Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Friday night that an explosion at a Philadelphia oil refinery was due to climate change, arguing that the incident underscores the urgency of her Green New Deal.
A vat of butane ignited and eventually exploded around 4:00 AM Friday at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refining Complex, followed by a series of smaller explosions as the fire worked its way through a mass of pipes carrying fuel across the complex.
The blast, which injured five workers, was eventually brought under control thanks to the intervention of more than 120 Philadelphia firefighters employing 51 pieces of equipment.
In a tweet later Friday, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez shared a video of the burning refinery, suggesting that the blaze was somehow caused by climate change.
“This was Philadelphia after an oil refinery exploded this morning,” she said. “So… what’s that about how climate change isn’t an existential crisis that will disproportionately impact working class people & burn its way up?”
“We need a solution on the scale of the crisis: #GreenNewDeal,” she wrote.
While climate scientists have argued that it is reckless to attribute a specific weather event to climate change, such a precise attribution would seem to border on the impossible in the case of an incident in an oil refinery.
Which may just convince AOC’s diehard fans that she can, indeed, do the impossible.