SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The Green New Deal introduced by progressive members of Congress is getting another endorsement from a possible 2020 presidential candidate.
On CNN’s State of the Union, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democrat, called it “more of a plan than a fully articulated set of policies.”
Last week, New York Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey introduced legislation that would push the United States to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions within the next ten years.
“We are not only being disrupted by economic change, we’re being disrupted by climate change,” Buttigieg said. “We have had two different cases of historic floods here in South Bend of the kind we’re told to expect every thousand years or so, and they happened within 18-months of each other.”
Buttigieg said climate change is partially to blame for these floods being so close to each other. He said climate change is a “national emergency”, but stopped short of calling it a swift end all, be all of manufacturing practices in the United States, as many opposed to it have painted it to be.
“I think the elegance, from a policy perspective, of the concept of the Green New Deal, is that it matches a sense of urgency about that problem with climate change with a sense of opportunity around what the solutions might represent,” Buttigieg explained.
Buttigieg said it is the “right beginning” and that he is supportive of the measure.
(PHOTO: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
