White House Press Secretary: Climate Change Has Health Benefits

During an October 24 press conference, Dana Perino, White House Press Secretary, explained how she sees a silver lining in global warming:

"Q: You mentioned that there are health benefits to climate change. Could you describe some of those?

MS. PERINO: Sure. In some cases, there are -- look, this is an issue where I'm sure lots of people would love to ridicule me when I say this, but it is true that many people die from cold-related deaths every winter. And there are studies that say that climate change in certain areas of the world would help those individuals."

Perhaps this "it's-not-really-so-cold-out-there" line is the Bush Administration rationalization on why they want to cut funding for heating low-income American households. Or maybe this crisis denial is their tactic of delaying expensive (yet planet-saving) reforms being forced upon their energy industry cronies. Whatever it is, it's detached and scary.

 

 

 

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Comments

[SamThornton]

07:56 PM on 10/25/2007

This is entirely consistent with the Bush administration dealing with unpleasant realities via a PR response rather than actually trying to do something to directly address the reality. As one of the White House aparatchiks famously claimed, "We create our own reality."

On a related note, the IPCC scientists who shared the Nobel with Gore today announced their latest studies show global warming is no longer avoidable and urge an international strategy focussed not on prevention but on providing emergency assistance to those whose lives and livelihoods are seriously threatened in the immediate future and beyond.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2976669.ece

[Wickerman]

05:25 PM on 10/25/2007

We are living in a bad movie...

[peterg76]

04:23 PM on 10/25/2007

Well, obviously, by random chance, climate change will benefit a few in some places. But the other 99.999% of humanity....

[mommadona]

04:02 PM on 10/25/2007

Has anyone figured out what Cheney is dumping in the Hill's water supply?

Dana reminds me of the heroines in those old Dracula movies....

"No! No!.....I know it's wrong, but I LOVE him!"

I can't imagine any amount of money that would allow me to lose my mind that way for a job...A DAMN JOB, girl....it's just a JOB.

[wldnswmmr]

03:53 PM on 10/25/2007

Fleischer, McClellan, Snow & Perino. What company to be in. How could they possibly be paid enough? There will come a time in the not too distant future when two horrifying truths become too apparent to ignore anymore. The 8 years wasted by the Bush Administration were absolutely essential to fundamentally dealing with global warming - we had much less time than we used to think. And the dollar has lost its fiat status in world commerce, as the American economy drowns beneath a sea of red ink. When the American people fully come to terms with those two inevitabilities, I would not want to be any of these four who served as the Propaganda Minister for a regime that will be viewed as the most evil in American history.

[wasteoftime]

03:51 PM on 10/25/2007

What does Ms. Perino have to say about the hundreds of heat related deaths every year? How does global warming improve the possibility there won't be more?

[bluesky49876]

03:30 PM on 10/25/2007

This administration is sinking farther and farther in its stupidity and is lowering standards of intelligence to the level that even apes can run the government just as good.