(For tl;dr readers: Democratic candidates should talk about the climate crisis every day.)
A phenomenal thing happened last Wednesday when those 10 Democratic presidential contenders took to CNN to talk about the climate crisis for seven hours. Serious talk. Smart talk. Talk of the kind the nation should have repeatedly been exposed to for the past 30 years by hordes of Democratic candidates up and down the ballot. For most of those years, only a relative few talked to their constituents about climate change with the seriousness it deserves. So this ordinary forum was extraordinary because it had never been done before and delivered a tremendous amount of information.
Differences among the candidates aside, here’s the essence of the Democrats’ forum message last week: The climate crisis is real; we have the technical capability to reduce the worst impacts but only limited time to do so; we need to be running wholly on clean energy by mid-century; the transformation of the economy and energy system will create jobs and an opportunity for environmental restoration and environmental justice; Donald Trump and the Republicans stand in the way of taking action.
This message can’t be a one-off. It needs to be repeated relentlessly over the next 14 months, in part to cope with two generations of lies and smears and concocted scenarios designed specifically to confuse the public and thereby forestall the retirement of fossil fuels as our main energy sources. As Marianne Lavelle at Inside Climate News wrote last week:
Nat Keohane, senior vice president for climate at Environmental Defense Fund Action Fund, who attended the forum in New York, said he viewed the evening as an important moment for action on climate change—but he said even more attention to the issue was necessary by both the candidates and media.
"They need to be talking about climate in every part of this campaign, because it's all about economic policy, it's fundamental to foreign policy, to national security," Keohane said. "It's really valuable to have something like this that's devoted to climate change, but we also have to make sure that climate change is a part of every debate and every discussion, so the American people can hear how the candidates are thinking about this crisis across all dimensions of the campaign."
Several of the Democratic presidential candidates support an array of longstanding ideas from climate activists, and have added amendments and innovative initiatives of their own. Several have entire packages of proposals ready for the legislative drafter’s hand. This is very encouraging.
Whatever one thinks about a particular candidate’s climate proposals—and there’s plenty for us to debate (such as nuclear or no, carbon tax or no, the source and amount of public money we invest)—it’s also quite encouraging most of the nomination seekers clearly understand that effectively addressing the mess we’ve gotten ourselves into here on planet Earth demands bold steps. Far bolder, in fact, than the boldest of them have proposed so far.
We don’t face a situation that can be fixed with a few tweaks and tucks here and there. Transformation will mean disruption and hiccups are inevitable. Several candidates are headed down the right track—call them modestly bold—and they showed last Wednesday (and if you read their websites) that they didn’t just begin thinking about climate matters the day before the forum. They showed too that they had taken Gov. Jay Inslee’s efforts to heart. Also quite encouraging.
But there’s a hitch that’s obviously not news to any activist. Democrats and their allies have to win the White House and a majority in the Senate. Without these, the most modest climate proposal cannot pass, much less anything bold enough to ameliorate the impacts of global warming or effectively adapt to them with the least amount of pain and the most amount of social justice. As long as the nation is held hostage to the policies of ignorance and cupidity, no worthwhile programs addressing the climate crisis, or most other issues, are going to happen. We’re all too well aware.
Sadly, all that smart and serious forum talk about the climate crisis last week was only viewed on CNN by 1.1 million households, bottom of the pack. Far more people were tuned into Foxaganda. All the more reason that educating voters on climate change is essential to getting policies to deal with its impacts.
Now that the CNN forum has broken the ice, Democratic candidates further down the ballot ought to choose to do some speaking of their own about the climate crisis. There certainly have been many Democrats making noise on this subject for a long time. They’ve sought to persuade their colleagues on city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and in Congress, to take on this crisis with the urgency that scientists say it requires. As can be seen in the map above, that talking over the past three decades hasn’t only been talk. It’s led to climate-friendlier policies being passed at the local and state levels. For instance, more than 130 U.S. cities are now committed to 100% clean or renewable energy sources.
These are not substitutes for national policies. But many are models for elements to include in national policies. And they ought to be mentioned every chance Democratic candidates get.
While it’s mostly been Democratic administrations in charge where local and state governments have adopted climate-friendlier policies, the majority of Democratic candidates and incumbents have nonetheless for years been more than a little shy on the campaign trail about mentioning the crisis we and our offspring in coming generations face and how we might lessen the impacts by acting sooner than later.
Unlike recent past elections, Democratic leaders—local, state, federal—should make mention of the climate crisis every day from now until next November if they’re candidates. If they’re already in office, then they should be figuring how to move against whatever political obstacles are in the way of doing what can be done at those levels to deal with climate disruption. Valuable local and state climate policies already on the books are being proposed and copied in other cities and states. This effort requires no worrying about the barricade of the Senate filibuster. It also provides another benefit to Democrats: It shows our constituents that policies designed to ameliorate and/or adapt to climate change are worth the investment and not some precursor of political apocalypse.
To be clear, I’m not in any way suggesting that Democrats make climate the 2020 campaign’s single-issue. Just that it get the attention that has been avoided in the past elections.
What about the role of us rank-and-file citizens? One way to spur elected and would-like-to-be-elected officials to discuss climate policy is for activists to repeatedly ask them focused questions on the subject every time they’re at the podium or otherwise speaking in public forums. Good questions can educate as much as their answers.
A key reason this education needs to be done is because of decades of lazy, inaccurate, gullible, and too infrequent coverage of the realities and potentialities of climate change by even some of the best media. The failure of most to cover the climate crisis in depth and consistently until very recently has, along with disinformation mills like the Heartland Institute, greatly contributed to so many Americans believing lies about hoaxes and scientists supposedly greedy for grants.
It’s been gratifying if frustratingly belated to see a few newspapers recently drop their quoting of denier-liars—both paid and amateur—as counterpoints to the overwhelming number of climate scientists who keep saying big trouble’s coming our way. Perhaps as recompense for all those years of promoting the views of these propagandists, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a climate-related story—whether optimistic or scary, local or global—appeared on the front page of each nation’s remaining daily newspapers in every edition? And appeared as a segment on every news channel’s evening line-up. Dream on, eh?
But just think if this fantasy really happened. Come the debates between Donald Trump and whoever Democrats choose as our nominee, when a couple of not-so-great climate questions are asked by some not-so-great moderators, another slice of the American public that hasn’t yet discovered what a fraud the man is would be informed well enough by then to see via the debate what a load of malarkey his climate policies are.
Yes, yes, I know, a climate story every day? A climate crisis mention by every Democratic candidate every day? What am I, some kind of extremist?
Worse yet, I am an optimist in that I believe people who have been drenched in propaganda on a subject for decades can change their minds when presented honest information for them to combine with their own personal experiences. Democratic candidates should provide that information. Nature is working on the experiences. Those could be the votes that give us the chance to make bold climate policies reality.