Just prior to the Vice Presidential debate on Tuesday, Meteor Blades posted the following question: Is it asking too much to have 9 of tonight’s 90 minutes of debate devoted to climate change?
A good question, since more than any other issue, the threats posed by climate change across the entire world make ISIS look like the mosquitos they are. As it turned out, of the 90 minutes of debate, there was one passing reference to climate change that took maybe 2 seconds and no other discussion on the topic at all.
The second presidential debate saw one question about energy policy at minute 89: "What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs, while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly, and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?"
Trump used his response time mostly for bashing “Hillary Clinton wants to put all the miners out of business” and expressed no concern for the state of the climate. Hillary’s response actually included a statement of her intent to fight climate change “because I think that is a serious problem” but she did not satisfy a lot of listeners looking for a more complete statement of the scope of climate crisis (despite Hurricane Matthew having made landfall on the east coast).
In fact, climate change has been monumentally under-reported in the mainstream media. The topic appears seldom even on candidate website and, to the dismay of activists I know, even Wikipedia has not been covering this issue in its profiles of American politicians. Until now . . . !
With increasing numbers of people turning to Wikipedia for basic information, a team of climate activists are coordinating an effort to include coverage of Climate Change under the topic of ”Political positions” for all 2016 candidates. They have queued up this effort with a staging of candidate climate data at the Center for Media and Democracy’s wiki page, ClimateCongress Wiki. They are trying to get this information updated as quickly as possible and, while they are working around the clock, they have a call out to anyone who can help them with editing Wikipedia.
Just think of the scope of this task: there are 34 Senate races, times two, covering just the major party candidates. Plus all 435 Congressional seats, times a minimum of two, equals 938 Wikipedia pages to be updated with a few well-documented references on climate positions, Congressional votes, and, when possible, public statements.
Take a peek at how the ClimateCongress folks have added information on Wikipedia for the two Senate contenders in Georgia. These would be typical entries, not too long, rather straightforward, unless there were juicier data points.
Knowing how expert the folks here are, I suspect that there could be thousands of Kossacks who have participated in editing entries at Wikipedia. As you probably realize, Wikipedia does not permit anyone to be paid for editing entries. Thus, this large effort has to be accomplished with a team of Wikipedia-editing volunteers. If a 1000 Kossacks signed up to help and each edited one candidate, this initiative could be completed in a day. So, if you can edit Wikipedia (or are willing to learn) and spare some time to help bring climate coverage to Wikipedia’s candidate pages, please head over to the website ClimateCongress.us or go directly the wiki page: ClimateCongress.info/wiki/ClimateCongress.
This small effort will help make sure that voters are informed about this critical issue when they are checking out candidates before the election and is just one small way that we can try to help Hillary have the kind of Congress that would support the climate legislative action that we desperately need.