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The congresswoman blasted Cuomo of New Castle for not making the environment a top priority of the current legislative session.
Cuomo took to the radio airwaves to refute that claim: “I proposed the Green New Deal before there was a Green New Deal being discussed nationwide,” Cuomo told WNYC's Brian Lehrer on Tuesday, June 4.
Ocasio-Cortez, a 2007 Yorktown High School graduate who became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress last fall, is ranked among the nation's leading advocates of a Green New Deal.
Ocasio-Cortez joined other members of the Empire State's congressional delegation by sending a letter to Cuomo and the state Legislature backing the Climate and Community Protection Act. The proposed bill demands 50 percent of electricity come from renewable sources, an end to climate pollution by 2050 and provides state money to communities disproportionately impacted by pollution.
“What I don’t want to do is give people a political placebo where we put forth dates and goals that we cannot make,” Cuomo said on the radio show. "I believe this is the most pressing issue of our time but I don’t want to play politics with it, and I don’t want to tell people we can move to a carbon-free economy in a period of in a time when I know we can’t."
During this year's State-of-the-State address, Cuomo did just that -- setting an ambitious goal of converting all of the state’s energy to be 100 percent carbon-free by 2040, quadrupling the state’s offshore wind target by 2035 and doubling distributed solar deployment by 2025.
Meanwhile, the Indian Point nuclear power plants in Westchester are slated to close during the next two years. They supply an estimated 25 percent of the electricity used in New York City and Westchester.
While the governor failed to make combating climate change a priority on his end-of-session wish list, Ocasio-Cortez and state Democratic lawmakers said there’s still time to address the issue.
“We can all do that within the next nine days. There is nothing that can stop us,” said state Sen. Todd Kaminsky (D-Nassau), the bill’s main sponsor and the chairman of the Senate Environmental Conservation Committee.
Meanwhile, Cuomo defended his endorsement of Melinda Katz for Queens District Attorney in a proxy battle with Ocasio-Cortez, who supports Tiffany Caban, an insurgent Democratic socialist candidate.
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