The DNC has refused a to host a debate on Climate Change and will ban candidates who take part in a debate outside the DNC framework.
"While climate change is at the top of our list, the DNC will not be holding entire debates on a single issue area because we want to make sure voters have the ability to hear from candidates on dozens of issues of importance to American voters," the DNC said.
You know what? That’s okay. We shouldn’t hold just one debate.
Climate change threatens human existence on this planet; a single debate on it would be meaningless in light of how critical it is becoming. (It’s why Climate Crisis is starting to replace Climate Change in news reports.) Joseph Stiglitz gets it.
Advocates of the Green New Deal say there is great urgency in dealing with the climate crisis and highlight the scale and scope of what is required to combat it. They are right. They use the term “New Deal” to evoke the massive response by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the United States government to the Great Depression. An even better analogy would be the country’s mobilization to fight World War II.
emphasis added
Imagine if Pearl Harbor had happened — but was treated as an isolated event with no connection to anything else? We’re doing that with Climate Change; it’s here, it’s happening, but no one wants to connect the dots. Americans are already suffering from it. We All Owe Al Gore an Apology.
A string of natural disasters has hit the central U.S. in recent weeks. Tornadoes have devastated communities, tearing up trees and homes. Record rainfall has prevented countless farmers in America's breadbasket from planting crops. Rising rivers continue to flood fields, inundate homes and threaten aging levees from Iowa to Mississippi.
And while none of these events can be directly attributed to climate change, extreme rains are happening more frequently in many parts of the U.S. and that trend is expected to continue as the Earth continues to warm.
Climate Change can’t be limited to a single debate. Going forward it must inform everything we do, every policy we craft, every bit of legislation we propose. It touches national security, health, employment, education, job creation, energy policy, social justice, economic development, foreign relations…
It’s difficult to think of anything it doesn’t touch in some way. As Stiglitz observes:
The mobilization efforts of the second world war transformed our society. We went from an agricultural economy and a largely rural society to a manufacturing economy and a largely urban society. The temporary liberation of women as they entered the labor force so the country could meet its war needs had long-term effects. This is the advocates’ ambition, a not unrealistic one, for the Green New Deal.
There is absolutely no reason the innovative and green economy of the 21st century has to follow the economic and social models of the 20th-century manufacturing economy based on fossil fuels, just as there was no reason that that economy had to follow the economic and social models of the agrarian and rural economies of earlier centuries.
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Climate Change should be an underlying assumption in every policy the candidates propose. Every question, every answer should reflect how it applies in a world that is becoming something human civilization has never encountered before. We can’t pigeonhole Climate Change and put it in a box apart from everything else.
The DNC and Democratic establishment leadership in general is risk-averse. A natural response to an existential crisis is to attempt to minimize it or deny it altogether (As in the case of a blatantly criminal presidency) lest it harsh the mellow of those darn centrist voters. You know, the people who want to have everything both ways.
Kevin Drum has been observing for some time now that people are aware Climate Change is a problem — but not one they are willing to sacrifice anything to do something about it. Part of the problem is that The Center Is Holding. Things are actually not that bad when you get away from the Trump distractions of trade wars, immigrant crises at the border, etc. etc. — for most people.
My message here is simple. If you cherry pick all the bad stuff that’s happened in the past few years, you can make a case for being pretty discouraged. If you cherry pick all the good stuff, you can make a case that everything is fine. The real reality is somewhere in-between. So if you feel like being discouraged, don’t let me get in your way. But there’s always good and bad in the world, and there’s no reason to insist otherwise.
Except for climate change, where we’re still on track to commit planetary suicide and no one is truly taking it seriously. That’s just a pure nightmare.
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The DNC’s “Not In Front of the Children” policy on climate change fails in at least three ways.
- It’s a form of moral cowardice to avoid an issue because it has problematic political aspects.
- It’s a failure to recognize reality and deal with it.
- It’s passive, reactive not active — and that lets others set the agenda. (Another example of Democratic inability to do effective messaging.)
As Kevin Drum notes above, there are a lot of things that are going fairly well at the moment — but ignoring Climate Change threatens everything. We have a number of problems that go in all kinds of directions, affect a variety of diverse interests — those “dozens of issues of importance to American voters” as the DNC puts it. Climate Change touches everything, so dealing with it effectively means — as Stiglitz notes — we can roll those other issues into the solutions we must pursue going forward as we transform the country once again.
(Solutions like this one. Excuse me for making a shameless plug.)
So, while holding a single debate on nothing but Climate Change is not a bad idea per se, if it’s only limited to one debate and doesn’t inform every other debate going forward, that will be the real mistake. Climate Change is a huge challenge facing the Human Race. It should come up in every debate. If the DNC is afraid to touch it, this is a chance for the candidates to demonstrate that they are not afraid to fight for what we really need, can craft an effective message, and can seize the initiative.
Conservatives have been running for years on exaggerated terror threats, ‘moral’ crises, immigration crises, burdensome government, overregulation, taxes, deficits, etc. and they’ve managed to scapegoat Liberals for everything, including the racism and religious bigotry.
Climate Change is real, it’s a threat, and they can’t deal with it. They have no answers. Democrats can and must. It is the great test of our times, to reference Bujold:
“I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, Shards of Honour
It is a gift we cannot refuse. Let’s make use of it.