Public officials making threats about the end of the world is no “joke,” according to a health expert who says socialist U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., stepped out of line.
The freshman lawmaker warned the earth would end in 12 years unless extreme action, such as her “Green New Deal,” is undertaken.
Cortez later claimed she was joking.
But Dr. Jane Orient of the Physicians for Civil Defense pointed out that Cortez’ “Green New Deal” has “not been withdrawn, and is endorsed by leading Democrat president candidates.”
“Schoolchildren are still being terrified about climate change destroying their future,” the organization said in its criticism of the congresswoman from New York.
“The Green New Deal is hardly new, and proponents are deadly serious,” Orient said.
She explained the plan largely was lifted from a 2009 document written for the U.N. Environment Program called “Rethinking the Economic Recovery: A Global Green New Deal” by Edward Barbier.
In the Jan. 3 issue of the prestigious British journal “Nature,” Barbier calls it “the first time a major western economy has proposed a comprehensive 10-year plan for a green transition.”
“The result of the plan, even if not its actual purpose, would be an energy-starved economy, Orient said.
“It is pure fantasy to think that ‘renewables’ – wind and solar – could possibly generate more than a tiny fraction of the energy we now produce from oil, gas, coal, and nuclear.”
She noted supporters of the U.N.’s Agenda 21, which the Green New Deal would impose, “envision a world in which people are allowed 320 square feet of living space and about 1 ounce of meat per day.”
“The Green New Deal cannot possibly sustain the earth’s current population,” Orient said. “And its effect on the climate would be negligible. The idea that it could save the climate or the planet could be the greatest scientific fraud in history.”
Ocasio-Cortez said: “And I think the part of it that is generational is that millennials and people, in Gen Z, and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re like, the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
She continued: “You’re biggest issue, your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it? — and like this is the war, this is our World War II. And I think for younger people looking at this are more like, how are we saying let’s take it easy when 3,000 Americans died last year, how are we saying let’s take it easy when the end person died from our cruel and unjust criminal justice system?
“How are we saying take it easy, the America that we’re living in today is so dystopian with people sleeping in their cars so they can work a second job without healthcare and we’re told to settle down. It’s a fundamental separation between that fierce urgency of now, the why we can’t wait that King spoke of. That at some point this chronic realities do reach a breaking point and I think for our generation it reached that, I wished I didn’t have to be doing every post, but sometimes I just feel like people aren’t being held accountable. Until, we all start pitching in and holding people accountable, I’m just gonna let them have it.”
A video of her statement:
.@AOC on millennials and social media: “We’re, like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” pic.twitter.com/HjhbVyfFN4
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 22, 2019
Later, she said it was all a “joke.”
The Daily Wire reported she said she claimed she was joking.
“The 29-year-old socialist mocked the Republican Party for taking her claim about the end of the world seriously, which she suggested was a combination of ‘dry humor + sarcasm,'” the Daily Wire said.
“This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. Like the ‘world ending in 12 years’ thing, you’d have to have the social intelligence of a sea sponge to think it’s literal. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows,” she wrote.
The Wire reported: “For context, Ocasio-Cortez first spouted the hyperbolic claim in January at a Martin Luther King forum in New York City, as The Daily Wire previously reported. She said it without laughing, earned a round of applause from the progressive audience, and then emphasized the point by calling the fight against Climate Change ‘our World War II.'”
Orient warned that Cortez’ “joke” now is “taught as truth in schools, and children are marching in the streets to demand ‘climate action’ to save their future.”
