Over the past few weeks, Hillary has been attacking Bernie for a lack of specificity in his proposals.
As VL Baker noted in a diary earlier today, the Sanders campaign called out the Clinton campaign for its own failure to provide details for its climate campaign. Hillary’s climate page says that the information provided is “just the beginning” of an energy and climate strategy to be released in the upcoming months. Months have passed, but the Clinton campaign has yet to flesh out the strategy.
The Sanders campaign highlighted some key questions unanswered:
“Will she support a carbon tax? Will she continue President Obama’s moratorium on all new coal leases on public land? Will she commit to banning fossil fuels extraction on public lands? Does she oppose offshore drilling? Fracking? We just don’t know.”
John Podesta, Chair of Hillary for America, responded with an aggregation of screen shots from Clinton’s site and climate-related statements of hers. Podesta leaves out the page of the Clinton climate fact sheet that notes that it’s “just the beginning,” and he doesn’t answer the specific questions asked by the Sanders campaign.
This wasn’t particularly surprising. What did come as a surprise was just how bald-faced of a liar Podesta is.
At the end of his post, Podesta claims that Bernie would take the US out of the Paris agreement:
While the Sanders campaign pores over those, I suggest that they explain how they plan to back out of the international climate deal that President Obama reached with the rest of the world in Paris. After all, Senator Sanders did come out against it.
If you read Bernie’s statement on the Paris deal, he states clearly that he sees it as progress but finds it woefully insufficient:
“While this is a step forward it goes nowhere near far enough. The planet is in crisis. We need bold action in the very near future and this does not provide that,” said Sanders.
In Bernie’s comprehensive climate plan, he expresses his clear intention to build on and strengthen the Paris agreement:
Convene a climate summit with the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists and indigenous communities in his first 100 days. The United Nations Paris climate talks in December are an important milestone toward solving climate change, but even optimistic outcomes of these talks will not put the world on the path needed to avoid the most catastrophic results of climate change. We must think beyond Paris. In the first 100 days of Bernie’s Presidency, he will convene a summit of the world’s best climate experts to chart a course toward the healthy future we all want for our families and communities.
For Podesta to claim that Bernie’s statements on the deal indicate a desire to pull out, he must be illiterate, mendacious, or both.