Ocasio-Cortez Breaks Down Why We Can't Free Market Our Way Out of Climate Change
Friday night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes to talk about climate change and the Green New Deal. This comes after an eventful week, where the plan to combat climate change failed in the Senate (in a Republican-led move that Democrats have decried as a "stunt" vote) and Ocasio-Cortez went viral in a clip decrying complaints that the Green New Deal is an "elitist" issue.
In her appearance on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez repeatedly returned to the idea that the problems facing the country right now are tied to systemic, economic problems,things that are deliberate choices about how we run both the government and the economy.
At one point, Chris Hayes asked specifically about complaints that the Green New Deal sounds like socialism. In response, Ocasio-Cortez explains that decades of hands-off approaches had consistently failed:
Here's a couple of issues here. One is that, if you want to bring up these labels and have that conversation and this, that and the other, and have that whole conversation, that's a whole other thing. But the one thing that we cannot rebuke and the one thing that we cannot deny is that climate change is a problem of market failure and externalities in our economics. And moreover, Exxon Moo—Exxon Moo—Exxon Mobil knew that climate change was real and man-made as far back as 1970. The entire United States government knew that climate change was real and human-caused in 1989, the year I was born. So, the initial response was, "Let the market handle it, they will do it." Forty years, and free-market solutions have not changed our position. So, this does not mean that we change our entire structure of government. What it means is that we need to do something—something—and that is what this solution is about.
