This week, the severe storms that have been plaguing the U.S. threatened the nation’s capital. While some saw danger, one Democratic lawmaker saw opportunity.
While trapped indoors taking shelter after a rare tornado warning was issued for the Washington D.C. area on Thursday afternoon, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) posted an Instagram Live video of the scene, suggesting it was proof that “the climate crisis is real.”
AOC Instagram footage
In the short clip posted to the social media website, Ocasio-Cortez talks to the camera while peering out of a large window. “They just issued a tornado watch in D.C.,” she says, while briefly turning the camera on two other women who let out nervous cries.
She then pans around to the scene outside, where people can be seen standing. “There’s people stuck outside,” she says. “We need to get them out. This is crazy.”
Here’s the footage:
“This is crazy”: AOC worried by DC tornado warning
Uploaded by dcexaminer on 2019-05-23.
The “real” cause of America’s tornadoes
Afterward, Ocasio-Cortez used the situation to talk about climate change, which she apparently thinks led to the tornado threat that D.C. faced. And here I thought that tornadoes were caused by the mixing of northern cold air and southern hot air that occurs at this time of year.
“The climate crisis is real y’all,” she said. “Guess we’re at casual tornadoes in growing regions of the country?”
Although it’s rare, Washington D.C. does get the occasional tornado. The area has seen roughly seven since official records started being kept in 1950.
“Other regions deal with wildfires, tornadoes, droughts, etc.,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “But ALL of these threats will be increasing in intensity as climate crisis grows and we fail to act appropriately.”
The AOC Agenda
Ocasio-Cortez has made remedying the so-called “climate crisis” a major goal for her time in office. It was to this end that she released the widely-criticized Green New Deal.
The proposal, among other things, seeks extreme, many would say impossible, solutions to various climate change predictions, with the goal of eliminating the United State’s greenhouse gas emissions in just ten years. Understandably, Republicans and moderate Democrats criticized the plan as being impractical.
Nonetheless, Ocasio-Cortez continues to push her proposal, just this month declaring that there is “no middle ground” on climate change. “I will be damned if the same politicians who refused to act then are going to come back today and say we need a ‘middle-of-the-road’ approach to save our lives,” she said.
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