Former Vice President Joe Biden defended his record on climate change on Tuesday, asking critics like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to “calm down” until he releases his plan.
“I’ve never been middle of the road on the environment … This is a long campaign and everybody should calm down a little bit,” Biden said to reporters in New Hampshire. “Nothing middle of the road.”
Biden did not specifically mention Ocasio-Cortez, but the famous freshman Democrat socialist has helped lead the charge against the former Vice President.
Ocasio-Cortez called out Biden after Reuters reported that his team was searching for a “middle of the road” plan on climate change after Congressional Democrats launched a dramatic plan through the Green New Deal.
“I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act then are going to try and come back today and say we need a middle-of-the-road approach to save our lives,” Ocasio-Cortez said at a climate change event on Monday. “That is too much for me.”
On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez called Biden’s proposal a “deal breaker.”
Ocasio-Cortez has not minced words about her feelings about Biden, noting in April that that former vice-president’s campaign did “not particularly animate me right now.”
“I can understand why people would be excited by that, this idea that we can go back to the good old days with Obama, with Obama’s vice president,” she said. “There’s an emotional element to that, but I don’t want to go back. I want to go forward.”