Popular science communicator and television host Bill Nye lavished praise on New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Saturday, The Hill reports.
“AOC gets it. She sees that fear is dividing us,” Nye said, referring to the Congresswoman.
“We can address income inequality. We can address climate change, if we get together and get to work.”
According to The Hill , Nye also came out in support of the Green New Deal, a set of proposed economic stimulus programs meant to combat climate change.
As previously reported by The Inquisitr , the Green New Deal was introduced last month by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts, when the two Congress members unveiled a five-page resolution setting a framework for a “national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization” program.
For the next two years, progressive lawmakers and climate change activists will tirelessly organize and craft legislation. Demonstrating that the Green New Deal is gaining traction is the fact that it has been endorsed by nearly every Democratic presidential candidate. Right-wing media and centrist Democrats have downplayed it as unrealistic, however.
“The green dream or whatever they call it — nobody knows what it is but they’re for it right?” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.
But Pelosi’s statements are not slowing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Congress progressives down. On the contrary, the New York Representative has been campaigning and advocating relentlessly.
“When we think about the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of vision,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Saturday at the South by Southwest Festival.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Question and Answer session at the event was “crashed,” as CNET put it, by Bill Nye, who asked the representative about climate change and her plans to address it. Nye pointed out that many people are afraid of the proposed — although necessary — changes, and are unwilling to embrace them.
Unfazed, Ocasio-Cortez responded that “courage begets courage,” arguing that “once one person stands up” others feel more comfortable doing the same.
Evidently impressed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dedication to the cause, and performance at the South by Southwest Festival, Nye took to social media to praise the young congresswoman, posting a picture he had taken with her.
It comes as no surprise that Bill Nye the Science Guy is endorsing the Green New Deal, given that the popular television host has long supported such initiatives.
In a recent interview with Rolling Stone , Bill Nye criticized Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the scientific consensus on climate change, calling the president’s positions “irresponsible and very troubling.”
