ON CLIMATE CHANGE, HERSCHEL WALKER ISN'T NOTICEABLY STUPIDER THAN DONALD TRUMP

People are laughing at Herschel Walker, understandably.

Herschel on the climate/Green New Deal/air:

"Since we don't control the air our good air decided 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 air space. Then now we got we to clean that back up." pic.twitter.com/BsR4GVAbX7

— stephen fowler (@stphnfwlr) July 11, 2022

On Saturday, Walker spoke at the Hall County Republican Party’s Independence Day picnic....

“Y’know, climate change — I’m gonna help y’all with that real quickly, and I’m gonna do it in the Wrightsville way, so you can understand what I’m saying,” Walker said, referring to his own birthplace.

“We in America have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water of anybody in the world,” he said, before mocking Democrats’ climate proposals. “So what we do is, we’re gonna put from the Green New Deal, millions or billions of dollars cleaning our good air up.”

“So all of a sudden — China and India ain’t putting nothing into cleaning that situation up. So all that bad air [is coming from them],” he continued. “But since we don’t control the air, our good air decide 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 air space. And now we got to clean that back up,” he said.

Surely Walker is the stupidest person in American politics -- right? No other politician would say something as ignorant as that!

In fact, this doesn't set a new standard for ignorance. Walker is mostly just imitating the master of political ignorance, Donald Trump.

Cleanest air and cleanest water? Here's Trump in 2018:

"I want clean air. I want crystal clean water. And we’ve got it. We’ve got the cleanest country in the planet right now," Trump said in an Aug. 21 rally in Charleston, W.Va. "There’s nobody cleaner than us, and it’s getting better and better."

It's not true, of course. PolitiFact noted at the time:

The Environmental Performance Index is the go-to source for questions on environmental quality. Yale and Columbia University researchers teamed up with the World Economic Forum in 2018 to compile the data.

Using 10 categories, they ranked the United States 27th. On air it ranks 10th and on water, 29th. Among wealthy democracies, the United States ranks toward the bottom, according to Zachary Wendling, principal investigator at the Environmental Performance Index.

But Trump liked saying this. He said it again in a presidential debate in 2020, and combined it with complaints about other countries that sound a lot like Walker's:

I do love the environment, but what I want the cleanest, crystal clear water, the cleanest air.... And we have the best carbon emission numbers that we've had in 35 years. Under this administration, we are working so well with industry, but what we can't do-- Look at China, how filthy it is. Look at Russia. Look at India. It's filthy. The air is filthy.... We have the cleanest air, the cleanest water and the best carbon emission standards that we've seen in many, many years.

And in a campaign rally that same year, he again said, more or less, what Walker is saying now:

“I keep telling my people you know, I love clean air but Russia and China, you look at a map you have all these spots and India and many others are spewing it in. What do you suggest?” he asked his thousands of supporters who had gathered at a city airport ... to listen to his election speech.

It's a short step from Trump's environmental ideas -- if you can call them that -- to Walker's. Walker will have to say much stupider things than he's saying now if he wants to top Trump.