Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) railed against climate change mitigation programs in Congress Wednesday, not merely because she doesn’t believe in man-made climate change. She quipped that people during the ice age didn’t have to pay taxes to combat it.
“People are not affecting climate change,” Greene said. “You’re not going to tell me that back in the ice age, how much taxes did people pay, and how many changes did governments make to melt the ice? The climate is going to continue to change.”
She continued, “And there is no reason to just open up our borders and allow everyone in and continue to funnel over $50 billion or however many billions of dollars or trillions of dollars to foreign countries all over the world simply because they don’t like the climate change.”
Greene’s remarks came within hours of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) proclaiming that “a warming globe is actually beneficial” during a Senate Budget Committee hearing on climate change-related health care costs and Republican attempts to cut spending.
Greene reportedly made a similar crack at a town hall in Murray County, Georgia, in 2021.
“How much taxes and how much money did the people back in the ice age spend to warm up the Earth?” Greene asked. “Maybe, perhaps, we live on a ball that rotates around the sun, that flies through the universe, and maybe our climate just changes.”
Scientists studying the climate have long agreed that people directly impact global carbon emissions and related temperature increases worldwide. NASA reported that 97% of “actively publishing climate scientists” agree.
While Greene is correct that people during the last ice age didn’t pay taxes to stop Earth from cooling, the last ice age ended about 11,700 years ago.
The congresswoman nonetheless continued to rant against climate change-related spending like the Green New Deal, however, and even insulted fellow Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for introducing that framework to Congress and the public sphere.
“I’ll tell you what the New Deal and our new infrastructure plan will do,” said Greene. “It’s going to bring us down to net zero carbon emissions, right? So we’ve got to stop using oil and coal, right? Because that makes a lot of sense to a little girl named AOC from New York.”
She added: “You can’t even make this up.”
This isn’t the first wild claim Greene has made publicly. She previously furthered an anti-semitic conspiracy theory about “Jewish space lasers” — and was pretty convinced that former President Donald Trump was fighting the “Deep State.”
In February 2021, House Democratic leadership stripped Greene of her committee assignments, but she was reinstated by Republicans when they gained control of the chamber.
CORRECTION: This article has been updated to clarify that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene lost her committee assignments in February 2021, not February of this year, and to clarify the timing of the last ice age.