Climate Change

This graded discussion is based on guided writing.  In order to be successful on this discussion, you need to CLEARLY demonstrate an understanding of the information and the questions presented.  OPINIONS need to be based on EVIDENCE.  This means you need to provide PROPER documentation for statements within the post.  You must follow directions in order to achieve a successful outcome on this graded material.

You will be given article(s) to read, then you will provide your opinions on the topic and provide evidence for your position.

Click on the above link(s) and read the article(s).  Then respond to ALL of the questions below.  In order to receive full credit for the discussion, you have to follow the guidelines provided. Remember to incorporate the articles/podcast in your response.  This means that you must briefly summarize and then make connections to them in your response.

Submissions must have at least 400 words (not including documentation/citations and works cited).  Students must also use proper grammar and punctuation, with no contractions. NO PLAGIARISM is allowed!  If you copy any portion of your submission from external sources, you will receive a 0!  Do not use phrases/quotes from the assigned link or external links to write your response.

You MUST document/cite your submission or you will receive a 0!

Climate Change

1.  Provide a brief (clear and concise) summary of the podcast and of the article in your own words.  What is the most important issue that is raised in the podcast and in the article, in your opinion? What solution do you believe would resolve this issue presented? Who or what entity do you believe is most able to deal with this issue?  What specific impact do you believe this issue has on your life currently? What other research have you done on this topic? (This means provide some additional point of interest that you found other than in the links provided.)  What impact does this topic have on your selection of candidates for political office and also your interest in government?

2.  Overall, do you believe that the information in the links are valid? What is your opinion of the information provided by this news source (Do you believe that the information is credible?)?  List at least one aspect of each of the article/research that you find questionable. Why?

3.  Based on course topics, why is this topic relevant to the study of government? (This means that you need to make a connection between the articles’ topic and at least one topic in the course and provide evidence.)  Why is this topic relevant to society as a whole?

 

Remember:  Your grade is based on following the directions carefully, your understanding of the topic presented, and your clear responses to the questions presented.

Thunberg, Greta (Speaker). “The disarming case to act right now on climate change.”  TEDxStockholm.  November 2018.

 

 

When I was about eight years old, I first heard about something called climate change or global warming. Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and to recycle paper to save resources. I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the Earth’s climate. Because if we were, and if it was really happening, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. As soon as you’d turn on the TV, everything would be about that. Headlines, radio, newspapers, you would never read or hear about anything else, as if there was a world war going on. But no one ever talked about it. If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal?

01:28

To me, that did not add up. It was too unreal. So when I was 11, I became ill. I fell into depression, I stopped talking, and I stopped eating. In two months, I lost about 10 kilos of weight. Later on, I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, OCD and selective mutism. That basically means I only speak when I think it’s necessary – now is one of those moments.

02:03

(Applause)

02:13

For those of us who are on the spectrum, almost everything is black or white. We aren’t very good at lying, and we usually don’t enjoy participating in this social game that the rest of you seem so fond of.

02:26

(Laughter)

02:28

I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones, and the rest of the people are pretty strange,

02:33

(Laughter)

02:35

especially when it comes to the sustainability crisis, where everyone keeps saying climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all, and yet they just carry on like before. I don’t understand that, because if the emissions have to stop, then we must stop the emissions. To me that is black or white. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change.

03:09

Rich countries like Sweden need to start reducing emissions by at least 15 percent every year. And that is so that we can stay below a two-degree warming target. Yet, as the IPCC have recently demonstrated, aiming instead for 1.5 degrees Celsius would significantly reduce the climate impacts. But we can only imagine what that means for reducing emissions. You would think the media and every one of our leaders would be talking about nothing else, but they never even mention it. Nor does anyone ever mention the greenhouse gases already locked in the system. Nor that air pollution is hiding a warming so that when we stop burning fossil fuels, we already have an extra level of warming perhaps as high as 0.5 to 1.1 degrees Celsius. Furthermore does hardly anyone speak about the fact that we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, with up to 200 species going extinct every single day, that the extinction rate today is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than what is seen as normal. Nor does hardly anyone ever speak about the aspect of equity or climate justice, clearly stated everywhere in the Paris Agreement, which is absolutely necessary to make it work on a global scale. That means that rich countries need to get down to zero emissions within 6 to 12 years, with today’s emission speed. And that is so that people in poorer countries can have a chance to heighten their standard of living by building some of the infrastructure that we have already built, such as roads, schools, hospitals, clean drinking water, electricity, and so on. Because how can we expect countries like India or Nigeria to care about the climate crisis if we who already have everything don’t care even a second about it or our actual commitments to the Paris Agreement?

