Herschel Walker: U.S. should keep 'gas-guzzling cars' that produce 'good emissions'

Campaigning in Georgia on Sunday, Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker said the United States is not ready to implement policies like the Green New Deal that are designed to address climate change. Instead, Walker suggested the country needs to "keep having those gas-guzzling cars" that produce "good emissions."

"If we was ready for the green agenda, I'd raise my hand right now. But we're not ready right now. So don't let them fool you like this is a new agenda. This is not a new agenda," Walker said at a campaign stop in Peachtree City. "We're not prepared. We're not ready right now. What we need to do is keep having those gas-guzzling cars, 'cause we got the good emissions under those cars. We're doing the best thing that we can."

The science on the causes of rising global temperatures has long been well established. Simply put, emissions from automobiles are anything but "good" for the planet. In 2021, more than 99.9% of climate scientists agreed that mankind's burning of fossil fuels is causing the global climate to warm.

World leaders and their representatives are currently attending the U.N. climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in an effort to reach new agreements on how to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Without significant action to transition away from fossil fuels and "gas-guzzling cars," scientists have warned, the resulting climate shifts will result in catastrophic consequences, including massive migration, for life on the planet.

While the U.S. passed its first meaningful climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, this year, not a single Republican member of Congress voted for it. Walker, who will face Sen. Raphael Warnock in a Dec. 6 runoff election in Georgia, has often offered an odd take on the efforts to fight climate change.

"We in America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world," he told a group of supporters while campaigning in July. "So what we are going to do is put, from the Green New Deal, millions, billions of dollars cleaning our good air up. So all of the sudden China and India, they put nothing to clean that situation up. Since we don't control the air, our good air decides to float over to China's bad air. So when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move. So it moves over to our good airspace. Then, now, we got to clean that back up."

In fact, air quality in the U.S. improved dramatically following the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970. And while many Republicans are opposed to committing the U.S. to climate change action unless other polluting nations like China and India also agree to do so, on Monday President Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping, with both leaders pledging to restart climate negotiations.

Warnock voted in favor of the Inflation Reduction Act and has made the fight against climate change a central issue in his reelection campaign.

"Reverend Warnock believes we must accept the science, invest in infrastructure, and combat the climate crisis that is already at our door," his website states. "He sees climate change as a moral issue, which we must act on by ignoring Washington special interests, and instead putting effective, common sense policies in place."