Rush Limbaugh on ‘Green New Deal’: ‘The left has literally have gone nuts on this climate change business’

https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2019/02/07/democrats-go-nuts-and-i-love-it/

RUSH: Holy smokes. Holy smokes! This is great. I love it! I love it, folks. You know, the left has gone nuts. They literally have gone nuts on this climate change business. Trying to keep up with things here breaking just as the program is started.

I want to go through some of the things that Cortez and some of these other people are proposing. They really believe this! I gotta calm down. I gotta slow down. I’ve gotta be reasoned and deliberate here.

Greetings. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network at 800-282-2882.

If we just shut up and let these people speak, we may end this whole climate change issue inside of two years. Just shut up. It’s gonna be very tough for me to do, but the thing that got my reaction here, Pelosi has created this brand-new committee, a select committee to deal with climate change, and she did not put Ocasio-Cortez on it! Ocasio-Cortez has been snubbed!

Ocasio-Cortez is leading this thing among the Millennials and the Democrat freshmen. And Pelosi has named this new select committee just announced they’re not gonna put Cortez on it. This is gonna cause delectable fireworks. But let me just run through some of the things — and you all have a proper background, understandings of climate change. You’ve been here 30 plus years. You’ve heard me detail everything there is about it.

Some of the new proposals that they have somehow let loose, they want to rebuild every single building in America. They want to phase out air travel in 10 years. They are promising government jobs and health care for everybody. And they’re suggesting that if we don’t have the money for it, no big deal, just print some. There’s a story in Politico today quoting Cortez as saying deficits don’t mean anything.

My friends, I love this in a way because I’ve been theorizing lately about how telling people that we can’t afford it, not a reason to do something, doesn’t work anymore with these people because it doesn’t matter. We don’t have the money to do anything. We’ve got deficits, $21 trillion national debt. It’s not stopping anybody from spending more, proposing to spend any more. Now they’re coming out and just being honest. It doesn’t matter whether we have the money or not. And if we don’t, just print it.

Now, out there in the Millennial population, we literally have a bunch of young people who believe that the earth is not gonna be habitable when they hit 65. I’ve tried to tell you they really believe this. You would not believe — I did a special survey after the State of the Union. Trump didn’t even talk about climate change. You would not believe the number of Millennial news sites and blogs that were outraged, livid. It was the number one criticism these people had, that Trump didn’t mention climate change.

And you could read in the stories they wrote about it that they’re genuinely scared to death. It is a crime what has been done to these kids. It is literally a crime the way they have been propagandized from the moment they started watching television, from early childhood. They literally believe this planet is under destruction as we sit here today and that human beings in the United States of America are responsible for it, primarily Republicans, and they’re calling for drastic action.

And so Cortez and her band have proposed it. Rebuild every building in America. I’m not making this up. They are dead serious. Phase out air travel in the next 10 years. Lord, thank you for my enemies. These people have now proposed what they literally believe what they think is necessary. And I find myself reacting to this much as I did reacting to things 20 years ago. Said, “Nobody is gonna believe this. Nobody’s gonna support this. Everybody’s gonna see how wacko this is.”

Now, I’ve learned. Some people are gonna support it. Some people are gonna support banning air travel. Some people are gonna think it’s a great idea to tear down every building and rebuild every building so it will be environmentally proper. I mean, literal impossibilities. We cannot ban air travel. The world would be brought to a screeching halt. The rest of the world isn’t gonna do any of this. And then you get to the printing money aspect.

So the great thing here is that they are, for whatever reason, showing all of their cards. And they are demonstrating exactly what they think is necessary to save the planet. And we’re all gonna benefit from this expose. So I’ll have more details on this as well as Pelosi — what would you call this? I mean, this is a major slap upside the head. A brand-new Select Committee on Climate Change and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will not be seated on this committee.

Pelosi’s appointed three other freshman Democrats to the panel. Eight Democrats to the new special climate change committee. (laughing) Cortez isn’t on the climate change committee! I have to tell you. I think Pelosi knows this is all a crock, she has to. I mean, folks, this is insane. This is literally childish. This is Romper Room type stuff and she’s gotta know this. So she has to placate these people and give them their little committee. And putting mostly freshmen on it means that she’s not taking it all that seriously.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  You think I’m making it up.  Here’s one of the proposals from the Green New Deal people.  A provision in the Green New Deal.  Quote: [E]xpanding high-speed rail to ‘a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.’”  What has our education system done?  What in the world has it done to people?  It has turned them against progress.  It has turned them against prosperity.  It has turned them against greatness.

It has turned them against the pursuit of excellence. It has turned them into cowards.  I mean, high-speed rail developed to “a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary”?  This is so absent reality that I’m kind of a little stumped here in reacting to this.  But I don’t know that I want to be on the rail line from New York to London.  High-speed rail?  Sufficiently widespread enough to make air travel unnecessary?  And they think trains are not gonna pollute, trains are not gonna…?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now let’s move on to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A Politico story: “The Democratic Party’s base is rallying around calls for massive social welfare programs like Medicare for All, a federal jobs guarantee and a Green New Deal — all of which would cost trillions of dollars and potentially bust the budget.

“Yet a small but growing chorus of progressives say that policy makers are thinking about deficits all wrong: The red ink, they say, is not that big of a deal. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-N.Y.), told Business Insider last month the notion that the government needn’t worry about balancing its books should be ‘a larger part of our conversation.’” If we run out of money, we just print some, she says. We haven’t had any money for a long time, and we’re not gonna let that stop us. We’re not gonna let people use the fact that we don’t have the money stop us.

So now we go to the audio sound bites. This was this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition. Steve Inskeep was interviewing Cortez about the Green New Deal. First question: “One reason people who are politically conservative are skeptical of efforts to combat climate change is that it sounds to them like it requires massive government intervention, which they just don’t like. Are you prepared to put on the table that, yes, that they are right, that what this requires is massive government intervention?”

CORTEZ: It does, yeah, I have no problem saying that. Why? Because we have tried their approach for 40 years. For 40 years we tried to let the private sector take care of it. They said, “we got this, we can do this. The forces of the market are going to force us to innovate,” except for the fact that there’s a little thing in economics called externalities, and what that means is that a corporation can dump pollution in the river and they don’t have to pay for it. And taxpayers have to pay for cleaning up our air, cleaning up our water, and saving the planet. And so we’ve already been paying the costs except we have not been getting any of the benefit.

RUSH: Well, you know, I really do think it’s a shame what our country, what our education system, whoever’s responsible for it, what they’ve done to these people. This woman is… I’m trying to find a charitable way. She’s just an ignoramus. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, and what she does know is so cockeyed that it’s difficult to deal with it with a straight face. But the problem is she’s not alone. It’s widespread. A whole lot of people in her generation have bought into this silly notion.

As far as she’s concerned, the United States is responsible for climate change.  As far as she’s concerned, climate change is real and is gonna destroy the planet in under 30 years. Well, in her case, 12 years.  We’ve got 12 years.  It’s absolutely absurd.  The whole thing intellectually, scientifically is absurd — and yet they buy it hook, line, and sinker.  Now their proposals here, which we detailed: Phase out air travel in the next 10 years, government guaranteed job for all, rebuild every single building in the USA!

None of this is practical.  Now, what they’re gonna say — what somebody in the Democrat Party’s gonna say to this — is, “Heeeey, don’t really believe all this.  This is just the starting point.  You know how negotiations work.  You always ask for much more than you expect to get.  You always put some throwaways in there.  They don’t really think they’re gonna ban air travel, and they don’t really think they’re gonna destroy and rebuild every building.”

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