Protesters shut down DC, demand action on climate change
More than two dozen protesters arrested; Ellison Barber reports.
A new ad highlighting the "Green New Deal's" (GND) financial toll will debut as Democrats take the debate stage on Tuesday night.
The ad, created by the right-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), will portray for voters a stark contrast between life under "common sense energy policies" and an economy "strangled" by the GND.
Tuesday's ads will run before, during, and after the Democratic debate on CNN, but it's just the start of a month-long campaign that will escalate with more than $250,000 in ad spending.
"You have a choice," the narrator says, claiming low gas prices and easy transportation will be disrupted by the Green New Deal. In a dramatic tone shift, the ad turns to the "other option" -- alarmism, intrusive government intervention, and skyrocketing energy prices.
SWING-STATE HOUSEHOLDS WOULD LOSE AT LEAST $70G WITHIN FIRST YEAR OF GREEN NEW DEAL, STUDY FINDS
It ends by plainly asking viewers: "Can you afford it?" The ad is just the latest of CEI's efforts to warn about what it considers to be catastrophic impacts of climate alarmism.
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“At a time when technology and innovation have led the United States to become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas and lowered energy prices, alarmist politicians and activists are using doomsday predictions to advance harmful energy rationing policies that will cost Americans tens of thousands of dollars,” CEI President Kent Lassman said in a statement provided to Fox News.
As climate change gained renewed attention at the U.N. in September, the group released a compilation decades-old, failed climate predictions in an attempt to cast doubt on current predictions.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who warned climate change might submerge Miami underwater in just a few years, figures prominently in the ad.
As the GND's visionary, the freshman congresswoman has already won support from leading Democrats like those on the debate stage Tuesday night. Each of the three frontrunners -- former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. -- have all endorsed the GND's basic framework. Their plans ranged from $1.7 trillion over 10 years to $16 trillion over 15 years.
Since the plan's release, conservative groups have warned that Ocasio-Cortez's dream policy would actually be a nightmare. For example, CEI released a study in July that estimated swing-state households would encounter an average of $70,000 in costs in the first year of the policy's rollout.
The group's ad also points to American Action Forum's prediction that the GND will cost as much as $93 trillion. In addition to rapidly reducing emissions, the GND promises to provide universal health care and guaranteed jobs. Because the goals are so sweeping in nature, it's difficult to even formulate a proper estimate of the program's costs.
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Advocates of the plan say that the alternative would be worse. "We need to start getting comfortable with how extreme the problem is," Ocasio-Cortez previously said. The toll of inaction, she argued, was death and even greater costs.
Sanders similarly claimed: "Economists estimate that if we do not take action, we will lose $34.5 trillion in economic activity by the end of the century. And the benefits are enormous: by taking bold and decisive action, we will save $2.9 trillion over 10 years, $21 trillion over 30 years, and $70.4 trillion over 80 years."
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