The Green New Deal (GND) quickly became the subject of such mockery that its godmother, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, attempted to scrub the talking points from her website and pretend they never existed at all. The effort to erase this political disaster is one of the biggest political gaslighting operations in recent memory. It happened so fast that half of the online Left is still touting the GND as the irresistible wave of the future, while the other half thinks it’s a trick concocted by right-wing pranksters.
The Green New Deal was announced on Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s website on Tuesday, February 5, accompanied by a set of talking points presented as “Frequently Asked Questions.” Of course, no one could be “frequently asking questions” about a plan that did not previously exist, but politicians long ago hijacked computer lingo to package their talking points as “FAQ sheets” to give the impression that everyone is buzzing about whatever idea the politician is pushing.
Ocasio-Cortez apparently did not like the buzz that erupted around her Green New Deal FAQ, because she scrubbed it from her website on Thursday, February 7 after 48 hours of ridicule and alarm.
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The whole point behind the FAQ sheet was to tease the formal rollout the resolution she and Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts introduced on Thursday. The resolution proved to be less specific than the FAQ sheet – but, of course, that’s what FAQ sheets are for. It has become very common for politicians to give relatively vague and aspirational speeches, then direct voters to consult their websites for more details.
The FAQ sheet was revised before it was deleted entirely, which completely demolishes the narrative that it was not a serious document or was posted by accident. Ocasio-Cortez and her staff tried to save the document by surgically altering its most ridiculous elements before they gave up and shipped the whole thing off to the ozone layer.
It is also worth noting that the FAQ sheet was shopped around by Ocasio-Cortez staffers to major media organizations, including NPR and the Washington Post. NPR published the FAQ before interviewing Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday morning, and she raised no objection to what they published. Clearly, this was not some phantom early draft posted on the website by accident.
Inconveniently for Democrat efforts to flush the original release of the Green New Deal down the memory hole, the resolution introduced by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Markey still contained plenty of eye-rolling insanities, such as destroying the American industrial base to achieve “net-zero greenhouse gas emissions” within ten years.
Climate cultists love to pretend this is a reasonable objective that could be reached with minimal cost and a bit of compromise – say, zero emissions in 12 years instead of 10, chugging in just ahead of the planetary apocalypse Ocasio-Cortez recently predicted – but in truth it would cost trillions of dollars, shove the U.S. economy back into an uncompetitive Stone Age, end the standard of living middle-class Americans have grown accustomed to, and cause incredible amounts of environmental damage.
This is especially true for zero-emissions schemes that do not rely heavily upon nuclear power, of which the GND takes a dim view. The original FAQ sheet actually called for a total ban on nuclear power and decommissioning every existing reactor within ten years, which is physically impossible.
Markey himself awkwardly admitted the zero-emissions plan assumes currently nonexistent technologies will be developed over the next decade, making it possible for air travel to continue without carbon emissions. Less creative defenders of the proposal grunted that everyone will just have to grow accustomed to changes in their lifestyles.
Even more inconvenient for Green New Deal revisionists, the resolution introduced on Thursday was still packed with all kinds of madcap social-justice spending that had nothing whatsoever to do with the environment.
“This is really about providing justice for communities and just transitions for communities, so really the heart of the Green New Deal is about social justice,” as Ocasio-Cortez herself put it on Thursday.