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Top FEMA Officials Flew To Ritzy Climate Conference In Middle East Amid Hurricane Controversy
Multiple FEMA officials attended a ritzy climate conference in the Middle East last month, where they pushed climate activism and complained about white women in leadership, as the agency faced criticism over its response to devastating hurricanes and skipping over of homes with Trump flags in Florida.
From around November 14 to November 20, FEMA’s Victoria Salinas and Samantha Medlock attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan. The pair pushed climate activism at the conference and said there were too many white women in relief work. During the conference, participants proposed a tax on meat, and approved a deal that would make countries like the United States pay developing countries $300 billion per year.
Salinas is a Biden-Harris appointee serving as the senior official performing the duties of deputy administrator for FEMA, while Medlock serves as Assistant Administrator for Resilience Strategy. It is unclear how much it cost taxpayers to send the two FEMA employees over 6,000 miles across the globe to attend a climate conference.
The trip came a month after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said that FEMA may run out of emergency funds amid its ongoing response to the devastation of Hurricane Helene. To date, nearly 5,000 people in Western North Carolina are without homes and forced to stay in hotels due to the torrential flooding that destroyed homes and killed over 200 people across the southeast.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) told The Daily Wire that FEMA should not be diverting resources away from disaster relief.
“FEMA sent its employees to Azerbaijan for the United Nations’ climate change conference — during the height of the Hurricane Helene response,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) told The Daily Wire. “Diverting attention and resources from the needs of the American People — during a crisis, no less — to focus on the globalists’ climate change agenda is the perfect depiction of our government under the Biden Administration for the last four years.”
Perry, the chair of the House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management, asked FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell about the cost of the trip as she was grilled on November 19 over guidance from a FEMA employee in Lake Placid, Florida, for relief workers to “avoid homes advertising Trump.”
Criswell maintained during her testimony that the guidance was an isolated incident, and punted many of the questions from Republican lawmakers to the status of an ongoing investigation. Since her testimony, whistleblowers in Georgia and North Carolina have alleged that FEMA employees discriminated against Trump supporters.
The embattled director’s testimony took place as Medlock and Salinas pushed Biden administration policies in Baku. After being given an extended deadline, FEMA asked whether they could wait to comment until after publication.
A schedule posted by the State Department indicates that FEMA hosted several panels at the conference. Both Salinas and Medlock were interviewed by the State Department’s Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues during their time at the conference.
On November 14, Medlock was on a panel called “Resilience at Scale: A New Paradigm for U.S. Government Infrastructure Investments.” According to the State Department, this panel was meant to show how the United States was a “leader in building a more climate resilient and sustainable world.”
During that panel, Medlock talked about how FEMA was focused on helping local leaders “prepare for the impacts of the climate crisis that we know can no longer be avoided.” She also discussed how the agency had pushed “low carbon materials and net zero policy.”
The next day, Salinas spoke on a panel called “With Equality and Resilience for All: Women Influencing Climate Action,” according to a recording of the event posted by the State Department. The point of this session was to teach participants to “discover how gender-responsive climate action creates more resilient communities for all.”
“Not all impacts of the climate crisis are felt equally,” the State Department wrote. “Women and girls, in all their diversity, experience unique livelihood, education, health, and safety challenges associated with natural disasters and resource scarcity.”
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During the event, “Love is Blind” television personality Taylor Krause talked virtually about“female political leaders being especially effective in effectuating climate policy” and how “family planning and reproductive rights have a dramatic impact.”
On the panel, Salinas talked about how the number of women in FEMA had “grown by the thousands” and said that it was great that it was now “led by a woman.” Salinas pointed to herself as a woman in charge of 2,000 employees as a sign of progress and said that it was necessary to “get more women into decision-making roles.”
Salinas speaks during a panel at COP29.
She also complained about the number of white women in leadership at FEMA, referring to that as a “new challenge.”
“So at FEMA, our leadership team may be 50% women, but it’s predominantly white women. And that’s OK, but it’s not good enough. Right? Because the people we serve in the United States, the intersection of identities … We know that to be a woman, but to be a woman of color, to be a woman of color with a disability, it goes on and on, leads to so many different experiences and different challenges.”
That same day Salinas appeared on a panel hosted by the America Is All In coalition alongside leftist Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller. America Is All In is a group that partners with groups like Bloomberg Philanthropies and the United States Climate Alliance to work “alongside the federal government to develop a national climate strategy that meets the urgency of the climate crisis” and scale “climate action around the country.”
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During the panel discussion, Salinas praised President Joe Biden’s “Inflation Reduction Act” and infrastructure bill, both of which dumped tens of billions of dollars into green energy companies and projects.
Salinas also appeared to criticize local leaders who made requests for FEMA projects without considering climate-friendly materials.
”We fund what is demanded,” she said. “People oftentimes may not know that they should be envisioning the project with low embodied carbon materials and that the government would fund it.”
Salinas also praised the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which stipulates that at least 40% of certain federal benefits go to “disadvantaged communities that are marginalized by underinvestment and overburdened by pollution.”
On November 19, FEMA helped organize a panel to “showcase” how the federal government had addressed “climate change” and “inequity.” Medlock participated in another panel on “climate resilience” on November 20, according to the State Department schedule.
Other things pushed at the conference include a push from the True Animal Protein Price Coalition for COP29 attendees to issue a statement encouraging the transition “away from animal protein overconsumption according to national or global dietary guidelines by implementing greenhouse gas emission pricing mechanisms in agri-food systems.”
COP29 also featured a lecture from Al Gore saying that he presses his “own buttons these days.”
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