We should have known this was coming.
On Tuesday, an anchor at CNN, along with Joe Biden’s Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, suggested that climate change might be responsible for the tragic collapse of the Champlain Towers South Condominium in Surfside, Florida.
The building collapsed last Thursday at approximately 1:15 am local time. As of this writing, 12 bodies have been recovered from the collapsed building, with another 149 persons still unaccounted for.
So, of course that’s the right time to bring up a straw-man argument that the scourge of climate change might be responsible for the tragedy.
Despite the fact that rescue workers are still picking through the ruins and searching for survivors, the “most trusted name in news” decided to attempt to blame the tragedy on the Left’s favorite bogeyman — climate change.
While a red chyron at the bottom of the screen blared, “Could Climate Crisis Have Contributed to Building Collapse?” anchor Erica Hill asked, “Given what we know about the changing climate, given that you’ve seen an increase in, so called, extraordinary tides, and the impact that that can have in areas like south Florida, do you think that climate would have played a role in that building’s collapse?”
To her credit, Granholm didn’t say yes, exactly. But she did play along, hinting that climate change might indeed have played a role in the tragedy.
“Well, obviously we don’t know fully, but we do know the seas are rising,” Granholm said. “We know that we’re losing inches and inches of beach — not just in Florida, but all around,” Granholm said.
Granholm saw the disaster as not only a chance to toss some blame for the collapse at climate change, but also to shill for her boss’s infrastructure plan.
“The issue about resiliency and making sure we adapt to this changing climate — that’s going to meant that levees need to be built, that means sea walls need to be built, that means infrastructure needs to be built,” Granholm explained.
“There’s so much investment that we need to do to protect ourselves from climate change but also to address it and mitigate it,” Granholm said. “Hopefully, these infrastructure bills when taken together will make a huge step and allow America to lead again,” the energy secretary concluded.
Despite the uncovering of a three-year-old consultant’s report that found evidence of “major structural damage” to a concrete slab beneath the pool deck and “abundant” damage to the columns, beams, and walls of the parking garage — something CNN itself reported on — Hill and Granholm decided to throw some blame toward climate change because, in their mind it seems, climate change is responsible for everything.
Some on Twitter were outraged by the stunt. User Mike LaChance called it “beyond parody,” while the Young Americans for Freedom account stated, “Let’s work to find survivors and clean up the damage before we blame an accident on anyone or anything.”
Rich Lowry echoed what many climate realists were thinking by tweeting, “There’s nothing that can’t be blamed on climate change.”
Stephen Leatherman, a beach researcher at Florida International University who is also known by the nickname “Dr. Beach,” said that it’s unlikely that climate change could have played a significant role in the tragedy.
“I doubt that that was an issue here,” Leatherman told Agence France-Presse.
“Big thing they worry about here are hurricanes, beach erosion, flooding, all those issues. But the collapse of a building is new. We haven’t ever seen this before, particularly a high-rise building,” Leatherman said.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” former Chicago mayor and advisor to Bill and Hillary Clinton Rahm Emmanuel famously said. Both CNN and Jennifer Granholm knew exactly what they were doing by bringing up climate change as a possible cause for the tragic Florida building collapse. They were simply planting a seed that their viewers will cultivate on their own, connecting this tragedy to climate change though it’s unlikely that such a connection truly exists.
For CNN and the Biden administration, one thing is clear: Agenda trumps honesty.
