Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced legislation to give the country’s public housing units an energy-efficiency overhaul, their first attempt at turning the Green New Deal’s broad framework into specific policy.
The bill, dubbed the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, would use seven grant programs to upgrade housing units into carbon-neutral communities with organic grocery stores, onsite child care and community gardens. Residents of public housing would be given preference in hiring to renovate those units.
“I think it’s very exemplary of what we try to do with the Green New Deal, where we have a front-line community that has historically gotten the short end of the stick with environmental justice,” Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said in an interview.
The bill would cost between $119 billion and $172 billion over the next decade, according to estimates developed by Data for Progress, a progressive think tank. It would create up to 240,723 jobs a year, the group estimated.
That would provide a boost to the economy “showing how the climate crisis is not a jobs versus environment paradigm,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We need electrical workers. We need construction workers. And it doesn’t have to just be fossil fuel pipelines that create these kinds of jobs. … We can create millions of jobs in this country by actually rising to the challenge of addressing what this crisis is going to represent.”
The original Green New Deal framework, which covered multiple topics including the country’s energy grid and its food system, contained just a few lines about housing. Overhauling the economy, according to that resolution, meant “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximum energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”
Republicans attacked that as unworkably expensive. House Republicans, citing conservative think tanks, pegged the cost at $1.6 trillion or more, and the president suggested that new regulations would hurt homeowners.
“They want to take away your car, reduce the value of your home and put millions of Americans out of work,” Trump told supporters at a rally shortly after the resolution was released.
(c) 2019, The Washington Post · Renae Merle, David Weigel
{Matzav.com}
