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Democratic rivals put climate change firmly on the agenda

While 35 percent say they’re most anxious about “economic problems” and 12 percent say they’re most concerned with immigration, only 2 percent express concern about the “environment”, which would include “climate change”.

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Martin O’Malley, previously the governor of Maryland, has often referred to climate change as a significant threat to USA security as well.

CLINTON: Well, that – that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

But, much like Clinton did in her remarks, he underscored the need for worldwide cooperation-particularly from China and India-to tackle climate change. In the initial moments of this year’s first Democratic presidential primary debate, four of the five candidates raised the issue in their opening statements-a stark contrast not only to the Republican candidates, who hardly mentioned climate change at all in their two debates to date, but also to previous election cycles. Asked by CNN moderator Anderson Cooper about her former opposition to same-sex marriage among other position changes, Clinton said she has “always fought for the same values and principles” but sometimes “absorb[s] new information” that leads to a change of mind.

· Senator Sanders gave a broad answer about the scale of the threat and working with China and India, but had said multiple times in the debate that this was a top issue for him.

The second Democratic presidential debate is scheduled for November. 14 in Des Moines, Iowa.

Although it could be years until a solution to climate change is discovered and implemented, Bettis said she is happy to have been a part of the discussion on a national level.

With the touted December United Nations climate summit in Paris getting painfully close, Engen noted that the next president – presuming it’s a Democrat – would have to follow up on, and possibly strengthen, the commitments that are agreed to at the negotiations.

When prompted for her rebuttal to Sanders’ remarks, Clinton highlighted her own credentials in fighting climate change, telling a story about a meeting in 2009 in Copenhagen where she and President Obama “broke in” to a secret meeting held by the Chinese delegation to ensure they would join an global climate agreement. Her kind state that “the debate is over” and “the science is settled”. At the time, Clinton called for “an energy policy that puts us on the right track to deal with climate change”. And in a Webb administration, we will do something about that.

“What we need is a green energy revolution”. Both have pushed emerging economies such as India and China to take on a greater burden based on their current “capabilities” and their current and future emissions.

Dr. Patrick Moore, a graduate of the University of British Columbia in ecology, made a presentation on this very subject at the Ninth global Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas in July, 2014.Dr. Moore was one of the co-founders of Greenpeace, but he is now not in that organization. Fifteen out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in one of those two countries. “The agreements – the so-called agreements that we have had with China are illusory in terms of the immediate requirements of the Chinese government itself”, Jim Webb said in response to the same question.

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Cuba’s Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, warned that “in Paris we will not be accepting a new agreement on climate change that minimises the responsibilities of rich countries”, denouncing a “lack of political will” to combat the issue from the governments of wealthy countries.

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