The legislative prospects for the measure were bleak in the foreseeable future; a resolution is essentially a statement of intention, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has no plan to bring it to the floor for a vote, according to a Democratic leadership aide with direct knowledge of her plans.
Pelosi countered with a move of her own on Thursday, naming the Democrats who will lead a new special select committee on climate change — and leaving off the chief architect of the Green New Deal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.
Still, the measure, drafted by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., gives shape and substance to an idea that, until now, had been a vague rallying cry for a grand stimulus package around climate change.
The proposal does not set a date for eliminating fossil fuels. It does call for generating 100 percent of electricity through renewable sources such as wind and solar in the next 10 years, eliminating greenhouse emissions in manufacturing and forestry “as much as is technologically feasible,” and re-engineering cars and trucks to end climate pollution.
The measure also includes social justice goals not usually attached to anti-pollution plans, such as eradicating poverty by creating high-paid jobs.
But the resolution goes far beyond that, touching on themes that are animating a rising left but that rarely reach the halls of Congress. It aims to “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression of indigenous peoples, communities of color, migrant communities, deindustrialized communities, depopulated rural communities, the poor, low-income workers, women, the elderly, the unhoused, people with disabilities, and youth.”
Sixty House members and nine senators are co-sponsoring the resolution, including several presidential candidates, according to a fact sheet provided by Ocasio-Cortez’s office. There is no mention of costs or how to pay for the proposed changes.
Pelosi has been decidedly cool to the proposal, but not the movement behind it.
“Frankly, I haven’t seen it,” the speaker told reporters when asked about the Green New Deal during her weekly news conference at the Capitol on Thursday. “But I do know it is enthusiastic, and we welcome all the enthusiasm that is out there.”
People close to Pelosi said she is wary of moving too quickly, mindful of her own past mistakes. A decade ago she pushed the last major climate change measure hard, an ambitious bill to cap emissions of climate-warming pollution, then allow industries to trade emissions credits on a pollution credit market. Through force of will, she got the cap-and-trade measure through the House, only to see it die in the Senate without a vote. The next year, Democrats were swept from power.
In that Congress, she had a Democratic Senate and Democratic President Barack Obama. This time, she has a president who calls climate change a hoax and a Senate in the control of Mitch McConnell, a Republican from the coal state of Kentucky.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.