(CNSNews.com) - Tied up in the climate change debate is a New Deal-type jobs program for American workers, Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told a climate change panel on Capitol Hill Monday.
Transitioning to renewable energy will create jobs and industry, she said:
And it's inevitable that we can use the transition to 100-percent renewable energy as the vehicle to really deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America.
That is our proposal, and that is what we are here to do. Because in the depths of darkness; in the depths of despair...you know, when you think about where we were when the New Deal was established. We were a nation in depression, in great depression. We were a nation on the brink of war; we saw the rise of fascism, creeping across in Europe.
And no one would have thought that a nation so poor, so scare and in such dire straits as we were in that time could pursue such a bold economic agenda. But we chose to do it anyway. We had the courage to do it anyway. And that is what this moment demands of us right now. That's what we have to do. We have to -- this is going to be the Great Society, the moonshot, the civil rights movement of our generation.
That's the scale-- that is the scale of the ambition that this movement is going to require.
The crowd loved it -- applauding her.
Ocasio-Cortez said there can be no solution to climate change "unless every single American," including working class Americans, are part of it.