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Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey unveiled a c ongressional resolution calling for a Green New Deal, a sweeping, ambitious list of projects and goals that would help steer the world away from climate apocalypse and address inequality at the same time. Knowing this was coming, Nancy Pelosi gave an interview to Politico’s Playbook in which she trashed the idea (emphasis ours):

The California Democrat did agree to launch a select committee on climate change, similar to the one she created back in 2007, when she first became speaker. Pelosi said Wednesday, however, the panel would not be tasked with writing a specific bill, and brushed off the idea of the Green New Deal as a “suggestion.” “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” Pelosi said. “The green dream or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it right?”


That’s that Pelosi shade we love! You threw down on those climate apocalypse-averse losers! Haha, those idiots and their stupid “ green dream”—what is this, legislation or a strain of weed??? Epic win, Ma’am.

Less offensive but more baffling was this sentiment:

In the past decade, she has already seen Democrats try and fail to pass a sweeping cap-and-trade climate law. The next attempt, she said, will need broader support. “This time it has to be Congresswide,” Pelosi said.


A very generous interpretation of “Congresswide” would be that she means Senate and House Democrats work together, because she could not possibly be so naive as to think any climate bill that has broad Republican support would be worth the paper it’s written on. Everything they want is the opposite of this! Nothing is going to happen until 2021, and even then it’ll only be possible if Democrats take the Senate and abolish the filibuster—in the absence of the Republican P arty waking up one morning and changing, uh, literally everything about itself. They do not share any of the goals of the Green New Deal.

And those goals are impressively broad, with some caveats—the resolution doesn’t explicitly call for ending the use of fossil fuels, for example. That’s partly because today’s resolution isn’t a bill—it doesn’t actually create programs or policies or fund them. It’s more like a To Do list for a saner government, a vision of how inequality and climate change can be addressed at once. It calls for meeting 100 percent of our energy demands through clean, renewable sources; upgrading buildings for energy efficiency; “overhauling” U.S. transit, including with high-speed rail; and public investments in clean technologies.

But it also calls for policies to address inequality and the top-down class war that’s currently being waged: a jobs guarantee, strengthening unions, and providing everyone with healthcare and housing. In other words, it’s a much broader reimagining of what America could be doing than most Democrats—particularly leading presidential candidates—have signed onto in years.

Anyway, it’s super dope for the Speaker of the House to dismiss this as a “suggestion” and a “dream,” as we hurtle towards climate apocalypse, inequality grows, wages stagnate, and life expectancy shrinks. We love it!