GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker hits out at landmark climate bill by asking: ‘Don’t we have enough trees?’

Herschel Walker, the Republican nominee in Georgia’s much-watched Senate race, has criticised Democrats’ recently-passed climate and health care bill.

Mr Walker, a former University of Georgia running back and Heisman Trophy winner, criticised the Inflation Reduction Act, which President Joe Biden signed last week.

His opponent, incumbent Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, voted for the legislation, though his proposal to cap the price of insulin for private insurance recipients died because Republicans raised a point of order to strip it from the bill. The legislation passed along party lines, with all 50 Democrats voting for it and Vice President Kamala Harris breaking the tie.

But Mr Walker slammed the legislation at a Republican Jewish Committee event.

“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out,” he said. “But they’re not. Because a lot of money it’s going to trees. Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

As part of the climate aspect of the legislation, $150m will be spent on “urban forests” to plant trees in cities.

But Mr Walker’s words were not the first time he made strange remarks about the climate crisis. In June, he was caught on video criticising the Green New Deal, saying it would spend “millions of billions of dollars cleaning our good air up.”

“Since we don’t control the air, our good air decided to float over to China’s bad air so when China gets our good air, their bad air got to move,” he said. “So it moves over to our good air space. Then now we got to clean that back up, while they’re messing ours up.”

Most polls show Mr Warnock, who won a special election last year, slightly leading Mr Walker. Though the race has tightened in recent months.