Gas-guzzling car rides expose AOC’s hypocrisy amid Green New Deal pledge
Freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to save the planet with her Green New Deal, but she keeps tripping over her own giant carbon footprint.“We’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ ” the progressive darling said in January, speaking of herself and her fellow millennials. “And, like, this is the war; this is our World War II.”
Last week, she ratcheted up the rhetoric: “It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult” due to climate change. “And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?”
The guiding principle of her eco-vision is to bring about “a full transition off fossil fuels and zero greenhouse gases” within 10 years.
To achieve this, the GND fact sheet says, the nation must “totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out high-speed rail … create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle.”
But the woman who boasts of a “razor-sharp BS detector” seems to have trouble sniffing out her own.
Since declaring her candidacy in May 2017, Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign heavily relied on those combustible-engine cars — even though a subway station was just 138 feet from her Elmhurst campaign office.
She listed 1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.
In all, Ocasio-Cortez spent $29,365.70 on those emissions-spewing vehicles, along with car and van rentals — even though her Queens HQ was a one-minute walk to the 7 train.
The campaign shelled out only $8,335.41 on 52 MetroCard transactions.
“Everyone — top to bottom — used the MetroCards,” Ocasio-Cortez spokesman Corbin Trent told The Post.
By comparison, fellow freshman Rep. Max Rose — whose district is more than twice the size of AOC’s and, like hers, spans two boroughs — listed only 329 transactions for car services, totaling $6,091.29, campaign filings show.
In a district with limited transit options and a $17 Verrazzano Bridge toll, Rose spent only $732 more than AOC on gas and tolls — an indicator of personal car usage.
Ocasio-Cortez has repeatedly attributed her success in beating Democratic incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley to walking the streets of her district, which includes parts of Queens and The Bronx.
“I knocked doors until rainwater came through my soles,” she tweeted last June, famously donating her worn-out campaign shoes to the Cornell Costume Institute for an exhibit about women and empowerment.
But Ocasio-Cortez and her staff appear to have done much less walking after she vanquished Crowley in the party’s June 2018 primary.
Instead, her campaign embraced the friendly skies, logging 66 airline transactions costing $25,174.54 during campaign season.
The Democratic firebrand or her staff took Amtrak far less — only 18 times — despite high-speed rail being the cornerstone of her save-the-world strategy.
Most of the flights came after her primary win gave her superstar status and Ocasio-Cortez spent weeks jetting around the country, burning fuel to support her fellow Dems.
That despite her ultimate goal of building “high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary” — part of her Green New Deal mentioned in a FAQ she posted to her official website. She later called the air travel reference a mistake. The resolution now before Congress doesn’t mention air travel.
On Oct. 12, 2018, the campaign logged 26 car-service transactions, its highest number in a single day, as Ocasio-Cortez shuttled between The Bronx and Queens for “phone banking,” according to social-media posts.
“Canvassing is what that people power is about,” the candidate wrote on Facebook that day, boasting about “actually making contact at someone’s door.”
Those 26 cars produced a lot of carbon dioxide, which heavily contributes to global warming. According to the American Public Transportation Association, “a single person … by eliminating one car and taking public transportation instead of driving, a savings of up to 30 percent of carbon-dioxide emissions can be realized.”
Ironically, the Uber-loving politician took a tough public stand against the conveyance after a New York City taxi driver committed suicide in February 2018.
“Yellow cab drivers are in financial ruin due to the unregulated expansion of Uber,” she tweeted on March 21. “What was a living wage job now pays under minimum.”
Her campaign billed only seven rides in yellow cabs in a year and a half, federal filings show.
And while she is quick to dispense all sorts of planet-saving tips to her constituents and fans, telling a high-school assembly in Queens last month that they should “skip disposable razors and switch to safety razors” and “skip meat/dairy for a meal,” she doesn’t always take her own green advice.
In a Feb. 24 Instagram video filmed in her kitchen, Ocasio-Cortez railed against plastic grocery bags — then appeared to toss two of the sacks, which can be recycled, into the trash.
“It drives me crazy,” she said of plastic bags. “I wish they didn’t exist.”
In the video, Ocasio-Cortez peeled a sweet potato while calling for a “universal sense of urgency” to save the earth.
But she discarded the vegetable scraps into the same receptacle she had just used for the plastic bags, rather than setting the food waste aside for compost.
Trent refused to answer when asked whether his boss tossed her organic material in the trash.
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