Mitt Romney made a big joke during the Republican national convention about Obama’s efforts to address climate change, and the crowd loved it. He then made the note that he was going to “help you and your family” — very contradictory statements there. As is evident with this freak storm Sandy, addressing global warming will help you and your families. Storms like Sandy will be the norm in a few decades, or a relief compared to the bigger storms likely to come, if we don’t address global warming. How is that a laughing matter?
Here’s Bill Clinton talking about this simple but underacknowledged point in the wake of Sandy:
http://youtu.be/C7T-Wy17U6M
And here’s Romney’s initial joke at the Republican national convention:
http://youtu.be/VgSIw3OBOx0
And, via Climate Progress, here’s the transcript from the Clinton video above:
“I was actually listening closely to what the candidates said in these debates. In the first debate, the triumph of the moderate Mitt Romney. You remember what he did? He ridiculed the president. Ridiculed the president for his efforts to fight global warming in economically beneficial ways. He said, ‘Oh, you’re going to turn back the seas.’ In my part of America, we would like it if someone could’ve done that yesterday. All up and down the East Coast, there are mayors, many of them Republicans, who are being told, ‘You’ve got to move these houses back away from the ocean. You’ve got to lift them up. Climate change is going to raise the water levels on a permanent basis. If you want your town insured, you have to do this.’ In the real world, Barack Obama’s policies work better.”
(And let’s not even get into the fact here that Romney wants to do away with federal disaster relief.)
