President Joe Biden’s nominee for a key Treasury Department role admitted that oil, natural gas and coal firms need to go bankrupt to prevent climate change, a resurfaced video showed.
“Here what I’m thinking about is primarily the coal and oil and gas industry. A lot of the smaller players in that industry are going to probably go bankrupt in short order, at least we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” Saule Omarova — who the Senate is considering to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency — remarked in a clip uncovered Tuesday by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), a conservative research group.
The comments were originally made during a March talk Omarova gave as part of the Jain Family Institute’s “Social Wealth Seminar” series.
Omarova has already been slammed by top GOP senators over her Marxist thesis paper which she has yet to share with the Banking Committee. She wrote the thesis, titled “Karl Marx’s Economic Analysis and the Theory of Revolution,” while studying at Moscow State University in Russia decades ago.
“At the end of the day, these are people’s lives, people are going to lose their jobs because she’s going to support policies that are there to drive them out of work,” AAF Founder Thomas Jones told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview.
“It’s people who are not going to be able to send their kids to college, who will not be able to make their mortgage payment because Saule Omarova has a classical Marxist view where she wants the government to run all sectors of the economy and part of that is implementing the Green New Deal,” he continued. “And you can only do that by destroying the oil and gas industry.”
Biden nominee Saule Omarova saying the quiet part out loud. On the oil, coal and gas industries:
"We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change." pic.twitter.com/luMR2HEMK9
— American Accountability Foundation (@ExposingBiden) November 9, 2021
In addition to her comments on bankrupting the fossil fuel industry, Omarova suggested that withdrawing investment from oil and gas firms would be beneficial, during a virtual roundtable hosted by the Jain Family Institute in May.
“So, the way we basically get rid of those carbon financiers is we starve them of their sources of capital,” she argued.
Omarova added that the government should stop “greenwashing,” or forwarding policies that only appear climate-friendly on the surface but are still harmful to the environment, and that leaders need to begin facing “difficult choices” on climate change policy.
During the same roundtable, she also criticized West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin for pushing back on left wing policies. Manchin “is supposed to be on the Democratic side,” she continued.
All 50 Republican senators are expected to vote against confirming Omarova, Axios reported Sunday. Three moderate Democrats reportedly shared their concerns with her nomination directly to the White House, multiple people familiar told Axios.