Zero Minutes On Climate In 2012 Debates; Five Minutes In 2016; Silence So Far In 2020 (Of Course)
A brief sample of recent climate news: record-setting heat waves, including a 121-degree day in Los Angeles; apocalyptic wildfires up and down the West Coast, killing dozens and draping much of the continent in smoke; an August derecho that laid waste to much of the state of Iowa; five tropical cyclones forming at once in the Atlantic for only the second time in recorded history. Oh, and a new report finding that the consequences of rising temperatures are likely to be even worse than prior predictions.
Don’t expect any of that to come up when Joe Biden and Donald Trump take the stage for the first presidential debate next week. On Tuesday, the debate’s moderator, Fox News host Chris Wallace, announced his planned list of topics. It includes the Covid pandemic, the Supreme Court, and the economy, but you will search in vain for any mention of the environment or climate change. To which I say, on behalf of humanity: You have got to be kidding me.
Counting the time devoted to climate change in presidential debates has become a fatalistic, every-four-years ritual, like rooting for England in the World Cup. The moderators didn’t ask a single question about climate change during the three 2016 debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump; according to Grist, the topic was discussed for about five and a half minutes total, mostly in passing. Somehow, 2012 was even worse: zero minutes on climate change. (The 2000 debates were a relative high-water mark, featuring 14 whole minutes of climate talk between arch-environmentalist Al Gore and Texas oilman George W. Bush.)
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This shift has been driven almost entirely by Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents; Republican voters generally still don’t care much about climate change, even if they acknowledge it’s real. Still, the issue has reached a level of salience that ought to qualify it for the debate stage. The question is whether any of this year’s debate moderators will pick up on that fact. The early evidence isn’t great. Fox News’s Chris Wallace does have one 15-minute segment blocked off for “The Trump and Biden Records,” but there’s little reason to expect him to dwell on climate policy. (One imagines it will nonetheless be more enlightening than the disconcertingly titled “Race and Violence in Our Cities” segment.)
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https://www.wired.com/story/trump-biden-debate-without-climate-change-inexcusable/