Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton used Hurricane Matthew as a campaign prop Tuesday to sell her green energy policies
“I will tell you this, it is the most important issue at stake in this election,” Clinton said in Florida, flanked by environmentalist and former Vice President Al Gore. The Nobel Prize winner joined Clinton in explaining why global warming helped cause the deadly hurricane.
“And if you need additional convincing, just remember what happened this week [when] Hurricane Matthew killed at least 26 people in our country, more than a thousand, as far as we know right now, in Haiti,” she said.
“Our planet can’t afford denial on climate or opposition to solutions. @HillaryClinton will work hard to solve the pressing issues we face,” Gore tweeted before Clinton took the stage.
Matthew killed scores of people in Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Haiti, where government official pegged the death toll from the storm rose to 1,000 people.
Matthew slammed into Haiti on Oct. 7 with 145 mile-per-hour winds and sheets of rains that left 1.4 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said.
North Carolina and South Carolina are still coping with Hurricane Matthew and will be “for at least the rest of this week if not longer,” Clinton told the crowd of supporters, because of massive flooding caused mostly by climate change.
The country cannot afford to elect “climate deniers and defeatists,” Clinton said in her remarks.
The Florida event is a rarity for the Democratic nominee, in that it actually revolved almost entirely around discussing climate change.
Clinton rarely mentions the words “climate change” in her speeches anymore since winning Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement, according to the news site Climate Home.
In fact, the site found that “since Sanders endorsed Clinton on July 12, the full focus of the Clinton campaign has swung to Trump,” and in “38 speeches since that date, Clinton mentioned climate change specifically eight times.”
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