The Rise and Rollout of AOC’s Green New Deal

Ahead of the publication of “The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution,” right-wing media outlets, in a series of reports in Fox News, the New York Post, the Daily Mail, and so on, wildly distorted the book. One of the chapters they mangled most aggressively was on the rise of the Green New Deal. Below is an adapted excerpt from Chapter 8: “It Is A Dream.”

Not long after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her shock 2018 primary, Saikat Chakrabarti and Corbin Trent ventured to Washington, D.C., to scope things out. Both had started as volunteers on the first Bernie Sanders campaign, worked their way up the skeleton crew, then left to found what became Justice Democrats, and then threw themselves full time into electing Ocasio-Cortez in her primary campaign against Rep. Joe Crowley.

Now they had made it to Washington as AOC’s chief of staff and communications director, and the first question everyone they ran into asked them was the same, a question born of both curiosity and a sense of competitiveness: What committees does Ocasio-Cortez want to be on?

Several members of Congress gave advice related to her “legacy” twenty or thirty years down the road. What does she want her legacy to be? She should figure that out first, they told Chakrabarti and Trent, and then work backward from there to figure out what committees she needs and what alliances she must form to make that legacy a reality.

I met both men in the lobby of the Hyatt on Capitol Hill, and they relayed their revulsion at the notion. “Twenty years?” said Trent. “Christ, if we’re still here in twenty years, we’ll be total failures.”

“We have, like, a decade to turn this entire thing around,” said Chakrabarti, who was evangelizing about a book on the World War II mobilization that turned a peacetime economy into a wartime industry capable of producing the armaments, ships, planes, bombs, and vehicles that defeated fascism. “Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II,” written by Arthur Herman, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, focused, as its subtitle suggests, on the role of business in winning the war. But the book itself teaches a different lesson: that it was Franklin Roosevelt who used every tool at his disposal to engineer the top-to-bottom redevelopment of the economy. The same would have to happen this time, Chakrabarti suggested. Let that be AOC’s legacy.

Despite Nancy Pelosi’s unwillingness to stop the party from raising money from the fossil fuel industry, the incoming speaker had been early in warning of the dangers of climate change, and the first thing she did when she took the House in 2006 was create a select committee on the climate with real teeth and subpoena power and then appoint then-Rep. Ed Markey, a true believer, to chair it. She also backed her ally Henry Waxman, another climate hawk, in his successful effort to oust the Big Auto–friendly John Dingell Jr. from the chairmanship of the Energy and Commerce Committee, specifically so Waxman could ram through a climate bill.

He did so, at significant electoral cost to Democrats in swing seats, and the House passed the bill, only to see it die without a vote in the Senate. President Barack Obama had declined Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s suggestion to use budget reconciliation — a 50-vote process — to pass the climate bill. Had the country started that year in reducing carbon emissions, the picture a decade later would have looked much different.

What happened to that climate committee? Chakrabarti and Trent wondered. Given the history, they both said, it seemed reasonable to push for it to be rebuilt and be the vehicle to turn the Green New Deal from a vision into legislative text, so that if and when the party took power fully in 2021, they’d have a bill ready to go.

Creation of a Green New Deal Committee became the central demand of the occupation of Pelosi’s office, though the method had been a gamble. On a personal level, Pelosi didn’t want to be pushed into doing anything, lest it chip away at the image of toughness she had effectively cultivated. She went out of her way to belittle the Green New Deal. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” she told reporters. “The green dream, or whatever they call it. Nobody knows what it is, but they’re for it, right?”

The “green dream” had started as a Google Doc put out by Sunrise, AOC, and the other groups behind the march on Pelosi’s office, and while the idea of a Green New Deal took off, the document itself came in for immediate criticism, both from the AFL-CIO, which warned that it would cost union jobs in the fossil fuel and pipeline industries, and from climate justice activists, who thought it didn’t go far enough in redressing the systemically racist impacts of climate change and pollution.

Moving from dreamland to Google Doc to a congressional resolution (which is significantly short of legislation) required much more compromise than might be expected in an aspirational document.

Work on it began in December 2018, before AOC had any staff. The joke was that Evan Weber of Sunrise, who had made the fateful ask that Ocasio-Cortez support the sit-in, was her interim legislative director. The first task was to find a co-sponsor in the Senate, and they immediately ruled out anybody potentially running for president, a good chunk of that chamber. “We knew if we had a presidential candidate, it would just be their thing, and we wanted it to be everybody’s thing,” said Weber.

After the Sunrise protest, Ocasio-Cortez had felt isolated, having gone out on a radical limb on her own, breaking all sorts of norms and customs in Congress. Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts was one of the few who reached out to her with an encouraging word, congratulating her on what she’d done and probing her about the new youth movement.

