Two months ago, the dazzling new congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a resolution calling on the House of Representatives to recognize that the government has a duty to create a “Green New Deal.”

Since then, the concept has been both attacked and ridiculed by members of the establishment — most of whom have probably not even read it. You would expect that from  Donald Trump, of course, who called it socialism and the “biggest government power grab in U.S. history,” and, with typical misogyny, ridiculed AOC as a “wonderful young bartender.”

Naturally, the Green New Deal is neither of those things, and whether Trump is merely ignorant, just lying as usual, or both, is neither relevant nor very interesting.

But others who should know better have also belittled the Green New Deal, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who was actually alive during the first New Deal.

Pelosi patronizingly called it a “green dream.”  Others have contented themselves by just calling it impossibly radical – and the press, by and large, has mostly parroted these claims.

Well, you know what? I have read the resolution, which, by the way, was also signed by dozens of other members of Congress.  It is indeed a call to take steps to save our planet, while there is still time, and also to put people to work doing so – which is what the old New Deal did, thereby saving America from toppling into communism, or more likely fascism.

What the Green New Deal really does, is call on the government to:

A)     Achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition.

B)      Create millions of good, high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States, and

C)      Invest in the infrastructure and industry of the United States to sustainably meet the challenges of the 21st century.

That’s a slightly condensed version of what House Resolution 109 actually says, in what I find to be a skillful blending of the old Democratic politics of trying to increase and share wealth and the new reality that we have to save ourselves from climate change.

There is now no legitimate doubt that climate change is real, that most of it is man-made, and that we need to significantly alter the way we are doing things within the next decade, or the bad consequences we are already seeing will accelerate, bringing more environmental disasters.

A few weeks ago, I talked about the Green New Deal with the eminent geophysicist Henry Pollack, who once shared in the Nobel Peace Prize. He is smart enough and savvy enough to know that it will never all be enacted as a package, but found it eminently sensible.

He thought there was something in it for both parties. While President Trump’s pledge to put coal miners back to work mining coal isn’t going to happen, he thought there are plenty of projects relating to our infrastructure miners could be trained to do instead.

Will the Green New Deal cost a lot? Absolutely, but not nearly as much as not doing anything. Is it radical?  Well, no more so than ripping someone’s heart out of their chest and replacing it with a donated heart, when death is the only other option.

And here’s something our politicians should take note of: When people understand what the Green New Deal is, and what it would do – more than 80 percent of them support almost all its provisions. That’s what the conservative publication Business Insider found, probably to the editors’ shock, when they commissioned a poll on the subject.

So my advice is read for yourself what the Green New Deal is about. We can do what we need to do as a society, or continue on our way to disaster.

I don’t think there’s really any choice at all.      

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