She is truly the gift that keeps on giving. As The Hill promised last week, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joined Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday for a town hall on climate change.
The town hall, which will be held at the U.S. Capitol and live-streamed online nationally, is “aimed at addressing the global threat of climate change and exploring solutions that can protect the planet from devastation and create tens of millions of good-paying jobs,” according to the Facebook event posting.
If the hot air that rose from the panel (which also included CNN’s Van Jones, aka Barack Obama’s “green czar”) could be harnessed, it would power a city the size of New York for a solid week.
Ocasio-Cortez was in rare form, promising that a switch to 100% renewable energy would bring economic, social, and racial justice to the U.S. Watch:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Ocasio-Cortez on her climate change plan: “And it’s inevitable that we can use the transition to 100% renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America”
Translation: She wants to destroy capitalism pic.twitter.com/yLhVOhFuaO
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) December 4, 2018
You’d think to listen to her that the bold claims she makes have never been tested. However, in 2015, the Center for Energy Policy and the Environment at the Manhattan Institute released a report, which found that California’s green energy initiative had imposed the greatest financial burden on the poorest customers in the inland and Central Valley regions of the state. A similar experiment in Texas yielded the same result, except that in the Lone Star State, every resident was adversely affected by the implementation of wind farms, which was originally budgeted at $4.9 billion but ended up costing the state $6.8 billion.
So much for economic justice.
As for social and racial justice, California in May of this year mandated that all newly constructed homes have solar panels installed on their roofs. So how’s that working out for prospective homeowners in the Golden State? According to Forbes, the law has raised housing and energy prices but done little to reduce emissions. Moreover, with blacks earning 75% as much as whites, according to the Pew Research Center, the dream of owning a home becomes more distant with each new solar panel installed.
