Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged voters to look at their personal habits in order to stop climate change, calling it one of the world’s biggest problems that the next president would have to face.
“On an individual level, you know there are a lot of things that if more people did it, you would see results,” she said.
Clinton shared her thoughts on global warming during a town hall with YouTube creators in Los Angeles, California.
During the conversation, Clinton took a question from a person named “Swoozie” who said he felt “helpless” when driving by industrial sites and watching towers of smoke float into the sky.
“I feel like these guys are just doing this stuff, just polluting our world and here in L.A. I just recently moved and the pollution here and the smog is ridiculous,” he said.
After praising Obama for implementing more regulations on power plants and pursuing an international agreement to reduce emissions Clinton asked everyone to look at their personal energy consumption habits.
“Be careful about your own energy use, pay attention to your energy use, pay attention to how much you’re driving, if you have an electric car, more power to you,” she said. “Do what you can to reduce your own carbon load. It’s hard, you know, I don’t know, most people are doing something but maybe not enough, and I include myself in that.”
Clinton expressed her own frustration with Republicans who opposed oppressive regulations on the economy and argued with the scientists who warned of global catastrophes as a result of climate change.
She said sometimes Republicans made her want to “yell” every time they replied to an answer on climate change by informing voters that they weren’t scientists.
“Go talk to a scientist!” she said. “I really am tired of the debate, which is a phony debate. Climate change is real. It is here. It has to be dealt with.”