Ron DeSantis didn’t risk being in the same county Saturday with Joe Biden, but he continues offering long-distance dismissals of the President’s climate change comments.
As Biden spoke recently after Idalia’s impact, he said that “nobody intelligent can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore,” referring to severe disasters in recent years “that we’ve never seen before.”
DeSantis, however, cited a pre-climate change era to rebut that argument.
“I studied history and they act like this is somehow unprecedented,” DeSantis said during a Fox News interview. “It’s not.”
The Governor’s proof is that a hurricane hit the same area in the 19th century.
“This area, the Big Bend got hit by a storm, almost the exact same track in 1896 that had 125 mile per hour winds. So the idea that we’ve not had powerful storms until recently, that’s just not factually true. And so when they, that’s the first thing they want to say, you have to ask, why are they trying to politicize the weather?”
DeSantis groused about “politicizing the weather” during a state press conference this week, comments which in retrospect seem like a rough draft for the cable TV hit.
Noting that storms have hit Florida long before the current era, the Governor said the “notion that somehow hurricanes are something new” is “just false.”
“We’ve got to stop politicizing the weather and stop politicizing natural disasters,” DeSantis continued. “We know from history, there have been times where it’s been very busy in Florida.”
In the “late ’40s, early ’50s,” DeSantis said there were “a lot of hits of significant hurricanes.”
“So I think sometimes people need to take a breath and get a little bit of perspective here. But the notion that somehow if we just adopt, you know, very left wing policies at the federal level, that somehow we will not have hurricanes, that is a lie. And that is people trying to take what’s happened with different types of storms and use that as a pretext to advance their agenda on the backs of people that are suffering and that’s wrong and we’re not going to do that in the state of Florida.”
The President sees it differently, of course.
“Nobody can deny the impact of climate crises — at least nobody intelligent can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. Just look around, around the nation and the world for that matter,” Biden said Saturday. “Historic floods, intense droughts, extreme heat, deadly wildfires that have caused serious damage that we’ve never seen before.”
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