Via the Free Beacon, my plan to drastically reduce carbon emissions is to nuke China, since they’re the global leader and will continue to run on fossil fuels even if we passed the Green New Deal tomorrow.

So now I’m the boss, I guess. How ’bout dah?

Is her bravado aimed only at right-wing critics of the GND or those on the left as well? She can’t mean to suggest here that she’s the first Democrat to try to move climate-change legislation; her co-sponsor, Ed Markey, actually got a cap-and-trade bill through the House 10 years ago. (The Democratic Senate never brought it to the floor.) As for her belief that she’s “driving the agenda” by having introduced the bill, that’s true but she may be driving it towards a brick wall. Her huge fan following has scared 2020 candidates into backing the plan but the fact that the GND is transparently unworkable makes it useful to the GOP. If the Green New Deal is the only game in town on climate change, or at least the only game in town that’s offering a solution as drastic as progressives believe the problem is, then it’s easy for Republicans to argue that Democrats’ entire global-warming agenda is unworkable and potentially ruinous to American industry. Some liberals are worried that the GND could set back the effort to get Congress to address climate change rather than advance it.

The punchline is that if/when Democrats are once again in position to get legislation enacted, there’s like an 80 percent chance that Ocasio-Cortez will vote no on the final bill. Whatever ends up getting through the House will be waaaaaay less ambitious than the GND is. Hardcore Green-Party-style environmentalists will spit that it’s completely unequal to the challenge, a “corporate” bill or whatever, and demand that their favorite congresswoman express their contempt for it through her vote. She won’t disappoint.

The best part of the clip, by the way, is how this allegedly existential threat to humanity is framed by AOC in terms of some petty psychodrama about lacking self-confidence. She used to doubt herself, see, but then she achieved self-empowerment by ignoring her critics and putting her bold solutions out there. As if the people complaining (in her words) that “oh it’s unrealistic, oh it’s vague, oh it doesn’t address this little minute thing” about a massive government power grab that would literally revolutionize how the United States functions are just mean girls in the cafeteria looking to tear her down. I thought Kevin Williamson was a little (although only a little) unfair when he wrote of AOC and the GND a few weeks ago that “Sandy’s war is not a struggle over the future of Earth — it is only a struggle over the future of Sandy.” But watching her defend her big proposal here in terms not dissimilar from that, I wonder.