Rep. Liz Cheney Stumps Panel About 'Air Travel' Portion of Green New Deal

Nick Kangadis | February 14, 2019
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For those of you that want get a little chuckle toward the latter half of your work week, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) has the remedy for you!

Cheney, who’s also the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, questioned a panel of “four Democrat and two Republican witnesses” on the feasibility of the Green New Deal during a natural resources subcommittee hearing on climate change on Tuesday.

Unfortunately for the panelists, Cheney really didn’t get much of an answer.

The Wyoming congresswoman wanted to know from the panel what they thought about some of the Green New Deal’s more puzzling items.

For Cheney’s with the panel, watch below:

 

Here's a transcript of a portion of Cheney's time with the panel:

I would assume that each of the witnesses, who believes that we should in fact move towards net-zero emissions, would say that we ought to do so gradually, not suddenly. And so I would ask, and again I’ll start with you Ms. [Chandra] Farley, if you could describe for me, perhaps, exactly how we’ll do that gradually. I would assume we’re not just going to wait 10 years and then all of sudden tell people they can’t fly, but that we’ll be in a situation, where over the course of the 10 years, that we’ll be able to work our way out of air travel. And I would also guess that would involve some sort of prioritization. So I assume, even my colleagues on the other side of the aisle who support the Green New Deal, and perhaps the witnesses who support the Green New Deal, wouldn’t advocate, for example, that we can’t sell things like life lights. They wouldn’t advocate that we immediately move away from being able to transport people who have life threatening illnesses by plane, but that there would be some other prioritization there. So Ms. Farley, could you tell me exactly how the government should prioritize air travel and the gradual move away from all air travel?

Farley is the Just Energy Director at the Partnership for Southern Equity in Atlanta, according to the organization's website.

“I would depend on the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and other federal agencies that focus on air travel to tackle that question,” Farley answered without actually answering. “The Green New Deal is a sweeping collection of recommendations and policies…”

Cheney cut Farley off to save her from continuing to give a non-answer.

“I guess we’re going to set up a situation where the FAA then can tell individual citizens which of their air travel is worthy and important, and which isn’t,” Cheney said. “It would seem to me, I guess, we would then have a situation where the FAA could say, for example, ‘you know what? Vacation travel, that’s not essential. We’ve got to make sure we could do the air travel for the people who really need it. So, no vacation travel.’ Would you say we’re going to have some sort of vacation commissar set up in the government to determine what kind of air travel makes sense?”

After Cheney continued by asking the panel whether any of them support the Green New Deal, no one responded at first until Farley SJW’d all over the place by saying she supports multiple aspects of the Green New Deal that deal with “equity.”

The original “frequently asked questions” section on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional website was taken down not long after being posted, but The Heartland Institute published a copy of it on their website.

Here’s the portion that pertains to air travel:

Totally overhaul transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, build charging stations everywhere, build out highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary, create affordable public transit available to all, with goal to replace every combustion-engine vehicle

The question remains, what is feasible about the Green New Deal?

Nobody? Well, okay then. I guess we’ll just have to keep waiting for an answer on that.

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