Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took to Twitter Friday afternoon, renewing calls for the implementation of the Green New Deal amid a national heatwave and severe flooding in New York City.
The lawmaker posted a video, showing severe flooding at the Court Square subway station in New York City.
“This is what the climate crisis is doing, and will do, to American infrastructure,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
“This is why we need a #GreenNewDeal that invests in a solution on the scale of the problem – and can help our nation transition, adjust, and prevent further damage in the climate crisis,” she continued:
The freshman lawmaker’s Green New Deal rolled out with a rocky start. While it asserted that “human activity is the dominant cause of observed climate change over the past century” and added that “a changing climate is causing sea levels to rise and an increase in wildfires, severe storms, droughts, and other extreme weather events that threaten human life,” it also teased giving economic stability to people “unwilling” to work.
It added:
We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.
Last month, Ocasio-Cortez – who has repeatedly touted the “12 years” doomsday deadline – said that any viable climate change solution needs to come with a $10 trillion price tag “to have a shot.” Some studies estimate that the Green New Deal could cost U.S. taxpayers between $51 and $93 trillion over the next ten years alone.
This month, Ocasio-Cortez, along with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), pushed colleagues to consider a resolution that would declare a “climate emergency”: