Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the wunderkind congresswoman from New York, has been getting most of the credit for the Green New Deal, an ambitious plan to fight global warming that has become increasingly popular among Democrats. But Howie Hawkins wants to set the record straight. “A lot of people think AOC thought it up,” he told me by phone Wednesday. “But I’m the original Green New Dealer.”

Hawkins, a 66-year-old Green Party member from New York, says he was the first American political candidate to run on the promise of a Green New Deal. During his run for governor in 2010, he proposed a plan to fight climate change “with the same urgency, speed, and commitment of resources that our country demonstrated in converting to war production for the mobilization for World War II.” To reduce New York’s carbon emissions to net zero over ten years, Hawkins’s plan would “devote resources to and create jobs in renewable energy, public transit and organic agriculture,” the New York Times reported. And those resources would come from progressive tax reform, including massive taxes on the rich.

Some greens are now irked at the Democrats’ attempt to claim ownership of the idea. “It’s a little frustrating to not have a dialogue between those of us who have been working on the Green New Deal for quite some time, and people who want to keep it solely in the realm of the Democratic Party,” said Ian Schlakman, a Baltimore-based Green Party member who’s running for president. “There are some Democrats who acknowledge the existence of third parties and independents. Congresswoman Cortez is not one of those people.”

Hawkins—who told me he’s launching a presidential exploratory committee in the coming weeks—also thinks the Green New Deal is being unfairly co-opted. But he’s happy that it’s become mainstream, because now the Green Party can expose the Democrats for the corporatists they truly are. “It’s our opportunity to explain how the Democratic establishment ... chopped away the pieces,” he said.

The question is whether the public will listen. Once widely accused of spoiling a presidential election that led to two wars, the Green Party has been mostly relegated to a political punchline, thanks in part to the foibles of its former leader Jill Stein. Now, the Green New Deal—which helped to differentiate the eco-socialists Greens from the Democrats—has been coopted. The Democrats are even warming to socialist ideas. So does America even need a Green Party anymore? Or does America need it now more than ever?

