U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday pledged to treat the climate crisis as an emergency as he accused the oil industry of giving him cancer.
The off-the-cuff admission of cancer during a speech outside a shuttered coal power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts prompted the White House press office to quickly clarify that the president was referring to skin cancer, which was treated before Biden took office last year.
Biden, 79, reportedly had non-melanoma skin cancers though it is not clear why he opted to use the present tense.
Drawing on his roots in a speech on climate change, Biden said the emissions from oil refineries near his childhood home in Claymont, Delaware were the reason why he and so many people he grew up with have cancer and why for the longest time Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.
While Biden did acknowledge that the climate crisis is an emergency and promised to treat it as such, he stopped short of issuing a climate emergency declaration like fellow Democrats are urging him to.
The president said that in the coming days, his administration will announce more executive actions to combat climate.
Biden’s physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, issued a health report last year that didn’t refer to the president as suffering from any current cancers.
“It is well-established that President Biden did spend a good deal of time in the sun in his youth,” O’Connor wrote of his patient, a former swimming pool lifeguard.
