AOC admits Green New Deal requires 'massive gov't intervention,' then criticizes the right for similar claims

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) made two comments in the same day about the Green New Deal that seem to be at odds with one another.

Thursday morning, Ocasio-Cortez went on NPR's "Morning Edition" with Steve Inskeep. Inskeep asked her if she was prepared to admit that conservatives are right to be skeptical about climate change efforts because they require "massive government intervention."

Inskeep: Are you prepared to put on that table that, "Yes actually they're right, what this requires is massive government intervention?"

Ocasio-Cortez: It does, it does, yeah, I have no problem saying that. Why? Because we have tried their approach for 40 years. For 40 years we have tried to let the private sector take care of this. They said, "We got this, we can do this, the forces of the market are going to force us to innovate." Except for the fact that there's a little thing in economics called externalities. And what that means is that a corporation can dump pollution into the river and they don't have to pay, but taxpayers have to pay.

Fast forward to later in the day, when Ocasio-Cortez went on "Meet the Press Daily: with Chuck Todd. Todd asked her how she envisioned financing the Green New Deal in a way that doesn't place an excessive burden on taxpayers.

Todd: Is it a—how do you envision financing this? Is it all through government? Is it just—how are you envisioning financing it that it doesn't end up with the rank-and-file taxpayers?

Ocasio-Cortez: So, there's a couple of things. One is that I think one way that the right does try to mischaracterize what we're doing as though it's like some massive government takeover.

Ocasio-Cortez went on to explain that the program could be accomplished through public-private partnerships, working with municipal governments, or through "potential contracting."

Here is audio/video of the two remarks:

This writer's perspective

Some will push back and say this isn't a contradiction due to the semantic difference between an "intervention" and a "takeover," but I believe it is a fair interpretation that she's talking about the same thing in both interviews based on the context of the questions.