05:29

So, why are we not reducing our emissions? Why are they in fact still increasing? Are we knowingly causing a mass extinction? Are we evil? No, of course not. People keep doing what they do because the vast majority doesn’t have a clue about the actual consequences of our everyday life, and they don’t know that rapid change is required. We all think we know, and we all think everybody knows, but we don’t. Because how could we? If there really was a crisis, and if this crisis was caused by our emissions, you would at least see some signs. Not just flooded cities, tens of thousands of dead people, and whole nations leveled to piles of torn down buildings. You would see some restrictions. But no. And no one talks about it. There are no emergency meetings, no headlines, no breaking news. No one is acting as if we were in a crisis. Even most climate scientists or green politicians keep on flying around the world, eating meat and dairy. If I live to be 100, I will be alive in the year 2103. When you think about the future today, you don’t think beyond the year 2050. By then, I will, in the best case, not even have lived half of my life.

07:19

What happens next? The year 2078, I will celebrate my 75th birthday. If I have children or grandchildren, maybe they will spend that day with me. Maybe they will ask me about you, the people who were around, back in 2018. Maybe they will ask why you didn’t do anything while there still was time to act. What we do or don’t do right now will affect my entire life and the lives of my children and grandchildren. What we do or don’t do right now, me and my generation can’t undo in the future. So when school started in August of this year, I decided that this was enough. I set myself down on the ground outside the Swedish parliament. I school striked for the climate. Some people say that I should be in school instead. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can “solve the climate crisis.” But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is to wake up and change. And why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts in the school system when the most important facts given by the finest science of that same school system clearly means nothing to our politicians and our society. Some people say that Sweden is just a small country, and that it doesn’t matter what we do, but I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not coming to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could all do together if you wanted to.

09:29

(Applause)

09:34

Now we’re almost at the end of my talk, and this is where people usually start talking about hope, solar panels, wind power, circular economy, and so on, but I’m not going to do that. We’ve had 30 years of pep-talking and selling positive ideas. And I’m sorry, but it doesn’t work. Because if it would have, the emissions would have gone down by now. They haven’t. And yes, we do need hope, of course we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere.

10:21

So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come.

10:32

Today, we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules, because the rules have to be changed.

10:53

Everything needs to change — and it has to start today.

10:58

Thank you.

10:59

(Applause)

 

 

 

 

 

Grunwald, Michael.  “Climate Change Could Be a Problem in 2020…for Democrats.”  Politico Magazine. September 3, 2019.

 

emergency and a political opportunity. As an assistant secretary of Defense under President Barack Obama, she helped lead the Pentagon’s first study of how climate change threatens U.S. military bases. Then, as a Democratic candidate for Congress in 2018, she attacked her Republican opponent for questioning the scientific consensus on climate change—and that’s one reason she’s now a Democratic member of Congress.

 

“We talk about the weather all the time in Michigan, and we all know it’s getting weird,” she says. “To most people, straight-out denial feels extreme.”

 

 

But even though Slotkin has shown how the climate crisis can be a winning issue, she’s not on board with the most prominent progressive effort to make it a national issue, the “Green New Deal,” backed by her more famous House classmate Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She thinks it’s too radical, too polarizing, a gift to President Donald Trump and other Republicans who want to portray Democrats as socialists. “My district is very worried that Democrats are lurching to the left,” she says. “I know AOC’s face will be on every ad against me in 2020.”

 

Slotkin doesn’t see why a plan to fix the climate needs to promise universal health care and a federal job guarantee, and she doubts a lefty wish list disguised as an emergency response will play well in her suburban Michigan swing district, which Trump won by 7 percentage points.

 

“I’m a pragmatist, and I represent a lot of pragmatic people,” says Slotkin. “Why say we need massive social change to reduce emissions? How does that build consensus?”

 

The politics of climate change are changing fast, partly because global heat waves, fires in California and the Amazon, Midwestern floods and increasingly brutal storms keep focusing attention on its nasty consequences, and partly because the Green New Deal has thrust it to the center of the national conversation. Polls suggest climate change has emerged as one of the top two policy priorities for Democratic voters, rivaled only by health care. The party’s presidential candidates are releasing remarkably aggressive plans to wean America off fossil fuels, which they discussed briefly during each Democratic primary debate in Miami and Detroit this summer, and will debate in more detail at forums devoted exclusively to climate on CNN and MSNBC in September.

