Hillary Clinton wants to power your home using only renewable energy within the next decade.
The former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate unveiled an ambitious plan Sunday to drastically transform U.S. energy usage and fired a shot across the bow of the entire Republican Party in the process, slamming those who denied the science of climate change.
In a video released by her campaign, provocatively titled “Stand for Reality,” Clinton said that she would bring more than 500 million solar panels to the U.S. by the end of her first term. She also pledged to enact policies to power every American home using only renewable energy within 10 years of taking office.
But it was Clinton’s slam on climate deniers that earned the most publicity. In the video, she directly mocked Republican politicians’ frequent attempts to dismiss global warming.
When confronted with the fact that virtually every climate scientist agrees that global warming is real and man-made, Republicans often say, “I’m not a scientist.” In her video, Clinton said, “I’m just a grandmother with two eyes and a brain, and I know what’s happening in the world is going to have a big effect on my daughter and especially on my granddaughter.”
Clinton’s campaign account, which changed its logo color to green, hammered home the attack in a followup tweet.
You don’t have to be a scientist to accept scientific evidence. Climate change is real and we must act. -Hhttps://t.co/jV0k5v5P4I
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) July 26, 2015
Although Clinton faces deep skepticism from the Democratic Party’s progressive base, her campaign has strong environmental bona fides thanks to the longtime climate activism of her campaign chairman, John Podesta, Bill Clinton‘s former White House chief of staff and a counselor to President Obama.
Podesta expanded on Clinton’s energy plan in a blog post on LinkedIn, calling her two policy goals “only the first steps in an ambitious energy and climate strategy.”
Photos via Elliot Brown/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) and Marc Nozell/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Max Fleishman
