Politics

House Democrats Are About To Pass A Climate Change Bill. Its Not The Green New Deal

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House Democrats are poised to pass legislation to keep President Donald Trump from withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris accord on climate change.

The Climate Action Now Act would require Trump to submit a plan to meet the Paris climate accord goals to Congress, and is expected to pass along party lines. The bill has 224 co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats.

But the bill is unlikely to have a future if it passes in the House.

No companion bill has been introduced in the Senate, The Hill reported, and Trump will almost certainly oppose any climate bill that lands on his desk. Likewise, Republicans and conservative groups came out against the bill.

“There is a better alternative to the Paris climate treaty and the Green New Deal. It’s called the Trump energy deregulatory agenda,” Myron Ebell, head of energy policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), said in a statement.

CEI is part of a coalition of conservative groups in opposition to Democrats’ climate bill to remain in the Paris accord, which the Obama administration joined in 2016. The coalition wrote a letter to lawmakers Tuesday, calling on them to oppose staying in the Paris accord.

“This legislative attempt to reinstate the Paris climate treaty would inflict permanent and irreparable damage to consumers and job-creating businesses across the country,” wrote groups, including CEI, American Energy Alliance and American Conservative Union.

Environmental activists have also been demanding concrete action from Congress on global warming. Some groups, like the Sunrise Movement, will accept nothing less than the Green New Deal.

Introduced by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in February, the Green New Deal calls for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in 10 years and vastly expand the welfare state. Activists have vigorously opposed legislation that doesn’t meet those goals.

The Sunrise Movement, a main Green New Deal backer, criticized Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke’s $5 trillion plan to address climate change as not going far enough. O’Rourke’s plan aimed for net-zero emissions by 2050, which activists said was too slow to fight climate change.

However, the Green New Deal’s botched rollout and call for more government power provided fuel for Republicans to attack vulnerable Democrats running in 2020.

Senate Democrats did not vote in support of the Green New Deal in March. Not even Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey, who introduced the Senate version of the Green New Deal, voted for it.

Ocasio-Cortez co-sponsored the Climate Action Now Act, but is still promoting the Green New Deal. The freshman congresswoman put out a video envisioning a utopian future because of the Green New Deal.

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