Markey was facing reelection in Massachusetts, with rumors that Rep. Joe Kennedy or Attorney General Maura Healey might challenge him. As a senator, Markey was liked well enough, but he’d been in Congress since 1976 and knew he was vulnerable to the question of why he deserved another term. What was he fighting for?

Recalling Markey’s service as chair of the previous special climate panel, and his authorship of Waxman-Markey — the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 — the only major climate bill ever to clear a chamber of Congress, Ocasio-Cortez asked him to be her lead sponsor in the Senate. He eagerly accepted.

By mid-January, working closely with Sunrise, which coordinated with outside groups, AOC’s office had consulted an endless number of organizations, including the Sierra Club, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, the BlueGreen Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, and New Consensus, the think tank backed by Chakrabarti and helmed by Zack Exley, where Rhiana Gunn-Wright, an up-and-coming radical policy writer, was taking the lead in drafting the resolution.

An exchange between Sunrise and the NAACP was indicative of the difficulties they faced. A week before the unveiling, an NAACP official, Katherine Egland, wrote to Sunrise. “It isn’t that we want or expect a perfect bill or resolution, but that we are fundamentally opposed to carbon capture sequestration, by any name or concept; and we are vehemently against any form or theory of carbon taxing, credits, dividends, etc,” Egland wrote. For the NAACP, carbon capture and sequestration — the idea that emissions could be captured or sucked out of the air and sequestered back into the ground — was seen as a scam by the fossil fuel industry to continue to burn coal in Black neighborhoods and call it clean. “We unapologetically believe that these two particular proposals will do more harm than good — especially as it relates to the very people it proposes to uplift. ”

Sunrise’s Weber forwarded the note to Markey’s and AOC’s teams. “Wanted to make sure you both had this from the NAACP. My opinion is that it would be very bad to not have them with us, and their concerns will be shared by other environmental and climate justice advocates as well,” Weber wrote, recommending that they remove the “true cost of emissions” bullet — which, to many in the know, Weber understood, signaled “carbon pricing.”

Putting a price on carbon allows renewables to compete on a more level playing field, as carbon is now asked to pay for its pollution rather than sticking the public with the tab. But this setup also raises the price of gas and utilities, and no amount of credit or rebate scheme is enough to persuade people, the NAACP worried, that they won’t be paying more at the pump to satisfy the vanity of environmentalists. The Yellow Vests protests in France in 2018 had sounded the death knell for such an approach, as it became clear the working class weren’t willing to pay for what they saw as a problem they hadn’t created.

When it came to carbon pricing, an NAACP resolution had cast it as insufficient to the scale of the crisis, while putting too much burden on Black communities. Lost on nobody involved was the NAACP’s significant support from the fossil fuel industry, whose leading companies sponsored the group’s conventions and otherwise kicked in support.

Yet dropping some form of carbon pricing could risk losing supporters on the left, who would see the resolution as mere wish-casting. “This is the kind of response we will likely get if we keep the carbon pricing thing as is,” Chakrabarti wrote in a subsequent email to Weber about the NAACP response. Carbon pricing was dropped.

The final document was a result of wheeling and dealing the likes of which hadn’t been done by the left in Washington since Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and the final product had a stunningly broad coalition behind it. The unveiling of the resolution was set for February 7. “We got everyone in the right place. We had the Big Greens lined up, and they were happy because AFL was in a good place,” said Weber. “AFL-CIO was planning to put out a positive statement on the whole thing.”

And then came the FAQ — and the cow farts. “We spent months really carefully negotiating between all these interests,” Weber recalled years later. “Honestly, this is like one of my biggest political regrets, is what happened around the FAQs.”

Several things happened around the frequently asked questions document the office prepared, but what first set the resolution veering off course, Weber said, was an article in Politico — or, as Weber called it, “pain-in-the-ass-fucking-Politico.” (I started my political journalism career at Politico and can confirm that it is a pain in the ass.)

The story, based on sources who had seen a late version of the resolution, landed on Monday, February 4, and was headlined, “Green New Deal Won’t Call for End to Fossil Fuels.” The story came from frustrated elements on the left of the climate world who insisted that the only rational path forward was to shut down the burning of fossil fuels and worry about the rest later. Weber understood the irony: Nearly everyone in the Sunrise leadership came from the divest-and-shut-it-down side of organizing. These were their people, and now they were getting attacked by them. The Sunrise team was barely into their mid-20s and were already being called sellouts.

“It’s the movement that many people in Sunrise came out of, but our whole thesis was that that kind of campaigning was ineffective both because it was an unpopular message with the public — that saying no to everything doesn’t actually give people something to believe in — and it was really bad for coalition building,” Weber said, noting that it’s impossible to get labor on board with a policy position that will eliminate jobs, even if you promise a world full of other types of jobs in the future.

