Republicans still control the White House and the Senate, which means passing any climate-related legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. But Ocasio-Cortez argues her goal goes beyond the new session of Congress. She says the party has to lay the groundwork now so they can tackle it right away if they win back control of the Senate and the White House in 2020.

Mission 2020

“It’s not even about passing the Senate,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s that we need to have this legislation drafted by 2020. We can’t wait until 2020 to start doing this work. We need to hit the ground running if we capture [the Senate and the White House].”

Read: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is open to supporting Pelosi: "There's an opening, for sure"

Pelosi has resisted calls for the Green New Deal, and instead aims to reinstate a House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming that Republicans scrapped once they took over the gavels eight years ago. But now she’s being pulled by the new vocal progressives in her party, even though many of the Dems' gains on Election Day were in Republican areas where new members could be endangered if they’re forced to vote on a sweeping climate proposal that’s guaranteed to die in the Senate.

"We can’t wait until 2020 to start doing this work."

The progressive’s demand for a radical rethinking of U.S. energy policy is also complicated by the defeat of an array of climate focused ballot initiatives on Election Day in a couple battleground states, including in Colorado and Arizona (and even in progressive Washington State). Democrats lost seats in 2010 after passing a cap and trade bill — that basically levies a tax on companies for their carbon use — but the politics around climate change have evolved since then, especially on the Democratic side of the aisle.