Freshman U.S. Sen. Mike Braun said Thursday that Congress has no money to try to prevent or mitigate climate conditions that scientists believe have produced the recent rash of tornadoes, storms and flooding in the Midwest and Great Plains.
“The institution we're talking about that I'm now a part of runs trillion-dollar deficits. I don't see where it can do hardly anything above and beyond what it's doing, because it's slowly and soon to be quickly running the institution into the financial ditch,” Braun, R-Ind., said in an interview outside a Fort Wayne restaurant.
Braun, who chairs a Senate Environment and Public Works subcommittee on clean air and nuclear safety, said state and local governments and the private sector are in much better shape to address the effects of climate change.
“I think utilities are doing it. Obviously they are putting out more solar fields, wind farms,” he said. “But you can't do it at a pace I think a ton faster than what we're doing or you'd have to marshal resources, probably through the federal government.
“And even if it was absolute that it should be done, where no one questioned it, I wonder how we'd do it in our current status – which metaphorically it's a broken institution, and it's financially in a spot where it can't take on any large project,” he said.
The first-year senator from Jasper said he is not convinced climate change is causing extreme weather this spring.
“All the models that try to make that case and do it in an absolute fashion I think need to be questioned, because I don't know that they can say it with that certainty,” he said.
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