If nothing else, it will be terribly amusing to watch Republicans of the ilk of Louie Gohmert and James Inhofe turn themselves inside-out, asserting that they know more about climate science than the degreed professional scientists on the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (It's just common sense, y'know, that if the weather gets really cold, global warming can't be really happening!)
Additional news on the GND front: Kate Aronoff of The Intercept has been doing some good work on the subject. She appeared on Democracy Now! this morning and told us not to get our collective knickers in a knot over Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's not being named to the special GND committee: AOC has noted that she can do more good as lead sponsor of the resolution and working her other committee assignments. In this Intercept post, Aronoff reports that AOC denies that Speaker Nancy Pelosi was making light of the proposal with her comment about "the Green Dream or whatever they call it."
Pelosi on Thursday morning announced Ocasio-Cortez would not be on that select committee, though she was approached for a seat and declined to join. In a separate interview with Politico, Pelosi mocked the notion of a Green New Deal. “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive,” she said. “The green dream or whatever they call it — nobody knows what it is but they’re for it right?”
Ocasio-Cortez, at a press conference unveiling the resolution, was asked repeatedly about Pelosi’s dig, but declined to hit back, saying that Pelosi has long been a climate champion and the term “dream” is a compliment, accurately capturing the scale of the vision, which she compared to the New Deal and Great Society.
Calling Madame Speaker a "climate champion" is AOC's way of putting her on notice that she needs to start acting like one. (EDIT: The NYT reminds us that Pelosi pushed for cap & trade, a market-based half-measure, as Speaker in 2009; she got it through the House but not the Senate.) It reminds me of when the Nobel Committee gave President Barack Obama the Peace Prize before he'd actually done anything beyond not being George W. Bush: a way of encouraging him to be the promoter peace his campaign rhetoric made him out to be. (His subsequent record on the peace front was mixed, to say the least.)
Similarly, as breathtakingly stupid as Pelosi sometimes appears on video, and as stubborn as she is about not embracing socialistic solutions, House Democrats made her Speaker because she knows where the levers of power are and is well acquainted with their use. She can swat down uppity progressive Congressmembers as easily as she swats aside questions about single-payer health care.
It's an open question whether Pelosi is aware that progressive/socialist policies are popular with the electorate, especially young voters, or whether she gives a flying fuck. To paraphrase Upton Sinclair rather liberally, It's difficult to make a legislator understand something when her campaign contributions depend on her not understanding it—even a legislator in a relatively safe seat.