Last week, social media images of New Yorkers wading through waist-high water to catch trains in a flooded New York City subway left people across the country astonished.
And the images left Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with some choice words for her Republican colleagues in Washington.
Using a video of a woman struggling through a storm-flooded subway station, AOC laid into GOP legislators who oppose climate change legislation with a damning tweet.
In her tweet, Ocasio-Cortez mocked right-wing politicians.
"The Green New Deal, which is a blueprint to create millions of good jobs rebuilding infrastructure to stem climate change and protect vulnerable communities, is unrealistic."
"Instead we will do the adult thing, which is take orders from fossil fuel execs and make you swim to work."
Subways and streets all over New York City flooded last week amid thunderstorms that dropped an inch and a half of rain in just an hour.
It's safe to assume Ocasio-Cortez is rightly furious about it. She posted another tweet in which she used the city's floods to call out her colleagues--including fellow Democrats, in this case--for their opposition to abolishing the filibuster, one of the key mechanisms GOP politicians use to hobble progressive legislation on all sorts of issues, including climate change.
Using a video clip of a flooded New York expressway, AOC sarcastically tweeted:
"I'm so glad the filibuster is here to fix this oh wait."
Ocasio-Cortez took aim at her colleagues earlier in the week too, as a burst petroleum pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico caused the ocean to catch fire. Ocasio-Cortez appeared to reference New York Times story about the actions of oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil. In the video, a lobbyist openly admitted that the company had spread disinformation about climate change and sought to influence senators to undermine Democratic President Joe Biden's climate policy.
In the tweet, Ocasio-Cortez appeared to reference a recent bombshell New York Times story in which an Exxon Mobil lobbyist admitted that the company had spread disinformation about climate change and cajoled U.S. Senators to undermine Democratic President Joe Biden's climate policy.
On Twitter, many people applauded Ocasio-Cortez's call-out of politicians' indifference to the ravages of climate change.
The cloudburst storm that flooded New York last week was among the top 10 highest one-hour rainfall events since 1943. Climate scientists expect rain events like last week's to become increasingly more common as climate change continues to intensify.
