The White House is standing by its statement that climate change affects far more Americans than terrorism.
“Absolutely,” President Barack Obama told Vox’s Matt Yglesias, when asked whether the media “sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease.”
The day after the Vox interview appeared, Press Secretary Josh Earnest defended the decision to include climate change in the White House national security strategy released last week.
“The point that the president is making is that there are many more people on an annual basis who have to confront the direct impact on their lives of climate change or on the spread of a disease than on terrorism,” Earnest said. “When you talk about the direct daily impact on the daily lives of Americans, particularly Americans living in this country…more people are directly affected by those things than by terrorism.”
Republicans continue to mock the priority Obama is attaching to climate change. “Mr. President, I believe that most of us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat to an American than a sunburn,” ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee told the Iowa Freedom Summit last month.
