VIDEO: Ocasio-Cortez explains how switching to renewable energy will bring about social justice, and it’s . . . really something

Wow.

I will give her this: She is really good at the sort of talk that lefty true-believers dream about hearing from their politicians. To them, politics and governance are heroic, and they’re looking for the kinds of leaders who want to attempt the “moonshot” that will change everything.

She invokes the New Deal, the Great Society and all the other liberal check-boxes. The passion in her voice rises the longer she talks. She paints a vivid picture of the suffering of the marginalized, and calls America forward to courage, because if not for our lack of courage, all these problems would be solved yesterday.

You and I know it doesn’t work that way at all, but people become liberals because they want desperately to believe that if only political leaders had the courage and the determination, they really could lead us to the light and we’d all know just what to do when we got there.

The problem with AOC is that, the longer she talks, the clearer it becomes that she doesn’t really have the slightest idea how any of this would work in practice. Yet she sounds so passionate about it, you can understand why Bernie implores her to go further and explain: Alexandra, for goodness sakes, how will all this work?

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And hoo boy. The part you want to see starts at 43:15.

So her proposition is that transitioning to wind, solar and all the other beloved renewables will actually bring about the long-awaited goals of the social and economic justice warriors. How will this happen?

In her attempt to answer the question, she invokes people choking on mold in Puerto Rico (she’s adorable when she rolls her Rs), she talks about people choking on smoke in California and she reminds us that the water in Flint is still dirty!

(Actually the State of Michigan says otherwise but people don’t believe it, so do with that what you will.)

OK. So. How does this mean renewables equal social/economic justice?

Well, she explains, you fix those pipes in Flint and you’ll create tens of millions of jobs. Got it?

Me neither, but here’s my best guess at what I think she’s getting at, and it’s really no different from what Democrats have believed since the days of her icon FDR: You’ve got all these needs. You hire people to go take care of the needs, and whammo, not only are the needs met but you’e got all these people working too.

How exactly this is achieved by dumping fossil fuels and switching to wind and solar, I’m not sure. She never really says. I guess she figures the burgeoning renewables industry would be able to hire people left and right because their business would be booming, and just like that the economic suffering of millions would be over.

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Well. Let’s consider a few things AOC seems to have missed:

First of all, completely transitioning away from fossil fuels means you displace all the people working in extraction, refineries, transport and service stations. You’d also render all the existing infrastructure associated with that industry worthless, when much of it still represents active capital investment. I’m all about the idea of creative destruction in economics, but when it works well it’s because something new has emerged on the scene to make the old thing obsolete. It’s not because a bunch of politicians mandated it. In the case of renewables, if the technology was mature enough to make them perform as all of us would like, those industries would already be burgeoning and politicians wouldn’t have to do anything.

But they’re not, so they’re not.

In a broader sense, most problems are not solved just because the government tells someone: “Here’s some money, now go and make things better.” Especially when the problems involve economic underachievement by people, it’s usually the people themselves who have to make changes in their lives before things get better. AOC and those of her ilk think all this would be better if only government had the courage and lots more money, but real life experience says otherwise.

Anyway: I predict her political star will continue to rise because she paints a stirring picture and she expresses herself with a lot of passion. And can we be candid here? She looks pretty nice, and television values that highly. We’ll continue to have a lot of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez shoved down our throats.

That said, it’s an opportunity for a lot of us to listen closely to what she says and realize: She doesn’t have the slightest idea what she’s talking about.

But when has that ever been an impediment to success in American politics?

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