The Green New Deal is generally treated as a wild-eyed scheme of the Congressional Democrats’ liberal youth caucus, most particularly of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But, if she is the fresh face behind the “aspirational” climate fix that was put on the nation’s table in February, proposing significant new public works and policies to move America away from carbon, what about the seventysomething Edward Markey, who joined her to introduce the resolution in the U.S. Senate?

Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-nine, and Markey was a barely older thirty when he first showed up in Washington—in 1976, thirteen years before the New York City congresswoman was born. That year, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, from Massachusetts. (He was reëlected to the House nineteen times and then took over John Kerry’s Senate seat, in a special election, in 2013, and was reëlected the following year.) It took the young Markey somewhat longer than it has Ocasio-Cortez, but he also stepped out with a bold initiative aimed at saving the planet from catastrophe.