Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter: "Climate change is here + we’ve got a deadline: 12 years left to cut emissions in half. A #GreenNewDeal is our plan for a world and a future worth fighting for. How did we get here? What is at stake? And where are we going? Please watch & share widely 
https://t.co/IMCtS86VXG" (video at the Intercept)
A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - YouTube
A cute little video showing what she thinks might be our future. It starts with herself aboard a NYC-DC bullet train thinking about when she started that commute and continues with how Exxon officials concluded that global warming was real, but instead financed a denial campaign. Then Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and learning that we have only 12 years to reduce CO2 emissions by a factor of 2.
Then she mentioned how the US had faced previous challenges, like the Great Depression and World War II, and she described the Green New Deal as a similar sort of initiative. In her rather optimistic scenario, the Democrats win the Senate and the White House, and create the Decade of the Green New Deal. Including Medicare for All and a Federal jobs guarantee. She imagined the career of someone like herself, going off to help restore Louisiana lowland terrain and being a well-paid teacher. Of course, not all the news is good news, like a hurricane drowning downtown Miami "for the last time", but that someone then goes on to be elected to AOC's seat in Congress in a publicly-funded campaign.
Optimistic? Yes. But Gilded Age II has continued for longer than the original Gilded Age, and the Left has had difficulty in getting organized well enough to end it. In the Schlesinger cycles of history, we are overdue for another major reform phase, and plenty of unaddressed problems have been piling up. Even so, it must be noted that previous phases of reform were often not very smooth going.
Also, as to being united in World War II, that happened only after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. Before that, there was a big "America First" movement which opposed involvement in that war. There were even some American Nazis, like some who held a big rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City early in 1939. But that attack shut up the America Firsters, and the US was more united than at anytime before or since.
As to what would be a Pearl-Harbor-level provocation in global warming, I think that a hurricane drowning Miami would most likely be it. Miami is very populous, very low in elevation, and right next to the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricane Irma of 2017 came close, though it went through west Florida. But a direct hit by the strongest winds in a hurricane would be devastating, especially if combined with a big storm surge.
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#TooLate… "
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