WASHINGTON — Colorado Rep. Doug Lamborn thinks his young Democratic colleagues are naive for pushing for a “Green New Deal” to combat climate change.
The Democrats’ sweeping plan sounds “too much like a Soviet five-year plan or something like that,” Lamborn told his colleagues Wednesday at a U.S. House hearing about climate change. The 5th District Republican, who represents Colorado Springs, said of the Green New Deal: It’s “simply not going to work.”
The general thrust of a Green New Deal — fighting climate change by transitioning the U.S. energy sector away from fossil fuels while boosting jobs in clean-energy technologies, such as wind and solar — has been embraced by Democrats, including House freshmen and presidential candidates.
Some of its vocal supporters include Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, and Joe Neguse, who represents Colorado’s 2nd District. Democratic presidential hopefuls including Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren have backed the idea, too.
Lamborn, 64, told the Natural Resources Committee he can understand how some of his younger colleagues have bought into the idea.
“You only have to be 25 years old to be a member of Congress, and we have young people that bring a lot of great qualities, but maybe they don’t bring a lot of life experience,” he said. “I guess I can understand if someone has not a lot of life experience and they’re proposing something that’s extremely unrealistic, well, impossible.”
He can’t understand how “adults and grownups, who are more mature,” would also be advocating for the plan, he said.
“I see that with some of the presidential contenders who are throwing their names out there. They’re plugging for something that is literally impossible.”
Ocasio-Cortez, 29, has been one of the leading champions of the Green New Deal in the new Congress. The freshman lawmaker is expected to soon introduce her formal plan.
“Next week, we plan to release a resolution that outlines the scope and scale of the Green New Deal,” she wrote in a letter to her colleagues, Bloomberg reported this week. “In it, we call for a national, social, industrial and economic mobilization at a scale not seen since World War II.”
Neguse, a 34-year-old House freshman who’s also on the Natural Resources panel, touted his support for a Green New Deal at the hearing, ahead of Lamborn’s comments. Neguse wrote on Twitter Tuesday that he’ll be one of the first co-sponsors of Ocasio-Cortez’s legislation.
He told The Colorado Independent in an interview last week that a Green New Deal should include “a transformation of our reliance on conventional sources of energy, carbon emitting and so forth, into a renewable energy future that is 100 percent renewable and in so doing leveraging the ingenuity and the skills of the American people to ensure that folks aren’t left behind as we transition.”
Neguse took issue with comments from a witness at the hearing Wednesday who questioned the need for drastic action to combat climate change.
“Based on current assessments of the science, man-made climate change is not an existential threat on the timescale of the 21st century, even in its most alarming incarnation,” said Judith Curry, a retired climatologist who has often testified in Congress to challenge the prevailing climate science.
“I think climate change is an existential threat,” Neguse replied.
“I can tell you that certainly in my community in Colorado, we are feeling the impacts of climate change already,” he added, pointing to increased flooding and erosion caused by snow melting faster, and damage to plants and animals at Rocky Mountain National Park due to rising temperatures.
“At the end of the day, I think this is the defining issue of our time,” he said.
The Natural Resources Committee hearing Wednesday was one of two held in the House that morning. They marked the first climate change hearings in that chamber in more than eight years, since Republicans took control of the House in 2010.
At a separate climate change hearing in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Colorado Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette of the 1st District called for the United States to stay in the Paris climate accord.
DeGette called the hearing “the first step” toward action on climate change, noting that Democrats intend to push legislation to curb emissions.
“We’re actually going to move this through and I know we can do it in a bipartisan way,” she said.
“The 5th District Republican, who represents Colorado Springs,…”
He may represent Colorado Springs, but he does not represent Chaffee county:
http://chaffeegreen.org/
Lamborn is an ass. He doesn’t care that we spend tens of BILLIONS on oil subsidies, which are DESTROYING the planet for human habitation. Maybe if we took even just a LITTLE of that and put it into research and implementation of renewable energy, it wouldn’t seem like SUCH an impossible thing.
But look at what this MORON is saying: The rich are SO powerful, we don’t even dare to save the SPECIES, we HAVE to kiss their asses until we all die in suffocating heat and unbelievable cold. Their PROFITS are far more important than our LIVES as a SPECIES. He’s CLEARLY OWNED by someone other than his constituents. He SHOULD have been kicked out of office this last time, but NO, the MORONS down in the Springs just HAVE to stay foolishly conservative, even if they SEEM to have learned a LITTLE something since they had to turn off the street lights thanks to their brilliant right wing nonsense of not collecting any taxes. I guess they didn’t like having to mow the parks themselves.
Lamborn is owned by oil and the 1%, clearly. Maybe it’s time for the Springs to decide THEY are more important than the 1%’s profits and DO SOMETHING about this IDIOT. LOSE this dead weight. YOUR LIVES depend on it. What a shame that it’s SO Impossible for them to see this. Their ideology is going to kill them all off. And the rest of us, too. So much for the basic instinct of SURVIVAL means so little to them, their ideology meaning SO much more. Why do we let these people vote?
Doug Lamborn’s incoherent blabbering shows what someone looks like when donors pay them to stick their head up their ass. Doug is a cheap purchase for them, probably because he’s not smart enough to make coherent arguments, only able to spout vile ad hominem insults. Sad.
Moronic solution that would bankrupt U S economy. Basically a money grab to throw into government more of our tax money. Even if climate change is affected by humans, the changes they advocated would not move the needle by very much. Meanwhile, India and China keep on thier non-green economy. On top of the supposed green solutoins, they want to throw in free medicare and guaranteed jobs for everyone? Crackpot econonimcs that is similar to stupid 5 year Soviet style plan. Sad that these clowns are in politics. God help us !
Rep Lamborn is a great case for term limits.
“Mr. Peabody’s coal train hauled it away.” – John Prine
Lamborn and his ilk:
2000–The climate is actually getting colder.
2005–Global warming doesn’t exist.
2010–It exists, but it’s natural.
2015–It’s caused by humans, but it’s actually good for us.
2019–It’s bad, but no big deal, not an existential threat.
Reading between the lines, he’s really acknowledging how the truth about climate change poses an existential threat to his political career, bought and paid for by fossil fuel industry.
Lamborn lifts his head out of the sand from time to time just to remind us how ignorant he is.
Bill McAlister: You can whine about China and India all you want, and while India is a mess, China is making incredible strides in cleaning itself up. But WE are one of the largest polluters in the freaking world, far beyond our population. We have an obligation to the future generations to NOT leave the place worse off than we found it. in that regard, we are failing miserably.
Look at it this way: Those jobs that will disappear from the dirtiest industries can be replaced with jobs that CLEAN UP THE MESSES. And say we spend a ton of money and DO clean up things. What is the problem with that? It makes FAR more sense to do that rather than keep fouling our own nest and thinking there are no consequences. We are living with the consequences now. Look at downtown Miami. There are times of the day when parts of downtown are under two or three inches of SALT WATER. This is a REAL issue, not the NOTHING the republicans keep telling you it is. Who is paying for their words? The very people who have KNOWN that their industries are destroying the planet and don’t want to have to pay to clean things up. They have been making profits hand over fist for generations, and for the last 30 years, big oil KNEW it was murdering the planet, but MONEY is what makes their decisions, NOT their brains.
You worry about things without actually thinking them through. If we have to clean up things, there WILL be jobs. It’s just a matter of whether we take oil company profits to do it or get the money elsewhere. But to continue doing the NOTHING we are doing now is a sure way to END HUMAN CIVILIZATION. is protecting the profits of big oil worth that to you? If so then you’re a complete fool and a typical republican.