The Biden administration’s push on climate change is not radical enough for some. Vice President Kamala Harris faced down a heckler who blamed the administration for the wildfires in Hawaii.
“We are in the middle of a climate emergency. Eighty people have died in Hawaii. Thousands have been displaced by the climate chaos. The planet is burning, and people are dying,” the unnamed heckler said. “We were wondering if you would uphold your promises … You and Joe are failing on climate.”
Kamala Harris, who could not be heard above his showing, shut down the heckler saying, “I’m speaking.”
The wildfires in Hawaii were spread by the winds from Hurricane Dora and were enabled by dried vegetation. The storm knocked out power and communications throughout the islands.
A combination of hot and dry conditions led to the wildfires that have killed 99 people thus far, with many more people still missing.
President Joe Biden has tried to tamp down criticism of his initial nonchalant approach to the wildfires by promising emergency support.
“I reassured the Governor that Hawai’i will continue to have everything it needs from the federal government, and directed [Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell] to keep surging resources and personnel as long as it takes. Every asset they need will be there for them.”
The town of Lahaina on Maui was almost completely destroyed.
Biden Administration Spending Billions on Climate
President Joe Biden has committed to cutting CO2 emissions by 50-52 percent by 2030 under the Paris Climate Agreement. His Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $369 billion in subsidies for solar, wind, nuclear, and other “Green Energy” sources, has won praise from mainstream environmental activists.
“If I was standing at a cocktail party and someone who doesn’t work in climate asked, ‘How is the U.S. doing on climate change?’ my immediate response, before taking another sip of my glass of wine, would be, given the hand they were dealt, the Biden administration is doing a remarkably good job,” Robert Stavins, an energy and environmental economist at Harvard University, said.
Other defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act contend the administration’s policies will ultimately crowd out fossil fuels in the marketplace.
“What we’re doing is throwing a lot of money at clean technology, and hoping medium-, long-term it will crowd out a lot of the dirty stuff,” said Michael Mehling, deputy director for the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It is kind of slow, but it lets a lot of the incumbent stuff hang around longer than it would if we deployed sticks in addition to incentives, like a carbon price.”
Critics Say Global Climate Change Does not Explain Hawaii Fires
Rhetoric about global climate change and the fires in Hawaii fails to explain why the fires happened, critics say.
“As Elise McCue wrote in an excellent report for The Daily Signal, Maui has been at high risk for big fires due to many factors. The disappearance of Hawaii’s sugar cane and agricultural industry is a big one. Many former sugar cane fields have been taken over by large stretches of dry, flammable grass,” Daily Signal Columnist Jarrett Stepman wrote.
“According to Anthony Watts, a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, the topography of Maui creates particularly dry conditions on large parts of the island and high winds. So, you have an enormous amount of fuel and dry conditions in a region that—global warming or not—gets quite hot.
Stepman continued, “This was a tinderbox—and a huge catastrophe waiting to happen.”
John Rossomando is a defense and counterterrorism analyst and served as Senior Analyst for Counterterrorism at The Investigative Project on Terrorism for eight years. His work has been featured in numerous publications such as The American Thinker, The National Interest, National Review Online, Daily Wire, Red Alert Politics, CNSNews.com, The Daily Caller, Human Events, Newsmax, The American Spectator, TownHall.com, and Crisis Magazine. He also served as senior managing editor of The Bulletin, a 100,000-circulation daily newspaper in Philadelphia, and received the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors first-place award for his reporting.
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