We recently asked you to tell Jim Lehrer, moderator of the first presidential debate on October 3, to ask a question about the climate crisis — because neither candidate can afford to ignore the most urgent issue of our time.
The response was huge. Today, with the League of Conservation Voters, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, MomsRising.org, GlobalSolutions.org, iMatter campaign and Moms Clean Air Force, we dropped off more than 160,000 petition signatures at Jim Lehrer’s studio.
What we told Mr. Lehrer very simple: Climate change is happening now. Dirty weather is affecting people around the world. So we need to hear from the presidential candidates about what they will do to help solve it.
In the words of our President and CEO, Maggie L. Fox: “We can’t get to the important work of debating and implementing solutions if the candidates won’t even talk about the problem. That’s why it’s imperative that we bring climate change into the presidential debates.”
Thanks to all of you who added your voice and asked to bring climate change into the presidential debate.
Mary Casoli
September 27th
We cannot allow the know-nothings to control an issue that affects every person on Earth so profoundly.
Janice Robert
September 30th
We have to start using the brains god gave us and actually think and question in order to make our world better and until we start being honest and respectful we will not achieve it. Trickledown economics does not work. Time to start looking at economic from the middle. The extremes only lead to revolution. Our founding fathers understood this human pattern. They saw it time and time again in past civilizations and wanted to make the new world America/United States move past that failure.
Is human kind ready to move past the technological age and move forward? As a species we have no choice but to find the balance between technology and nature and evolve or become extinct.
Tim MacDonald
September 30th
A debate on the existence of a problem will be more popular if we are also debating the choice of which of the available solutions will be most practical and popular.
A problem for which there is no practical and popular solution is not something that anybody really wants to talk about.
Is there any solution to climate change other than carbon balancing? Is there any way to achieve a climate-benign level of carbon balance than by reducing the rate at which we are releasing fossilized carbon into the atmosphere?
I think the answer to both these questions is universally agreed to be “No” (prophets of carbon sequestration notwithstanding). Even those who have a vested interest in denying that carbon release really is a problem have to agree that, if it is a problem, then there really is only one solution. That is why they deny the problem.
So the real debate we need to be having is not about whether there is a problem, but rather about how much we are all, collectively and individually, willing pay to solve it. To let this continue to be a question for individual choice under “free market” principles, is to choose to do nothing. The rules of competition under which market mechanisms currently operate externalize carbon impacts to the best-fit, least-cost equation: fossil fuels are cheaper, and work better (carbon impacts aside); so according to these rules, there is no other choice. All carbon-balanced options cost more, so fossil fuels are better. The Ancient Greek logicians called this “begging the question”: better at what?
If we do re-write the rules of competition to bring carbon impacts inside the best-fit side of the least-cost equation, costs will go up. Those who want to pretend this is not true, in my opinion, are only hurting their own cause — and ours.
The debate needs to be not about whether we need to pay a higher price to build and maintain a globally carbon-benign energy supply infrastructure, but about how much higher a price we are willing to pay.
Let’s stop allowing the debate to be about “if”, and move to the more serious question of ‘how much”.