Rep. Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and The Intercept teamed up to create an illustrated video detailing her imagination of the future after the Green New Deal.
The bad news: Miami is underwater after being hit by a hurricane.
The good news: Indigenous communities teach union workers how to restore the land after they dig up pipelines. Elections are publicly funded, and everyone has a job.
The New York progressive narrated her story of what’s to come in the video, “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” released Wednesday.
“The wave began when Democrats took back the House in 2018, and then the Senate and White House in 2020, and launched the decade of the Green New Deal, a flurry of legislation that kicked off our social and ecological transformation to save the planet,” she said. “It was the kind of swing-for-the-fence ambition we needed.”
Climate change is here + we’ve got a deadline: 12 years left to cut emissions in half.
A #GreenNewDeal is our plan for a world and a future worth fighting for.
How did we get here?
What is at stake?
And where are we going?Please watch & share widely ⬇️pic.twitter.com/IMCtS86VXG
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 17, 2019
The Green New Deal future would include “Medicare for all” — “the most popular social program in American history,” Ocasio-Cortez said — a federal jobs guarantee, and publicly funded elections.
“Of course, when it came to healing the land, we had huge gaps in our knowledge. Luckily, indigenous communities offered generational expertise to help guide the way,” Ocasio-Cortez explained.
Not everything is rosy and harmonious in Ocasio-Cortez’s imagined future, however.
“When hurricane Sheldon hit southern Florida, parts of Miami went underwater for the last time,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez said in a tweet Tuesday that the project was in the works for months. Artist, writer, and activist Molly Crabapple illustrated the video.
In another tweet promoting the video, Ocasio-Cortez reiterated the claim that carbon emissions must be cut in half within 12 years in order to stop the devastating effects of climate change.
“A #GreenNewDeal is our plan for a world and a future worth fighting for,” she tweeted.
A since-deleted FAQ released on Ocazio-Cortez’s website said that the Green New Deal endeavored to “eliminate emissions from cows or air travel” and provide “economic security for all who are unable or unwilling to work.” Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff explained that “an early draft of a FAQ that was clearly unfinished” and “published to the website by mistake.”
