President Joe Biden pushed the narrative that global warming might be responsible for the condominium collapse in Miami during his visit to the region this week.
Biden said it was “interesting” to him how many of the survivors, families of missing and dead residents, and rescuers allegedly raised “the impact of global warming.”
“I didn’t raise it,” he said on Thursday. “They talked about sea levels rising and about how, the combination of that and a concern about incoming storms, incoming tropical storms.”
He noted that an official investigation into how the collapse occurred is still underway, so there is no “definitive judgment” about what caused the Champlain Towers South condo complex to partially collapse last week.
However, a 2018 inspection of the 136-unit tower built in 1981 found “major structural damage” to a concrete slab below the pool deck.
Biden isn’t the only Democrat to suggest that climate change is responsible for the accident.
His Energy Secretary, Jennifer Granholm, also claimed global warming played a role in what happened.
“Obviously, we don’t know fully, but we do know that the seas are rising. We know that we’re losing inches and inches of beaches, not just in Florida but all around,” Granholm told CNN on Tuesday. “Michigan, where I’m from, we’ve seen the loss of beaches because the waters are rising, so this is a phenomenon that will continue.”
The Wolverine State’s “beaches” would be on the Great Lakes that surround most of the state — all of which are hundreds of feet above sea level and thus not affected by a resulting “rise.”
Granholm also used the tragedy as an opportunity to push Biden’s infrastructure package.
“We’ll have to wait to see what the analysis is for this building, but the issue about resiliency and making sure we adapt to this changing climate, that’s going to mean levees need to be built, sea walls need to be built, infrastructure needs to be built,” she said.
Biden Energy Secretary @JenGranholm: “We don’t know fully” if “climate change” caused Florida building collapse pic.twitter.com/Xy8H5lgdkH
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) June 29, 2021
