From WNYC, I'm Brian Laird. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Tuesday, July 7th.

With Democratic Socialists on the rise in New York, Colorado, California, elsewhere,

one little-noticed story seems to be their changing

relationship with the issue of climate change, or a term we actually haven't heard very much

for a few years, the Green New Deal. Here to walk us through that evolution and where he sees

the DSA today is Robinson Meyer. He's the founding executive director or executive editor of

HeatMap News, the Climate and Energy News Organization. He wrote a piece called How Pothole Socialism

solves the new left's biggest challenge. Hi, Robinson. Always good to have you on the show. Welcome

back to WNYC. Thank you so much for having me. It's always great to be here.

Just to set the historical foundation of this, Zeran Mamdani and AOC, for example, had very early

climate focus as one of their main things as they were coming up, right? Yes, exactly.

And I want to be clear that I think I'm, I want to, you know, expand the ambit a little

bit to say, you know, the DSA, it's a very New York and kind of urban focused institution.

I'm, in this, I'm thinking about the kind of new left or millennial left or online left,

whatever term you want to use for, I mean,

the post-Burney and Bernie kind of faction in the Democratic Party broadly.

But yeah, exactly.

AOC and Zoran, both at the beginning of their political careers defined themselves, in part

by their strident and very aggressive and ambitious climate politics.

I think even Zoran described himself as a eco-socialist at the beginning of his time in the state legislature.

Eco-socialist, and you remind us in the article that AOC cemented her national profile by joining an activist group called

the Sunrise Movement for a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi's office and demanding a Green New Deal.

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