Herschel Walker, the GOP nominee for a Georgia Senate seat, rejected a new law aimed in part at combating climate change, arguing it will waste money on trees.
“They keep trying to fool you like they’re helping you, but they don’t,” Walker said Sunday at a Republican Jewish Coalition event in Sandy Springs, Georgia. days after President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law. “They don’t help you because a lot of the money goes into trees. You know that, right? It goes into trees. We have enough trees. Don’t we have enough trees here?”
Walker’s comments, which came in response to a question about the measure, were: reported first by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The bill that Biden signed will bring in about $700 billion through corporate tax increases and savings on prescription drugs, and spend about $400 billion on clean energy and healthcare facilities.
Walker stuck to his comments in a tweet Monday night.
“Yes, you heard me right,” Walker wrote on TwitterBiden and his Democratic opponent, Senator Raphael Warnock, said in November, “to spend $1.5 billion on ‘urban forestry’.”
Under the bill, the new law provides $1.5 billion in grants to government agencies and nonprofits “for tree planting and related activities.”
Will Kiley, a spokesperson for Walker’s campaign, told NBC News in an email that Walker “remarked how Raphael Warnock and Joe Biden spent billions of taxpayer dollars in a recession doing absolutely nothing to fight inflation and provide aid.” offer to hard-working Georgians.”
Walker was supported by former President Donald Trump, who largely rejected climate change, but said the United States would join the World Economic Forum’s initiative to plant and protect a trillion trees by 2030. In the final weeks of his presidency, Trump signed an executive order that created the One Trillion Trees Interagency Council.
Georgia’s close-knit Senate race is one of many where Republicans have first nominated candidates backed by Trump to take on seasoned Democratic politicians. Other states include Arizona, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., called last week “candidate quality” when he said Republicans might not gain control of the evenly divided chamber in November. He did not name specific candidates.