Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian points out that the candidates “mentioned climate change a dozen times during the two-hour encounter”, much more frequently than the many Republican candidates did during five hours of debating. In the debate, he stepped that up, saying an executive order on the issue would be his first action as president.
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“We did not land a man on the moon with an all-of-the-above strategy”, O’Malley said, a jab at a line the Obama administration has often used to describe its approach to energy.
Her closest rival Bernie Sanders said he agreed with Pope Francis, who called it a “moral issue”. Many “made in Pakistan”, local solutions to tackle climate change were presented and new ones recommended. A primary driver for this renewed attention is the upcoming December 2015 Paris Climate Conference, otherwise known as COP21, an annual global forum under the United Nations Framework for Climate Change.
“The scientists are telling us that we need to move extremely boldly”, Sanders said. “We knew that we had to get them to agree to something”, she said. As moderator Cooper noted, Webb maintains unusual positions on energy for a Democrat: “You’re pro-coal, you’re pro-offshore drilling, you’re pro-Keystone pipeline…”
Clinton went on to say she had been committed to fighting climate change since 2009, when she and Barack Obama hunted down the Chinese leadership at the Copenhagen climate conference to try to reach a deal to cut carbon pollution.
For Ontario’s cap-and-trade system to be successful, its policies need to continue to support the critical role that renewable fuels play as a low emission fuel option. “If you look at China and India, they’re the greatest polluters in the world”.
In Phoenix, organizers have scheduled a full day of events because, as one of them, Stacy Champion, explains, “Arizona is in the bullseye of climate change, [and] it is our duty as inhabitants of this planet to act on climate immediately – locally, nationally, and globally”. “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.
Addressing the conference, other speakers, including Arif Ahmed Khan, Secretary Ministry of Climate Change, Javed Jabbar, Neil Buhne UN Resident Coordinator, Dr Dominique Raynaud, French Glaciologist and Dr Ghulam Rasul, the Director Pakistan Meteorological Department, said Pakistan was facing multiple threats to climate change as only floods affected millions of people during the last few years.
By the end of the debate, the only candidate to make no mention of energy policy specifics was Lincoln Chafee.
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Climate activists in the USA tried and failed to push a cap-and-trade bill through Congress during Obama’s first years in office. He failed to provide specific examples that would have elaborated on both comments.
