Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said on Sunday he supported the recently released “Green New Deal” resolution from New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed Markey.
Buttigieg announced an exploratory committee last month for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and his remarks Sunday reflected a growing consensus among much of the prospective 2020 field in support of the “Green New Deal.”
“I think it’s the right beginning,” Buttigieg said of the resolution on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Jake Tapper.
Calling climate change “a national emergency,” Buttigieg said the concept matched “a sense of urgency about that problem of climate change with a sense of opportunity around what the solutions might represent.”
The recently released joint resolution set out a framework for what a “Green New Deal” would include in order to reframe the US economy and shift the country away from fossil fuels, with an eye to combating climate change.
If elected, Buttigieg would be the nation’s first openly gay president and the youngest person ever to hold the office. He compared his age in the interview to President Donald Trump, and suggested that Trump’s attack lines about socialism came from an outdated perspective.
“If you grew up during that Cold War period, then you saw a time in politics when the word socialism could be used to end an argument,” Buttigieg said. “Today, I think a word like that is the beginning of a debate, not the end of a debate.”
