Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who led the charge for progressives’ once-fringe Green New Deal, is now just one election away from chairing the House subcommittee responsible for overseeing America’s oil and gas drilling on public lands, E&E News reported Tuesday.
Ocasio-Cortez currently serves as the ranking member of the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, establishing her as a prime candidate to head the committee and take steps to advance a progressive climate agenda in the event Democrats take control of the House, according to E&E News. The New York congresswoman recently reintroduced the Green New Deal — which has been harshly criticized as radical and expensive by Republicans since she first introduced it in 2019 — as progressive allies Rep. Ro Khanna of California and Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced an accompanying health care package, dubbed the Green New Deal for Health.
“A lot of our victories have already begun, for example, by breaking off some of the pieces [of the Green New Deal] and incorporating it in different areas of must-pass legislation including the Inflation Reduction Act,” Ocasio-Cortez told the outlet. Her office, alongside that of Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, maintains an ongoing document that tracks the ways in which the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have implemented core tenets of the Green New Deal.