerged in what looked like a hastily assembled FAQ on Ocasio-Cortez’s website that’s since been taken down.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a surprise announcement on Tuesday: He’s planning to hold a vote on the Green New Deal. But it’s not because he thinks it’s a good idea.

The sweeping resolution to tackle climate change aggressively was proposed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) last week. McConnell now wants to put Senate Democrats on the record about whether they support it. It’s an especially prescient political move, given how many Democrats in the Senate are running for president in 2020.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) barely got to take a victory lap on her Green New Deal resolution last week before a fight broke out over an accompanying set of talking points.

The conflict was rooted in what looks like a mistake on the part of Ocasio-Cortez’s office, which released a fact sheet inconsistent with the actual legislative text of the Green New Deal resolution. In areas where the Green New Deal was purposefully vague to attract a broader base of Democratic support — such as renewable energy sources — Ocasio-Cortez’s fact sheet offered more specific and prescriptive priorities.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi offered up measured, careful praise of the newly released Green New Deal on Thursday.

“Frankly, I haven’t seen it, but I do know it’s enthusiastic, and I welcome all the enthusiasm,” Pelosi told reporters, just hours before Green New Deal sponsors Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) held their own press conference.

The Green New Deal has become an incredibly hot item on the political agenda, but to date, it has remained somewhat ill defined. It’s a broad enough concept that everyone can read their aspirations into it, which has been part of its strength, but it has also left discussion in something of a fog, since no one’s quite sure what they’re arguing about.

On Thursday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) introduced a Green New Deal resolution that lays out the goals, aspirations, and specifics of the program in a more definitive way. This is as close as there is to an “official” Green New Deal — at last, something to argue about.

The Green New Deal is here.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) are set to release a House resolution on Thursday detailing a sweeping plan to make the United States carbon neutral by 2030, upgrade efficiency and sustainability for national infrastructure and private businesses, and create “millions” of jobs in the process.

The Green New Deal ricocheted into America’s political consciousness in record time.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who drew attention to climate change during a sit-in at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office before she was even sworn in, is releasing a formal resolution in the House this week outlining her exact policy proposal for the Green New Deal — an ambitious idea that aggressively tackles climate change to reduce carbon emissions in the next 10 years. It also includes plans for universal health care and a significant expansion of the social safety net.