Mere days after being sworn in, freshman U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–NY), famously proclaimed the world will end in 12 years if action isn’t taken to thwart climate change. After weeks of criticism and ridicule from those on both sides of the aisle about the controversial claim, the Congresswoman took to Twitter to back peddle her outrageous claims.
Ocasio-Cortez made her initial comments about climate change while being interviewed by Ta-Nehisi Coates during a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day at the Riverside Church in New York City. Speaking to a receptive audience, the freshman Congresswoman said, “I think that the part of it that is generational is that millennials, and Gen-Z, and all these folks that come after us, are looking up and we’re like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is, your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it?”
After the audience applauded loudly to her statement, the freshman Congresswoman took her claim even further by saying, “And like, this is the war, this is our World War II. And I think for younger people, we’re looking at this and we’re like ‘how how are we saying, let’s take it easy when 3,000 people died last year?’ How are we saying let’s take it easy when the nth person has just died from our cruel and unjust criminal justice system?”
Continuing, Ocasio-Cortez added, “How are we saying take it easy when the America that we’re living in today is so dystopian with people sleeping in their cars so that they can work a second job without health care. And we’re told to settle down, it’s a fundamental separation between that fierce urgency of now, the why we can’t wait that King spoke of, that at some point these chronic realities reach a breaking point. And I think for our generation, it’s reached that.”
Concluding her remarks, the freshman Congresswoman proclaimed, “And, I wish I didn’t have to be doing every post but sometimes I just feel like people aren’t being held accountable. And until we all start pitching in and holding people accountable, I’m just gonna let them have it!”
But that wasn’t the only time Ocasio-Cortez repeated the outlandish claim. In March of this year, Ocasio-Cortez doubled down on her gloomy forecast of world doom during a town hall event with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.
The town hall centered around the freshman Congresswoman’s controversial “Green New Deal.” At the event, she insisted in labeling climate change the “greatest existential threat” to the country’s future.
The New York Congresswoman also clumsily compared climate change to the atrocious bombing of the World Trade Center on 9/11. Ocasio-Cortez said, “On the events of September 11, 2001, thousands of Americans died in the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil and our national response, whether we agree with it or not, our national response was to go to war in one then eventually two countries. Three thousand Americans died in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. Where is our response?”
Since Ocasio-Cortez gave the world an expiration date of 12 years if climate change isn’t addressed, the media, researchers and scientists have pushed back against her claims. According to TheBlaze, a climate scientist at NASA, Kate Marvel, told Axios, “Twelve years isn’t a deadline, and climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off — it’s a slope we slide down. We don’t have 12 years to prevent climate change — we have no time. It’s already here. And even under a business-as-usual scenario, the world isn’t going to end in exactly twelve years.”
Despite her repetition of the claim, Ocasio-Cortez seemed all too eager to walk it back last Sunday. And in an attempt to avoid blame or admit she lied, the freshman Congresswoman attempted to make Republicans look like the ignorant ones. She tweeted, “This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it. 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. But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.”
Perhaps, the liberal lawmaker has decided she needs more than 12 years to fundamentally change America into a socialist nation.