Indeed, the Politico story — as if to make Weber’s point — quoted the policy director for the climate group 350.org (where some of the Sunrise brass had started their careers or journeys into activism) criticizing the resolution for using the term “clean,” which indicated a “keep the door open” approach to carbon capture and sequestration, allowing fossil fuels to continue to be used.

The rationale for the blanket opposition to any carbon technology is a bit elliptical. The carbon industry supports investment in clean-tech infrastructure cynically, as a way to stave off its own demise, the argument goes, and the technology isn’t actually able to do what its proponents have claimed it will one day be able to do.

But there are kinks in the logic. If a technology’s current state equaled its promise, both wind and solar would have been shut down long ago and we would never have seen the exponential technological bursts that have led both to become cheaper sources of energy than fossil fuels. It also ignores the reality that carbon capture technology does work — at least at a small scale and in theory. Whether it can be scaled fast enough to meet the crisis is an open question, but it’s not out of the question.

The Politico article also quoted Sean McGarvey, president of the North America’s Building Trades Unions, saying that oil and gas industry jobs paid solid, middle-class wages while work in the renewable field still did not. “They’re talking about everything except the workers that are doing the work,” he said.

McGarvey made the comments at an event alongside Mike Sommers, a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, who gleefully drove in the wedge, claiming that one-third of construction jobs are in the oil and gas industry.

Spooked by the article, AOC’s team began walking away from some of the concessions they had made. But instead of rewriting the resolution, they began tweaking the FAQ and other material that described it. Where the resolution left room for carbon tech and the possibility of nuclear power to play a role, for instance, the FAQ blasted the concepts.

“Yes, we are calling for a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases,” the answer read, going beyond the carefully negotiated resolution. It continued:

Anyone who has read the resolution sees that we spell this out through a plan that calls for eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from every sector of the economy. Simply banning fossil fuels immediately won’t build the new economy to replace it—this is the plan to build that new economy and spells out how to do it technically. We do this through a huge mobilization to create the renewable energy economy as fast as possible. We set a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, in 10 years because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast, but we think we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, plant lots of trees and restore our ecosystem to get to net-zero.

“Farting cows and airplanes.” Trent’s plainspoken, no-bullshit approach, and his frustration with and contempt for the norms of Washington, D.C., had helped him slash and burn his way through the swamp. Trent and Ocasio-Cortez’s team were trying to have it both ways: to expose the absurdity of the zero-emissions approach. How will you fully eliminate cow farts? Or campfires? How to replace a fleet of jet-fueled airplanes with electric ones when the latter didn’t exist yet?

Weber lamented that the retreat away from the compromise they had agreed upon came in the face of everything they’d done to reorient their politics toward coalition building, reaching the masses, and expanding the tent of environmentalism with the aim of actually passing a Green New Deal. “We believe that really deeply in our bones. It was one of the whole reasons why we broke off 350.org and the rest of these groups and started Sunrise in the first place, and we were really thrilled to find alignment with AOC and the New Consensus folks,” he said. “And basically, the second this Politico article hit, we sort of got scared, and I think it was eve-of-launch jitters.”

Overconfidence had crept in, as AOC and Sunrise had become the It kids of Washington. “I think we had done such a good job, up until that point, of massaging the language that there was kind of an arrogance of, like, ‘We can actually appease everyone here,’ instead of sticking to our guns and making a real choice about charting a different direction and keeping our eyes on the prize,” Weber said. “And so, the decision was made by AOC’s team to write that FAQ, and they very rapidly and haphazardly put it together without any sort of process, like the one that we went through to write the resolution.”

The FAQ brought up carbon capture specifically, asking, “Are you for CCUS [carbon capture, utilization, and storage]?” The resolution plainly left the door open for that technology, and Trent, in the Politico article, had even reiterated as much. But the FAQ document got weaselly, and instead of referring to the resolution, it stepped back to ask what its authors believed, which is a different question: “We believe the right way to capture carbon is to plant trees and restore our natural ecosystems. CCUS technology to date has not proven effective.” The answer leaves wiggle room for CCUS tech but is clearly trying to close the door — not what unions were looking for. The FAQ document added that while the Green New Deal didn’t ban fossil fuels or nuclear fuel, it might as well: “The Green New Deal makes new fossil fuel infrastructure or nuclear plants unnecessary.”

The AFL-CIO, which had prepared a supportive statement, was livid, and issued a skeptical statement instead. Major environmental groups like the Sierra Club panicked. Fox News delighted in the entire affair. “We just fucking served them up this thing on a silver platter,” Weber said of Fox. “They go wild with the cow farts and the antinuclear and all this sort of stuff. We lose the support of AFL-CIO, they are freaking out. Their freaking out almost caused these Big Greens to pull out of the thing at the last minute. This is all happening while the press conference launching the thing is taking place. It’s just a total shitshow disaster. Months of some very delicate planning, years of strategic thinking and correction for mistakes, sort of gone in like, less than forty-eight hours.”

