The Last Time A Debate Moderator Asked About Climate, Bush Was President & Iron Man Was In Theaters

[hatrack]

EDIT

It’s a sign of how times have changed. By all accounts, 2008 was the last year that both candidates acknowledged the science on climate change and wanted to do something about it. If you want a signal of how radically different the discourse was back then, consider this: During the vice-presidential debate, the conservative darling Sarah Palin said “We know that [climate change] is real” and “We’ve got to reduce emissions.” After all, both John McCain and Barack Obama were running on platforms that called for capping carbon emissions across all 50 states. This was reflected in the debate questions: In the vice-presidential debate, Gwen Ifill of PBS asked the candidates “what is true and what is false” about the causes of climate change; in the final presidential debate, moderator Bob Schieffer from CBS asked Obama and McCain how they would reduce dependence on foreign oil for “energy and climate control.”

Four years later, however, following the rise of the far-right Tea Party, neither Obama nor his opponent, Mitt Romney, wanted to touch the issue of climate change. They spent 0 minutes on it throughout all three debates, although Obama did briefly mention the importance of green jobs and spending on clean energy. In 2016, with Republican nominee Trump frequently calling climate change a “hoax,” the only question on climate and energy policy came from an audience member, the red-sweatered internet sensation Kenneth Bone, who both accepted the scientific consensus on climate change and worried that it would cost him his job at an Illinois coal plant. If it weren’t for Bone, the total time spent discussing the warming climate may have been 0 again; thanks to him, it squeaked in at five and a half minutes.

To David Steinberg, a political communications expert at the University of Miami, the lack of climate change in debate questions isn’t much of a surprise. The questions “are going to be based on what shows up in polling data among those people who are direct targets,” he said. That means people who are undecided, infrequent participants in politics, or who don’t commonly vote.

And, although climate change clocks in pretty high on Democrats’ policy priorities, it ranked as the 13th priority for American voters overall, according to a poll in April by George Mason University and Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. That’s well below COVID-19, the economy, and healthcare. It’s also hard to imagine what, if anything, Trump would have to say on climate change. Earlier this month he told California policymakers that “I don’t think science knows” what will happen to the climate.

EDIT

https://grist.org/politics/its-been-12-years-since-presidential-debate-moderators-asked-about-climate-change/

[still_one]

1. I remember bush junior going to Michigan making fun of hybrid and clean energy vehicles

We all know Detroit paid a heavy price for that ridicule

[Magoo48]

2. Without an environmental-focus-lens, which must be used to provide clarity into every remaining

national and global issue, tonight’s get together is little more than a meet and greet.
THAT SAID, GO JOE!

[Sneederbunk]

3. The moderators work for big corporations. 'Nuff said.