On Tuesday, Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that “the transition to 100 percent [renewable] energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social, and racial justice in the United States of America.”
And within hours, right-wingers across the country got their panties in a collective bunch. National Review, Hot Air, and— of course— the Daily Caller all had a mega-meltdown because, to quote Hot Air, “She really let the cat out of the bag here, admitting that the left views climate change as a ‘vehicle’ to achieve their social and economic goals.”
This is how conservatives see this: They’re not capable of recognizing that the least privileged among us— who tend to be minorities— are the ones who suffer most from climate-change-related natural disasters, and other environmental degradation (see here, here and here for a hyper-local example of this where a GOP-connected property developer basically is getting waved right along by the Texas Council on Environmental Quality as he tries to build a toxic waste dump right next to where a bunch of poor, Hispanic Texans live— and in the middle of a floodplain). It’s nice that some Republicans are getting on board with more policy like carbon taxes aimed at reducing the aggressive warming of the planet, halting it or even reversing it, but it’s mostly lip service and too little too late.
Of course, there are also problems on the Democratic side of the aisle, namely infighting over nuclear energy. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders (at whose event she made the social justice comments) are in the firmly anti-nuclear energy camp.
But seasoned policy-makers who have more narrowly focused their time and energy on environmental issues and climate change, specifically, take a different view. Notably, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse— probably the Senate’s biggest and most high-impact climate hawk— told Axios recently “I think that the climate change problem is now so dire and so immediate that we can't afford to turn away from any technologies that promise to reduce our dependence on fuels that emit carbon dioxide when burned. And nuclear is a part of that portfolio.”
He probably has a point. As much as nuclear scares people, as Whitehouse also told Axios, there are ways of mitigating against the risk that haven’t really caught on in the US, maybe because a lot of our policymakers are reluctant to copy Europe, and France specifically (remember all the old, Bush-era jibing of France? Yeah, that still has an effect on people’s willingness to adopt “French” policies). Whitehouse told Axios also that if we just copied France, and reused spent fuel, generating electricity with nuclear would be a whole lot more politically-tenable, which matters because nuclear does not emit CO2.
Sanders has been a longtime anti-nuclear advocate, which is understandable on one level given when he came up in politics and life more broadly, and the risks associated with nuclear then (which are different today). But one of the problems with this is, thanks in part to his advocacy, his home state of Vermont has ditched nuclear energy. That sounds nice, but in practice, it has actually meant Vermont has wound up emitting more CO2, and therefore contributing more to climate change than it should because during last year’s cold snap, power was literally being generate by burning… oil.
Progressives can agree to disagree over the merits of nuclear, but I’ll wager there’s not a progressive in the country that thinks burning oil to generate electricity is really acceptable. Likewise, it’s unlikely that many progressives are going to look favorably on Mike Bloomberg, who just took a pro-ethanol stance ahead of an anticipated presidential run, even though ethanol is really bad even in non-obvious ways in terms of its climate change effects.
There are a lot of conservatives who think that burning oil to make electricity and running on more ethanol is totally fine, though— probably the same people who think that with her comments, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is letting slip that action “ostensibly” aimed at combating clime change is actually a super-secret stealth move to turn the United States into the Soviet Union and achieve “economic justice.” (Trump loves ethanol, and manifestly doesn’t care about the impact fossil fuel burning is having on the climate).
These people will be united in opposing anything that might be done to try to combat climate change, whether it’s AOC’s platform, Whitehouse’s platform, or even Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s really quite conservative and reasonable plan to require publicly traded companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s a prime reason why it’s really important that progressives get on the same page about this and formulate broad, comprehensive policy that will actually stop the planet from overheating that is based on what is technologically feasible now and won’t have climate-worsening side effects down the road. Plus, it’s fun “triggering” the snowflakes on the right.