President Joe Biden believes, or at least claimed to believe, that “global warming” is “the only existential threat humanity faces” in 2023.
Biden, 80, made the remarks during a media event in Hanoi, Vietnam, while discussing the perceived need for investment by the richest 20 countries in the world in infrastructure in poorer countries.
“Guess what?” the president said. “In addition to helping the environment overall — and the only existential threat humanity faces, even more frightening than a global war, is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20, 10 years.”
“It would be real trouble,” the president said. “There’s no way back from that.”
Biden was arguing that it was important to keep less-developed countries from clear-cutting forests that serve as “carbon sinks,” removing carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere.
“There is more carbon absorbed from the air into the Amazon region — into the ground, the ground — than emitted in the entire United States in the same basis [i.e., on a daily basis],” the president said.
“Now imagine if people go in and do what we [the United States] did, 150, 250 years ago, and cut down the forests, start farming in that area, no longer have that great carbon sink. It would be a gigantic problem,” he claimed.
“So we should be going into areas — whether it’s in the Congo or other places — as the G7 nations and as the wealthy G20 nations and providing the kind of infrastructure they need to be able to benefit.”
Anyone who wants to see Biden’s remarks in their entirety can do so below, with his address beginning at about the 1:53:46 mark.