Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) criticized former vice president Joe Biden’s climate change plan Wednesday, while praising that of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) as the “gold standard,” the best in the presidential field.
Ocasio-Cortez co-authored the “Green New Deal” earlier this year. It calls for the total elimination of fossil fuels as an energy source in the United States by 2030. (Previously, the most ambitious plan, adopted by California, aimed to do the same by 2045; critics have pointed out that no one is quite sure how the state will achieve that aggressive goal.)
Biden’s plan, released Wednesday morning, calls for fossil fuels to be eliminated by 2050, after spending $1.7 trillion in federal funds and $5 trillion in state, local, and private funds. The former vice president also called for building “small modular nuclear reactors at half the construction cost of today’s reactors” to help replace fossil fuel energy.
But 2050 is too late, Ocasio-Cortez said, according to The Hill. “Scientifically, anything that is less than helping us cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 is going to be too late,” she reportedly said.
“It’s a start, and I think that what that has shown is a dramatic shift in the right direction, but we need to keep pushing for a plan that is at the scale of the problem.”
Ocasio-Cortez said in January that the world would end in 12 years — i.e. by 2031 — if the U.S. did not change its policy radically. She claimed later that she was not speaking literally. Yet she continues to apply the year 2030 as a litmus test for climate change proposals.
Ocasio-Cortez told The Hill that she prefers Inslee’s plan our of all this that have been introduced thus far: “I do think that Jay Inslee’s plan is a phenomenal blueprint and example of where we need to go. It’s got the scale, the jobs and justice,” she said.
Inslee, who is running a single-issue campaign focused on climate change, aims to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2035, ABC News reported.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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