‘To hell with it’: Sean Hannity gives up on planet, says humanity should ‘have a big party’ instead of fighting climate crisis
‘I’m like, if it’s done in 12 years, oh, to hell with it,’ Mr Hannity said on his radio show. ‘Let’s just have a big party and you know, eat, drink, and barbecue and be merry’
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Your support makes all the difference.Right-wing pundit Sean Hannity has offered a disturbingly nihilistic response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s warnings about the climate crisis.
“Remember, she told us – what, a year or two ago – that we only had 12 years left, the planet, that’s it,” Mr Hannity said on his radio show on Wednesday.
“I’m like, if it’s done in 12 years, oh, to hell with it. Let’s just have a big party and you know, eat, drink, and barbecue and be merry, because we’re not going to be able to fix it the way she’s proposing.”
Rep Ocasio-Cortez has been a forceful advocate for the Green New Deal, a plan to combat global warming and create new jobs in the green energy industries. In 2019, she warned that humanity only had about a dozen years left to meaningfully address the crisis.
“Millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like, ‘The world is gonna end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?’” Ms Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with author Ta-Nehisi Coates back in 2019.
On Wednesday, Mr Hannity mocked that statement, while still making the kind of “how are we gonna pay for it” argument it was criticizing.
“Not enough money!” Mr Hannity continued. “You can’t even print the money for this.”
The 12-year timeframe AOC mentioned was drawn from a 2018 United Nations report on climate change, which warned that the world only had until about 2030 to keep the rise of global temperatures within 1.5 degrees Celsius – or face catastrophic consequences.
“The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5ºC would require ‘rapid and far-reaching’ transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities,” the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5ºC said. “Global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide, would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050.”
But conservative pundits have latched onto the “world is gonna end” comment as proof of AOC’s alarmism. Ms Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, has said she did not mean it literally.
“This is a technique of the GOP, to take dry humor + sarcasm literally and ‘fact check’ it,” the congresswoman tweeted in 2019.
“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,” she went on. “But the GOP is basically Dwight from The Office so who knows.”
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