by John Gage
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Sen. Rand Paul after he claimed she said the world would end in 12 years if nothing is done about climate change.
“Hey Senator! Would you like me to also take your comments out of context and pose them as your earnest position, as you have chosen to do with me?” the New York Democrat wrote Wednesday. “I assume the answer is yes, especially given that the GOP climate agenda is about as fictional as Spaceballs anyway.”
Paul, 57, attacked Ocasio-Cortez’s position on climate change earlier in the day. “No @AOC the world will not end in 12 years but we must, absolutely must do something, over the next 500 million years,” he tweeted. “Some say we should develop a space shield to protect us from the sun’s increased luminosity. I’m not against that but it will only be a temporary respite maybe a few million years. I do think we should also begin genetically altering O2 producing organisms to send to Saturn’s Titan and possibly the closest planets outside of our solar system. What say you AOC?”
The freshman congresswoman said a year ago her generation believes the “world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” In May, Ocasio-Cortez said Republicans should not take all of her statements too literally.
“This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it,” she said. “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.”
Ocasio-Cortez introduced her Green New Deal resolution last February, which seeks to overhaul the United States’s approach to climate change and the economy. The freshman congresswoman’s chief of staff later stated her Green New Deal plan was originally not “a climate thing” but “a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”