WASHINGTON, DC (AP) — Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California) was unimpressed with the Green New Deal put forth by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) to try to combat climate change and prioritize life on a jeopardized planet. When asked in an interview about the 29-year-old’s proposed legislation, the 78-year-old responded “The green dream, or whatever they call it, nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”
Ocasio-Cortez, who will be Pelosi’s age in 2067 should life persist on Earth, stressed the urgency of shifting American policy to a new awareness of environmental devastation. “We have to get to one hundred percent renewable energy in ten years. There is no other option.”
Pelosi, who has already exceeded the life expectancy of women born in 1940 by thirteen and a half years, said this was naive. “In ten years, I’ll probably be in the ground,” the Speaker laughed. “And how long will it take for me to become a fossil fuel? A few millennia? Yeah, there’s no way the planet survives that long.”
The veteran lawmaker’s glib attitude shocked the younger member of Congress. Ocasio-Cortez, who has lived her entire life hearing scientists take climate change seriously, doesn’t trust the market to solve the problem. “For 40 years we have tried to let the private sector take care of this. They said, ‘We got this, we can do this, the forces of the market are going to force us to innovate.’ Except for the fact that there’s a little thing in economics called externalities. And what that means is that a corporation can dump pollution in the river and they don’t have to pay, but taxpayers have to pay.”
Pelosi, who was born 21 months before Pearl Harbor, retorted. “I don’t know why it’s so ‘important’ to this new generation to ‘save the planet,'” she said, utilizing derisive air-quotes. “She’s in Congress now and she’d better learn that here, we don’t think about pie-in-the-sky nonsense like ‘the survival of Earth.'”
Ocasio-Cortez, whose home district could be underwater in her actuarial lifespan, was left unable to comment further by a mix of sorrow and rage.
When asked why Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts), who is 72, also cared about the Green New Deal, Pelosi was quick to quip. “Oh, I guess he actually loves his children.”