“In kowtowing to this small corner of the left who was literally fighting over words and phrases, even though we are all basically aligned on the goals, we threw a lot of that away.”

But the PR stayed strong. At the press conference outside the Capitol, Ocasio-Cortez pulled off one of her more impressive jujitsu moves when a reporter asked her about Pelosi’s swipe that it was just a “green dream or whatever they call it.” AOC disarmed the attack by adopting it. “No, I think it is a dream,” she said, going on to defend the Green New Deal as the full aspiration of the public.

From there, the Green New Deal took off on two separate tracks. On one, it was ridiculed by the right and dismissed by Democratic leaders as unserious. But on the other, it became a global sensation.

The Canadian government adopted a version of the Green New Deal, as did the Spanish government. The German government, unfamiliar with the American context of FDR’s New Deal, mixed up the words and pledged to implement a New Green Deal. And Democratic presidential candidates from the center to the left rushed to embrace it. Joe Biden, who would go on to become the Democratic nominee and then president, rejected the moniker as part of his effort to differentiate himself from the progressive wing, but the context of his platform was wildly more ambitious than anything Hillary Clinton had put out in 2016 and became even more so after he named AOC and Sunrise head Varshini Prakash to a committee charged with crafting his climate agenda.

The capitulation to the environmental left had set back the cause of winning over organized labor and the party’s center, but the entire effort succeeded in reshaping the climate zeitgeist. “One of the main things we wanted to accomplish was to have Green New Deal be one of the questions that gets asked in a debate,” said Trent. “And we far and away achieved that goal. Like, the Canadian government is running Green New Deal shit. It literally took it across the world. And so, I felt like it was an accomplishment. I really don’t think [Ocasio-Cortez] does. I think she was embarrassed by the Green New Deal. She didn’t feel like it was serious enough,” he said. “That’s not what she wanted to do.”

He noted that AOC pivoted after the rollout to something she called the Just Society series, a suite of six pieces of legislation that addressed housing, immigration, criminal justice reform, and other progressive priorities. “She wants to do the serious work of Congress, getting things in the record, on the record in committee, and things like that,” Trent said. She was there to help the party succeed in living up to its principles, she believed, not there to tear it down, and was frustrated that her colleagues and the party leadership couldn’t see it. What she wanted, said Trent, was “that they’d accept her as a sort of normal rep, that she would be one of the team. That just wasn’t never gonna happen.”

Trent said he would often warn Ocasio-Cortez that because of the way she had burst onto the scene, and because of the threat she represented to others, her hope of being accepted as a member in good standing would always be frustrated. “Disarming will not make them happy,” he said. Even if she left politics and became merely an influencer or an MSNBC talking head, he argued, they’d still hunt her until the end of time. “The funny thing is it still wouldn’t prove to her that it won’t work,” he said. “ ‘I just have to get a little smaller, so nobody thinks I’m a threat. Okay. Sorry again, guys. Sorry again for all this trouble.’ ”

Her staffer Dan Riffle, who served through the first two years, also watched the burn-it-down image that had developed around AOC clash with her more conciliatory approach to her colleagues. “Despite her having beaten Joe Crowley and her public-facing persona,” Riffle said, “she is a very conflict-averse person, more so than a normal person I think. And you add in all of the very real shit that she has to deal with and the very difficult decisions that she’s faced with as a then-twenty-nine-year-old female.”

At the end of her first term, AOC produced and posted a video noting all her accomplishments, and the Green New Deal gets roughly as much time as the fact that she “Introduced more amendments than 90 percent of freshman lawmakers” and “cosponsored 78 pieces of legislation that passed the House, 14 that were signed into law.” “If you go back and look at the stuff she actually focuses on, to me it’s not the really fucking useful stuff she did,” said Trent.

The rollout of the Green New Deal and Trent’s screwup with the cow farts opened up a rift between the two, even as they stayed bonded through their shared experience of the campaign and AOC’s launch to stardom. “My dad used to always talk about how Peyton Manning was good at never blaming other people on the team—took the blame and gave away the credit,” Trent said. “[Alex] used to love to talk about how—well, not love, but she would literally throw me under the bus all the time for fucking up that rollout, as she put it, or she’d say things like ‘Well, it didn’t go as smoothly as we’d like.’ ”

The Green New Deal rollout bundled together all the contradictions at the heart of Ocasio-Cortez’s politics and personality, tying her up in knots. In a profound way, she had found herself in a tortured position: a consensus builder and a people pleaser thrust into the role of rebel; a science fair champion, a congressional intern, and a loyal progressive Democrat cast as a burn-it-down radical because she had come from outside the system — had been forced to come from outside, because there was no other way in. And she was cast as unrealistic— a green dreamer — because she grasped the reality of the crisis.