It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)