 

Meanwhile, even though Trump is an unapologetic climate-science denier and fossil-fuel promoter who has claimed that wind turbines cause cancer, other Republicans are retreating to more nuanced and factually defensible positions, acknowledging that greenhouse-gas emissions are a problem while calling for “innovation” and “adaptation” (as opposed to Green New Deal-style economic transformation) to deal with them. Corporate America is evolving, too. Dozens of big companies—including oil majors like BP and Shell—descended on Capitol Hill this spring to lobby for modest carbon taxes, responding to pressure from their shareholders and the public to support some kind of climate action.

 

 

 

As a rift builds between Republicans who do or don’t want to acknowledge climate change as a problem, another wedge is growing between Democrats who support radical solutions and those, like Slotkin, who want somewhat less radical solutions. It is mainly playing out through the internal battle over the Green New Deal, which so far is more of a call for dramatic action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions than a specific legislative agenda, but has been effectively branded by conservative outlets like Fox News as a leftist crusade to ban meat and air travel.

 

It’s not a coincidence that Trump has vowed to run for reelection against the Green New Deal, or that Senate Republicans gleefully forced a vote on it, or that no Senate Democrats dared to vote yes. Even liberal House speaker Nancy Pelosi, while supporting deep emissions cuts and denouncing Trump’s efforts to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, has declined to endorse “the green dream or whatever.”

 

 

Activists often say climate change shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but in the U.S. it still is. Democratic-controlled states like New York, California, Washington, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada and Maine have all passed sweeping bills requiring economywide climate neutrality by 2050 or earlier. States where Republicans hold power haven’t passed legislation like that, and the Republican Senate minority in blue Oregon managed to block a similar bill by fleeing the state to avoid a quorum. Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who chairs a new Democratic committee on the climate crisis, devoted an entire hearing in July to conservatives who support climate action, and he’s hopeful about some modest bipartisan efforts to promote clean energy infrastructure and research. But Schatz says it’s far more important for the health of the planet for Democrats to defeat Trump in 2020 and take full control of Congress.

 

“As a practical matter, 2020 will decide whether we reenter the realm of responsible nations, or not,” Schatz says. “It’s not a super-complex policy question. Climate is going to be on the ballot, and Democrats just have to win.”

 

The question is whether the current politics of climate is making that more or less likely. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, widely considered the scientific gold standard on the issue, has called for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to slash emissions. But it can be politically risky to support rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society. The Washington establishment seems convinced that as a generic long-term issue requiring politicians to do something, climate change makes Republicans look out of the mainstream, but as a demand for massive upheaval on a tight planetary timeline, the Green New Deal makes Democrats look just as far out of the mainstream.

 

WHERE THE 2020 DEMS STAND ON THE ISSUES: CLIMATE CHANGE

 

And it’s exposing real tensions inside the Democratic Party—between center and left, congressional leaders and insurgents, labor groups and green groups, and even among various factions inside the Green New Deal movement.

 

 

***

 

In the past, climate was rarely more than a check-the-box afterthought on the campaign trail, so it’s notable that it has finally broken through as a top-tier issue for Democratic voters. In one CNN poll, 96 percent of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said it was important that a presidential candidate support aggressive action against climate change, higher than any other issue; in several other polls, climate change has been cited as the No. 2 Democratic priority, ahead of guns, jobs and education, just behind health care.

 

“That’s worth underlining and bolding and italicizing,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale University Program on Climate Communication.

 

The Democratic presidential field has absorbed the message; one potential problem with the CNN and MSNBC climate-only quasi-debates might be the lack of substantive disagreements for the candidates to debate. Until he dropped out of the race last week, Washington Governor Jay Inslee had built his entire campaign around climate, billionaire Tom Steyer is a top funder of climate activism, and populist senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have called for a war on fossil fuels. Even former vice president Joe Biden, who was attacked from the left over early reports that he’d carve out a “middle ground” on climate, has unveiled a plan to decarbonize the entire country by 2050.

 

There are subtle differences among the candidates, mostly involving the specificity of their plans and their willingness to embrace “keep-it-in-the-ground” fossil-fuel policies that pro-pipeline construction unions oppose. But all the Democrats represent a stark contrast with Trump, who has appointed like-minded fossil-fuel advocates throughout his administration and the judiciary, made the U.S. the only nation to reject the Paris accord, routinely attacked climate-friendly pollution and efficiency regulations, and publicly dismissed the National Climate Assessment released by his own administration as left-wing “deep state” alarmism.

