'People Are Dying'
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Defends Green New Deal
NBC News
AOC on Republican inaction on climate change
After members of the Republican Party called the Green New Deal “elitist,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tore into them for being callous, shallow, and hypocritical monsters.
Her response was beautiful and it was the kind of response that we’ve been waiting for Democrats to deliver in the face of Republican obstruction for quite some time.
Ocasio-Cortez’s righteous - and accurate - anger about poverty and the environment
‘This is not an elitist issue’
The occasion was the marking up of legislation aimed
at addressing homelessness. Rep. Sean P. Duffy (R-Wis.) introduced an
amendment to the bill aimed not at improving it but, instead, at
demonstrating how addressing climate change can increase the cost for
things like housing.
“I think it’s rich that we
talk about how we care about the poor, but all the while we’ll sign on
to bills that dramatically increase the cost of a family to get into a
home,” Duffy said, criticizing Democratic colleagues for joining
Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal
effort. The Green New Deal proposes a sweeping approach to combating
climate change, including retrofitting existing buildings to improve
energy efficiency — at great expense in the case of affordable housing,
according to Duffy.
“I don’t think we should not focus on the rich,
wealthy elites who will look at this and go, ‘I love it, because I’ve
got big money in the bank; everyone should do this. We should all sign
onto it,’ ” Duffy said. “But if you’re a poor family, just trying to
make ends meet, it’s a horrible idea.”
“It’s
kind of like saying, ‘I’ll sign on to the Green New Deal, but I’ll take a
private jet from D.C. to California,’ ” he continued. “A private jet!
Or ‘I’ll take my Uber SUV, I won’t take the train. Or I’ll go to Davos,
and I’ll fly my private jet.’ The hypocrisy!”
Rep.
Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Financial Services
Committee, asked Ocasio-Cortez whether she would like to respond.
Ocasio-Cortez did.
“I am very encouraged by the
sudden concern on the other side of the aisle about climate change, and
it makes me feel as though our efforts have been effective,” she began,
“at the very least in distancing between the dangerous strategy of
climate denial, which we know is costing us lives — at least 3,000 in
Puerto Rico in Hurricane Maria.”
But concerns about the environment, she continued, were hardly “elitist.”
“You
want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air
and clean water is elitist?
Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx
which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the
country,” she said.
“Tell that to the families in Flint whose kids have —
their blood is ascending in lead levels. Their brains are damaged for
the rest of their lives. Call them elitist.
You’re telling them that
those kids are trying to get on a plane to Davos?
People are dying. They
are dying.
“And the response across the other
side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment five minutes before a
hearing in a markup?” she continued.
“This is serious. This should not
be a partisan issue. This is about our constituents and all of our
lives.
Iowa, Nebraska, broad swaths of the Midwest are drowning right
now. Underwater. Farms, towns that will never be recovered and never
come back."
She added:
“If we tell the American public that we
are more willing to invest and bail out big banks than we are willing to
invest in our farmers and our urban families, then I don’t know what
we’re here doing. I don’t know what we’re here doing.”
‘This is not an elitist issue’:
AOC on Republican inaction on climate change
Ocasio-Cortez
is addressing two points at once: the effects of air and water
pollution on poorer communities; and the effects of climate change on
those same communities. Both are accurate, according to scientific
research.
Both globally and in the United States, poorer people are more likely to be exposed
to air pollution. This makes sense: Housing in industrial areas or near
major roadways is less expensive, meaning it is more accessible to
low-income Americans — who are then exposed to particulates and other
pollutants like nitrogen dioxide. The American Lung Association has robust documentation of this link.
Polluted water, as with the lead-tainted water in Flint, Mich., has a similarly uneven effect. Heavy industry can pollute local waterways, and smaller and poorer communities are less able to afford proper systems for filtering out contaminants.
Ocasio-Cortez also noted the flooding that has affected Iowa and Nebraska in recent weeks, flooding that bears the hallmarks
of being related to the warming climate. Those floods have revealed
another way in which poorer rural communities are affected by water
pollution, as the Associated Press reported
Wednesday: A million privately owned wells in the region are at risk of
being tainted by polluted floodwaters. Well owners are responsible for
doing their own decontamination once the floods recede, an expensive
proposition. Flooding aside, rural areas were already more likely to be affected by water pollution.
The
broader Duffy-Ocasio-Cortez debate, though, focused on climate change.
There, too, Ocasio-Cortez’s arguments about the relevance of the subject
to poorer communities is accurate.
In November, the U.S. government released
its fourth National Climate Assessment, looking at the likely effects
of the warming climate on the country. Its findings support
Ocasio-Cortez’s point directly: Climate change is more problematic for
poorer Americans, not less.
For example:
Multiple
lines of evidence demonstrate that low-income communities and some
communities of color are experiencing higher rates of exposure to
adverse environmental conditions and social conditions that can reduce
their resilience to the impacts of climate change. Populations with
increased health and social vulnerability typically have less access to
information, resources, institutions, and other factors to prepare for
and avoid the health risks of climate change.
Across all climate-related
health risks, children, older adults, low-income communities, and some
communities of color are disproportionately impacted.
Why?
Disrupted access to public transportation. Disruptions to food systems.
Lower ability to prepare for and deal with extreme heat or increased
mosquito-borne diseases. Changes to agricultural and fishing patterns.
Living in more risk-prone areas such as isolated rural regions or places
with poor infrastructure.
The report also gets
to Duffy’s point about the need to upgrade housing across the board. It
recommends that planners consider “green gentrification” — making
community upgrades that increase property values but might then drive
out lower-income individuals. It warns at another point specifically
about upgrading housing stock and, therefore, making it unaffordable.
One way to potentially avoid that problem is to do
precisely what Duffy disparages: upgrade public housing, as well.
Focusing on upgrades only where residents can pay for them means an
uneven distribution of upgrades.
“If urban
responses do not address social inequities and listen to the voices of
vulnerable populations, they can inadvertently harm low-income and
minority residents,” the National Climate Assessment reads.
“This
is about our lives. This is about American lives, and it should not be
partisan,” Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday. “Science should not be partisan.”
She could point to a climate report released under President Trump to reinforce her argument.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/27/ocasio-cortezs-righteous-accurate-anger-about-poverty-environment
Anderson Cooper mocks lawmaker's
use of props on Senate floor
AOC Blows Up Republicans
For Calling Green New Deal “Elitist”
No comments:
Post a Comment