Newly-minted 29-year-old congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has championed a Green New Deal, a proposal which aims to mitigate climate change through massive investments in clean-energy technology. The White House said it would ignore the Democrat, who claims the world will end in about a decade if people don’t think about the environment.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit back at White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who told her to leave climate change up to God and said the Trump administration would ignore the freshman congresswoman’s apocalypse predictions.
Ocasio-Cortez shot back with verses from the Book of Genesis, which describe people’s duty to “serve and protect” the Earth. “You shouldn’t need a Bible to tell you to protect our planet, but it does anyway,” she added.
The congresswoman, who represents New York’s 14th Congressional District, had earlier warned that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” She was apparently referring to a 2018 UN-backed report which said climate change would become irreversible if people did not limit carbon emissions.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the most prominent backers of the so-called Green New Deal, a programme developed by young US activists that aims to tackle climate change by expanding renewable power sources, building an energy-efficient power grid, removing greenhouse gas emissions and investing in “green” jobs and infrastructure.
This week, she introduced a resolution to set up a House Select Committee on a Green New Deal that would draw up a national climate plan.
President Donald Trump has been sceptical of climate change: he withdrew the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, citing its negative effect on the national economy, and said he “did not believe” his own government’s report which said that the US would lose hundreds of billions of dollars due to climate change by the end of the century.