Green New Deal Fails Senate Vote

“Today’s #GreenNewDeal vote is a partisan stunt to side-step needed debate on climate action, and give Republicans cover to put oil lobby checks over our kids,” Gillibrand tweeted earlier Tuesday, adding ” … I don’t play ball with bad-faith farces.”

“Climate change is an existential threat, and confronting it requires bold action,” Harris said in a statement following the vote. ” … Political stunts won’t get us anywhere. Combatting this crisis first requires the Republican majority to stop denying science and finally admit that climate change is real and humans are the dominant cause. Then we can get serious about taking action to tackle the climate crisis at the scale of the problem.”

However, Democratic presidential candidate John Hickenlooper said Tuesday that he opposes the Green New Deal. The former Colorado governor said the proposal sets “unachievable goals” and shuns the private sector.

In explaining his “no” vote, Manchin said in a statement: “This climate problem is a massive one and we must act, but aspirational documents will not solve this crisis –real solutions focused on innovation will … The truth is even if we zero out our country’s use of fossil fuels tomorrow, we must face the facts that other nations have invested in and will continue to use fossil fuels to develop their economies for decades to come. We cannot successfully address our climate challenge by eliminating sources of energy that countries are committed to using.”

Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said Democrats were being hypocritical by refusing to vote for their own plan. “I’ve never seen a bill sponsored by a dozen people who don’t want to vote on it,” he said.

At a news conference earlier Tuesday, McConnell said he believed climate change was real and at least partially caused by humans, but said the real question facing lawmakers was, “How do you address it?”

“The way to do this, consistent with American values and American capitalism is through technology and innovation,” McConnell said. ” … Not to shut down your economy, throw people out of work, make people reconstruct their homes, get out of their cars, you get the whole drift here. This is nonsense, and if you’re going to sign on to nonsense, you ought to have to vote for nonsense.”

“[McConnell’s] stunt is backfiring and it’s becoming clearer and clearer to the American people that the Republican Party is way behind the times on clean energy and that Democrats are the party willing to take action,” said Schumer, D-N.Y., who asked, “… What’s the Republican Party proposal? Is it more coal?”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., the Green New Deal’s main sponsor in the House, accused McConnell earlier Tuesday of rushing the resolution to the floor “because he doesn’t want to save our planet. Because he thinks we can drink oil in 30 years when all our water is poisoned.”