Click the link to read the commentary on The Los Angeles Times website (Sammy Roth). Here’s an excerpt:
June 27, 2024
Two-thirds of the way through Thursday night’s presidential debate, CNN journalist Dana Bash finally asked the candidates how they would tackle a challenge that scientists say poses an existential threat to human civilization: climate change. Perhaps unsurprisingly, former President Trump made a series of false claims about his first-term track record. After he spent most of his two-minute response time returning to a previous debate topic, Bash prompted him to say something about global warming. Trump responded that he wants “absolutely immaculate clean water” and “absolutely clean air.”
“We were using all forms of energy, all forms — everything,” he said, referring to his first term. “And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever, and my top environmental people gave me that statistic.”
Although planet-warming carbon emissions fell sharply during the final year of Trump’s first term, due to an economy slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, they rose slightly from 2016 to 2019. And if Trump could have helped it, emissions would have risen even more. He glorified coal, oil and gas even as they polluted the air and water he claimed to love; bashed solar and wind energy with bogus talking points; and pulled the United States out of the international Paris climate accord. At Thursday’s debate, Trump claimed the Paris accord — which Biden ultimately rejoined — would cost the country $1 trillion. He didn’t cite a source for that number. And he didn’t come close to acknowledging that the heat waves, wildfires, floods, storms, droughts, migrant flows and crop failures already being exacerbated by rising temperatures will cost the U.S. far more than the price of transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, in the view of climate and economic experts. Trump also claimed that the Paris agreement will cost China, Russia and India “nothing.” Another lie. All three nations, like every other Paris signatory, have pledged to do what’s necessary to try to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — which scientists say involves slashing carbon emissions 43% by 2030 — a tall order.
In total, the candidates spent about two and a half minutes discussing the climate crisis during Thursday’s debate before the moderators moved on to other topics.