Conservatives are starting beef with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez again. Earlier this month, on Showtime’s Desus & Mero talk show, the freshman congresswoman said her plan to fight climate change—the Green New Deal—would require the meat industry to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. “We gotta address factory farming,” she said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”

The right-wing media pounced, bleating that Ocasio-Cortez wanted to rip hamburgers from Americans’ hands. Then, last week, it seemed she was caught red meat–handed: Republican strategist Caleb Hull tweeted a picture of Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, eating a hamburger. The hypocrisy was supposedly self-evident.

Hi AOC, why is your Chief of Staff eating a hamburger? smh pic.twitter.com/sJanAC1Oz2 — Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) February 27, 2019

Ocasio-Cortez’s communications director, Corbin Trent, calls this claim “absurd,” noting that the Green New Deal doesn’t call for banning meat. “We want to restart America’s industrial capacity, revitalize economic growth, and ensure America’s leading in the development of new, bourgeoning green energy industries,” he told me. “That’s what the focus of the Green New Deal is. Not to take way anyone’s right to eat cheeseburgers.” Ocasio-Cortez, speaking to The New Yorker’s David Remnick last week, argued that “it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level.”

Trent and his boss are right on the merits, but there’s a grain of truth to the Republicans’ hyperbole. Any serious plan to slow global warming must call for reducing the carbon output of the meat industry. That won’t require banning hamburgers entirely, but it does mean producing (and thus, eating) less meat. Democrats can’t afford to wave away that reality—and the gun control debate shows the risks of doing so.

This all started with cow farts. On February 7, the day Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Senator Ed Markey released their Green New Deal resolution, her office released a FAQ that said the resolution “set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast...” Cows fart and burp methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.