“As a presidential candidate, what will you do to address climate change?”
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She finally came out against it last month, when polls began to show her as the Democrats’ front-runner, and insisted that: “I never took a position on Keystone until I took a position on Keystone”.
Mere hours after U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders told the American public that the greatest danger to national security is climate change, a large crowd is expected to descend on the Arizona capitol in Phoenix to demand that state leaders take aggressive action to combat the threat.
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.
Martin O’Malley, previously the governor of Maryland, has often referred to climate change as a significant threat to United States security as well.
Even so, in 2007, climate change received little more than a nod in the Democratic primaries.
He opened his administration with bold environmental bills that were eventually defeated by a hostile Congress. According to event organizers, this will be a family-friendly gathering, and attendees are encouraged to “bring a photograph or drawing of something you’re anxious about losing because of climate change”.
Then, also in August, Obama authorized the EPA to police a 40 to 45 percent slash in oil and gas industry releases of methane – a so-called short-lived climate gas 25 times as heat-trapping as carbon dioxide.
Who should be passed the climate baton? Second, while Republican candidates have generally walked the same line on policy positions, the Democratic candidates have substantial differences in their views for how to address the country’s energy challenges.
Bellona’s Engen wants to hear more before she makes a ruling. In the statement, companies said they needed a clear direction from world leaders to guide long-term investments and transparency to ensure all countries were applying the same rules to emissions.
But she said, “Deep emission cuts are needed in other sectors than electricity production” which is where Obama has mainly wielded his executive power of the EPA cudgel.
Who would play for Paris?
Multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies show that 97%, or more, of actively publishing climate scientists agree that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, we will pass the threshold beyond which global warming becomes “severe, widespread and irreversible”. However, in contrast to Sanders’ moral argument, Clinton approached her energy plan from a perspective of how to leverage clean technology and innovation to create jobs: “I’ve put forward specific plans about how we’re going to create more good-paying jobs: By investing in infrastructure and clean energy, by making it possible once again to invest in science and research, and taking the opportunity posed by climate change to grow our economy”.
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“Maybe this can fuel Obama’s will to return from Paris with a real climate agreement and a global Carbon dioxide price”, she said.
