Two-thirds of Democrats, including many high-ranking elected officials and presidential contenders, believe Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) claim that “the world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” — an assertion that Ocasio-Cortez now says only a “sea sponge” would swallow.
A Rasmussen Reports poll of 1,000 likely voters conducted May 20 and 21 asked respondents the following question: “A prominent politician says the United States has only 12 years to aggressively fight climate change or else there will be disastrous and irreparable damage to the country and the world. Do you agree or disagree?”
A whopping 67 percent of likely Democrat voters said they agree with the unnamed politician’s statement. While the percentage of all likely voters who agree is considerably lower — 48 percent — it is still nearly a majority. Only 40 percent of likely voters disagree, and 11 percent are undecided.
That unnamed politician, of course, is Ocasio-Cortez. In January, she told an interviewer, “Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will 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 and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’”
The Green New Deal, which Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) introduced in February, is also based on the notion that “we may have as few as 12 years” to save the planet from certain doom. That ambitious and unconstitutional plan for totally restructuring the American economy within a decade has been estimated to cost $93 trillion — but what’s $93 trillion compared to the end of the world?
After enduring a couple months’ worth of ridicule, in early April Ocasio-Cortez hit back at her critics. “How many years until the world ends again? We have 12 years left to cut emissions by at least 50 percent if not more,” she said on Instagram Live. “For everyone who wants to make a joke about that, you may laugh but your grandkids will not.”
A month later, however, she tried to suggest that her apocalyptic assertions had just been intended as a joke. “This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it,” she tweeted. “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.”
Apparently — and to no one’s great surprise — there are a lot of sponges in the Democratic Party.
At least five people who want to be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, for instance, have cited Ocasio-Cortez’s 12-year deadline.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is cosponsoring the Green New Deal bill in the Senate, referred to “scientific reports that tell us that we have all of 12 years to significantly cut carbon emissions or else there will be irreparable damage to the United States and countries all over the world” during an April Fox News town hall.
“Every day we fail to act will be to our collective consequence,” Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) declaimed in an April CNN town hall. “The UN has already said over the next 12 years if we don’t get this straight there will be severe consequences.”
Warning of the “existential” threat of “climate change,” former Vice President Joe Biden told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January, “The United Nations told us, whether you agree with the exact number, that we have 12 years to act before it’s irreversible.”
Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and former Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke have also warned that there are just 12 years left to avert disaster. O’Rourke has even tightened the deadline in recent weeks to 10 years.
It would seem that the “sponges” have soaked up Ocasio-Cortez’s climate-change talking point all too well, and no amount of insisting it wasn’t to be taken seriously will disabuse them of that notion. Indeed, such is the climate alarmism among millennials that they aren’t even bothering saving for retirement, figuring the planet will have been destroyed by the time they get old. Perhaps people really are getting dumber every day.
Photo: AP Images
