DETROIT, Michigan — Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) shortened the Democrats’ climate change doomsday clock from twelve years to ten during the first night of the second Democratic debate on CNN on Tuesday.

“I listen to scientists and they’re very clear. We don’t have more than ten years to get this right, and we won’t meet that challenge with half-steps or half-measures,” he said.

Previously, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the author of the Green New Deal, had said that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” She later said she was speaking metaphorically, and may have been referring to a point of no return rather than an actual physical end to the world itself.

However, her legislation did adopt a ten-year deadline, as Breitbart News noted at the time:

The core of the Green New Deal is a proposal, within 10 years, to eliminate “pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” and to meet “100 percent of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Not even California, the most ambitious environmental state, proposes to achieve that until 2045 — and even California has no idea how to run the world’s 5th-largest economy on wind and sunshine alone.

Prior to the debate, a large Green New Deal protest marched past the Fox Theatre in Detroit. At least one participant wore a T-shirt that read, “12 Years.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.