AOC says she's woken up at 3:30 am because of her worries about climate change: 'It really freaks me out'
Democratic US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that her angst about climate change is so acute that sometimes she wakes up at 3:30 am anxious about the negative effects of it on our planet.
She acknowledged having extreme fear over the current state of climate change while answering questions from viewers in a live-streaming session on Instagram on Wednesday, August 28.
Ocasio-Cortez also claimed the process of climate change is seeing an acceleration and the prospect of living in the future is filling her with fear.
"Even while I was on vacation, I woke up in the middle of the night, at 3:30 in the morning, just concerned about climate change," she said, FOX News reported.
The Democrat from New York also claimed that she was struggling with balancing her work life and climate change might affect her ability to have a family.
"I’m 29 years old. I really struggle sometimes with the idea of how to be a policymaker and potentially have a family in the time of climate change," she said, adding, "And it really, like, freaks me out and it can be really, really scary."
The youngest woman ever elected to Congress also said that people are “blowing past a lot of the markers” -- such as melting of glaciers and rising sea levels -- that scientists thought would happen years from now but unfortunately are actually happening now.
"I’m scared sometimes, too, about the world that I’m going to be living in, that we’re all going to be living in. And I sometimes fear what we’re going to be living with when I’m 40, 50, 60 years old," the freshman Rep. said.
AOC has been a vocal advocate of radical measures to tackle climate change. She and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced a resolution asking Congress to declare global warming a national emergency. She was also an author of the Green New Deal resolution, which called for urgency and massive interventions to tackle climate change.
In January this year, she called the fight to mitigate the effects of climate change her generation's "World War II."
"Millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up, and we're like, 'The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?' " she said.