Biden Pledges Protections Against Climate Change as 170 Million Across U.S. Face Heat Alerts - Democracy Now!
Biden Pledges Protections Against Climate Change as 170 Million Across U.S. Face Heat Alerts | Democracy Now!
Here in the U.S., over 170 million people are under extreme heat alerts as sweltering temperatures spread across the country. On Thursday, President Biden announced a series of measures to tackle the impacts of the extreme heat.
President Joe Biden: “We should be protecting workers from hazardous conditions, and we will. And those states where they do not, I’m going to be calling them out, where they refuse to protect these workers in this awful heat.”
But Biden made no mention of the fossil fuel industry’s role in the climate crisis and continued to ignore calls from climate activists and scientists to declare a climate emergency.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.