Beto O'Rourke: Authors of Green New Deal 'Absolutely Right on the Money'

WASHINGTON — Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), a 2020 presidential candidate, said the authors of the Green New Deal are “right on the money.”

“Those who have helped to champion and to write the Green New Deal are absolutely right on the money. Their comparison to this country in the 1930s and the 1940s coming out of the Great Depression, at the same time that we confronted the existential threat, at least to the Western democracies, of Nazi Germany, we were able to harness the power and the political will of hundreds of millions of our fellow Americans, as well as reassert our global leadership to win that war and to lift millions into the middle class,” O’Rourke said during the “We the People Membership Forum” on Monday.

“We have such an opportunity right now — freeing ourselves from a dependence on fossil fuels, investing in renewable energy technology, beating China at the game of inventing those next generation of technologies upon us, [on] which the world will depend — not only is it the right thing to do for the future, it will galvanize this economy,” he added.

Republican lawmakers were critical of the original Green New Deal outline released by the office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), which called for “upgrading all existing buildings” for energy efficiency and building out “high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.”

During the summit, O’Rourke also called for abolishing the Electoral College.