Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) stated people are “safer than ever” from the specter of local weather change, and he blasted the Biden administration’s effort to handle the phenomenon as he unveiled an oil- and gas-first power plan on Wednesday.
DeSantis, who’s vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, made the feedback throughout a speech in Midland, Texas. He pledged to enact a slew of insurance policies to roll again efforts to handle local weather change, together with proposals to make electrical automobiles dearer, ramp up home manufacturing of fossil fuels and take away the U.S. from the landmark Paris local weather settlement.
“We’ve seen a concerted effort to ramp up the concern in the case of issues like international warming and local weather change,” he stated Wednesday, claiming Democrats had been making an attempt to “circumscribe your ambitions.”
“They’re even telling our youthful generations to have fewer youngsters, or to not even have youngsters, on the grounds that by some means youngsters are going to make our local weather and planet unlivable — and that’s flawed to say.”
DeSantis’ feedback come simply weeks after a Category 3 hurricane slammed into Florida, bringing record-high floodwaters and warnings from scientists that local weather change is fueling extra harmful and extra frequent storms. The secretary-general of the United Nations warned this week that humanity has “opened the gates to hell” and that even underneath present commitments, has not performed practically sufficient to restrict planet-warming emissions.
The Florida governor appeared to reject scientists’ concern on Wednesday, saying that though the local weather had “clearly” modified, his insurance policies to extend power manufacturing had been in reality a “sensible option to scale back international emissions.” Warnings a couple of way forward for climate-related disasters, he stated, had been merely “concern techniques.”
“We take care of hurricanes in Florida,” the governor stated. “We take care of fires, too, in Florida, however what I’d say is when… Joe Biden says that he’s extra nervous, like in 10 years, with the local weather than a nuclear warfare, I imply, I’m sorry, that’s simply not true.”
The lectern in entrance of the governor held an indication studying “$2 in 2025,” pointing to his marketing campaign promise to decrease gasoline costs to $2 a gallon ought to he be elected to the White Home. The Biden marketing campaign took umbrage with DeSantis’ assaults, calling his plans “deeply unserious and impractical” and “chock-full of the local weather denialism that defines the MAGA Republican Occasion.”
“Voters want look no additional than DeSantis’s personal state — the place his agenda is resulting in skyrocketing power prices for his constituents and pure disasters are inflicting tens of billions of {dollars} in damages — to know what DeSantis’s plan would imply for the nation,” Ammar Moussa, a spokesperson for Biden’s reelection marketing campaign, told The New York Times.