She may have graduated cum laude in 2011 from Boston University College of Arts and Sciences with a bachelor of arts degree in international relations and economics, but Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) (AOC) is also a highly qualified climatologist and, apparently, a skilled epidemiologist, too.
AOC, the lead member of “The Squad,” is shouting from the rooftops that Earth has just 12 years left before climate change destroys the planet. Her solution: Spend $93 trillion over the next decade to address farting cows (and she’ll do her part, too, saying she might just adopt one fewer child).
Now, Ocasio-Cortez says climate change will lead to melting glaciers, which could release ancient diseases infecting the world’s population.
“There are a lot of diseases that are frozen in some of these glaciers, um, that scientists fear that there is a potential that a lot of diseases could, um, escape these melted glaciers, things that were frozen for thousands of years, and that they’re going to get into our water,” she said during a live video session on Instagram.
She added “that humans could contract them, and they are going to be diseases that are thousands of years old that have vectors that we are not prepared for, that we have never seen. And, um, so that’s a concern.”
Oh, and AOC is also an entomologist.
“Um, even if there are no diseases frozen at all in these glaciers, you have diseases that are spread by mosquitoes, and now mosquitoes are starting to fly further north that carry diseases like malaria, and, um, a whole slew of other things,” she said.
“And, uh, and there are, you know, parts of the United States and things are moving much farther north that we’re going to have to contend with, diseases that we haven’t had to contend with in parts of the world before. Um, so there’s disease,” she said.
AOC said she’s losing sleep over climate change. “Even while I was on vacation I woke up in the middle of the night at 3:30 in the morning just concerned about climate change,” she said. “I’m 29 years old, I really struggle sometimes with the idea of how to be a policymaker, and potentially have a family in the time of climate change.”
But she said Americans are just going to have to pony up that $93 trillion or the whole world will be lost.
“We need to start getting comfortable with how extreme the problem is,” she said, “because only until we accept, frankly, how, um, bad climate change is and how bad it can be for our children’s lives, um, are we going to be comfortable pursuing really big solutions.”
“We need to bite the bullet on the cost,” said the climatologist/epidemiologist/entomologist/financier, “because the alternative to not spending the money is (A) death and (B) spending even more money.”
“People may not like it and they may say ‘Oh my God’ and ‘blah blah blah,’ like, we’re not trying to end cows and plane travel, but we need to change our lives. All of it. Our whole lives.”