New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that young people are right to doubt whether it is ethical to have children given the projected effects climate change will have in their lifetimes.
The self-described Democratic Socialist appeared in a live stream on Instagram to discuss climate change Monday.
“Our planet is going to face disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,” she said from her kitchen. “And so it’s basically like, there is a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult and it does lead, I think young people, to have a legitimate question. Ya know, should—is it okay to still have children?”
“Not just financially because people are graduating with 20, 30, 100 thousand dollars of student loan debt so they can’t even afford to have kids in the house, but there’s also just this basic moral question, like, what do we do?”
“And even if you don’t have kids, there are still children here in the world and we have a moral obligation to them to leave a better world to them,” she added.
AOC takes shot at Dianne Feinstein:
Ocasio-Cortez also hit out at California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was recorded telling a group of children in her office that the proposed Green New Deal legislation is untenable.
“You know what’s interesting about this group? I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I know what I’m doing. You come in here, and you say, ‘It has to be my way or the highway.’ I don’t respond to that. I’ve gotten elected. I just ran. I was elected by almost a million-vote plurality, and I know what I’m doing. Maybe people should listen a little bit,” Feinstein told the children. (Full video here)
Ocasio-Cortez said in response to the video that working on one issue for decades does not make you “qualified” to solve the issue.
"The issue has gotten worse. So I don't think that working on an issue for 30 years alone is what qualifies as-as what makes someone qualified to solve an issue," Ocasio-Cortez said.
"That said, there are a lot of people that have been doing this work for decades that have proposed ambitious solutions for years and have not been listened to," she added. "So it's not just, 'I've been doing this for 30 years,' so we need to listen to them because frankly people have been failing at the same things for 30 or 40 years. What we need to do is say, 'What solutions have not been tried yet? And what ambitious scale have we not shot at yet.' And let's do it.”
AOC doubles down on call for Green New Deal:
“The whole premise of the Green New Deal, is that we’re screwed on climate. I’m sorry to break it to you,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the livestream. “When it comes to climate in particular, we’re actually screwed. There is a global threat to the planet.”
“At this point, we don’t even have to prove it. Just walk outside in the winter in a lot of places, and its, either way worse than you’re used to, or way warmer than you’re used to,” she said. “Hurricanes, storms, wildfires. We are dying now.”
Though there is no Green New Deal legislation (there is a nonbinding resolution that has been introduced), Ocasio-Cortez and allies like Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey are calling for “a new national social, industrial and economic mobilization on a scale not seen since World War II and the New Deal.”
The wide-ranging set of proposals includes “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers;” a federal jobs guarantee, Medicare for All, investment in infrastructure, and guarantees to clean water and a sustainable environment.
