Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) unleashed an impassioned defense of her Green New Deal during a House committee meeting on Tuesday, the same day the landmark environmental proposal failed to advance in the Senate.

During a meeting of the House Committee on Financial Services, Ocasio-Cortez used her time to address Republican critiques of the proposal, a set of ambitious policy recommendations meant to tackle climate change and rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans have lambasted the Green New Deal as untenable, but forced the Senate to vote on the measure without a hearing in an attempt to get Democrats to go “on the record” about their support.

At 0-57, the nonbinding measure fell short of the necessary 60-vote threshold needed. No senators voted in support of it. Four members of the Democratic caucus voted against it. And most Democrats simply voted “present.”

However, Ocasio-Cortez said that while the proposal may have gone down, Americans would eventually need to pay to address climate change one way or another.

“We’re going to pay for this whether we pass a Green New Deal or not. We need to decide whether we’re going to pay to react or we’re going to pay to be proactive,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I’m very sad to say that the government knew that climate change was real starting as far back as 1989. I’m going to turn 30 this year, and for the entire 30 years of my lifetime, we did not make substantial investments to prepare our entire country for what we knew was coming.”