The Democrat darling, incoming congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been harping on about her “green new deal” which is supposed to take us off any pollutant fuels and put us on 100 percent renewable energy.

As I’ve previously discussed, the young democratic socialist has not told us how she intends to pay for it and I’m not holding my breath for her to explain how she will with any detail.

However, as Jazz Shaw at Hot Air pointed out, taking us off of fossil fuels and putting us on purely green energy would have an adverse effect on our country that would make us WISH we were still polluting the air.

(Quick fun fact: We’re one of the least polluting nations on the planet, outpacing nations on board with the Paris accords by miles.)

According to Shaw, Ocasio-Cortez’s plan would put us squarely reliant on China and Russia and would put us into some serious debt with them.

But just how “green” is this deal? There are a number of problems with it. For one thing, it shuts down nuclear power (which produces no greenhouse gases, by the way). That’s an element of the “deal” being pushed heavily by Bernie Sanders. Of course, when they shut down all nuclear energy in his home state they wound up having to burn oil to keep the power grid alive last winter. Super plan there, Bernie.

But the bigger crisis we’re looking at with the Green New Deal has to do with our ability to actually manufacture all the equipment required to generate that kind of energy. A new report from Leiden University in the Netherlands reveals one factor that progressives don’t seem to have considered. Expanding production of solar and wind power facilities is going to require a vastly larger supply of what are known as “rare-earth metals” like neodymium, terbium, dysprosium, and praseodymium. Here’s the problem. The current global supply of these metals is nowhere near the anticipated demand and the countries that control most of those supplies aren’t exactly our best friends.

Aside from the fact that throwing the mining these rare Earth metals into overdrive to have the materials necessary to build all these green energy wonders would be the opposite of good environmentalism, the largest deposits of these metals are found in very specific places. Namely China and Russia according to a 2017 report.

As Shaw notes, we just got away from OPEC, but Ocasio-Cortez’s plan would put us right back under the boot of another country:

So if you want to move ahead with this plan, there appear to be two choices. We could start doing a massive amount of hardrock mining here in America, no doubt driving the environmentalists insane. Alternately, we could go to China and Russia with our hat in our hands. We’ve only recently gotten the boot of OPEC off our collective throats by becoming a world leader in the oil and gas industry. Now we’re going to replace OPEC with the Russians and the Chinese and leave our fortunes in their hands?

For a party that seriously despises Russia, its members sure do want us financially under their thumb.

Perhaps Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders, who also supports this “new deal” should reevaluate their approach to a renewable energy-only world.