 

Still, even though Trump has made headlines with his attacks on Obama’s climate policies and his mockery of climate science, and even though the floods ravaging Midwestern farms and the heat wave broiling Europe have highlighted the urgency of the climate issue, it probably wouldn’t have risen this high on the political agenda if Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t become Capitol Hill’s top celebrity. Democratic leaders may be annoyed that she gets so much press, and the president may enjoy using her outspoken “Squad” of left-wing women of color as foils, but her Green New Deal has called more attention to climate than any phenomenon since the 2006 Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It’s also mobilizing the green young voters Democrats will need to beat Trump in 2020—even if it’s mobilizing them with rhetoric and tactics that make establishment Democrats uncomfortable.

 

 

The youth-oriented Sunrise Movement was an obscure year-old organization with just 20 chapters when Ocasio-Cortez stopped by its climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office last November. It now has more than 200 active chapters that have held town halls all over the country, building pressure for the Green New Deal, accusing their elders in both parties of consigning their generation to a fossil-fueled dystopia. The IPCC has called for drastic emissions reductions by 2030 to avoid the worst climate scenarios, and with U.S. emissions rising under Trump, groups like Sunrise argue that gradual and incremental political changes are not going to cut it.

 

“We’re at the start of a paradigm shift, and it’s wild,” says 29-year-old Rhianna Gunn-Wright, who helped craft the Green New Deal resolution as policy director for the progressive think tank New Consensus. Gunn-Wright says younger voters have just as little patience for half-measures, delay and “hand-wringing from moderates” as they have for Trump’s snide how-about-that-global-warming tweets on cold days. “People want action now,” Gunn-Wright says. “Calling the people trying to solve the problem socialists might work for a while, but it’s going to get tougher and tougher to say we can’t afford to address this crisis.”

 

She may be right that the long-term politics of climate favor action, but in the short term it matters a lot whether calling climate-friendly Democrats socialists will work for Republican candidates in 2020. Some politicians in both parties believe the issue could play out the way gay marriage did in 2004, rallying the conservative Republican base and helping to reelect a conservative Republican president even though large majorities later came to agree with the Democrats. Democrats may be magnifying their problems with a circular firing squad, as the establishment echoes Republican talking points about left-wing extremism while the left attacks even minor deviations from Green New Deal purism as shameful inaction.

 

“Denying the science is not a sustainable position, and more Republicans need to face reality on this issue,” says Representative Garrett Graves of Louisiana, the ranking Republican on the new House committee investigating climate change. “But there’s a civil war happening on the Democratic side, too. If the Green New Deal can’t get a single vote in the U.S. Senate, they obviously haven’t figured this out, either.”

 

 

In fact, six months after the Green New Deal resolution was unveiled, with far-reaching climate goals but few specific climate policies, its supporters have yet to introduce substantive legislation for achieving those goals. Meanwhile, House Democrats skeptical of the Green New Deal have introduced two alternative green blueprints, both calling for net-zero emissions by 2050, but those are also primarily plans to have a plan, not actual plans. So far, the political sweet spot seems to be to announce a climate-friendly destination without detailing exactly how to get there.

 

***

 

In the past, climate change has been such an un-sexy campaign issue that there has never even been a question about it in a general election debate. In 2012, CNN moderator Candy Crowley said she considered including one for “you climate change people,” as if the broiling of the planet were a niche concern for tree-huggers, but decided it would have distracted from her focus on the economy. In 2016, one town hall debate did include one thoughtful question about energy and the environment, but the question was overshadowed by an Internet furor over the questioner, a cardigan-clad insta-celebrity named Ken Bone.

 

In 2018, though, climate was a key theme for Democratic congressional candidates such as Slotkin and Harley Rouda of California, a moderate who successfully challenged the eccentric conservative Republican Representative Dana Rohrbacher. Rouda considers climate “the number one issue facing humankind,” and he knew it mattered to voters in his coastal Orange County district, where rising seas have forced local officials to raise a seawall on Balboa Island. “Climate is a bigger infrastructure issue here than widening the 405,” he says. Rouda also saw climate as an ideal way to paint Rohrbacher as an extremist who, when he wasn’t floating conspiracy theories that Democrats organized the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville or suggesting that homeowners should be able to discriminate against gays, was dismissing climate change as “liberal claptrap” and suggesting that carbon emissions actually help the planet.

 

“It fit in with the outlandish stuff he said every day,” says Rouda, who now chairs the House’s key subcommittee on environmental oversight. “And it really resonated with everyone who wasn’t a hard-core Trump supporter.”

 

 

Climate denial was not always a Republican value. As recently as 2008, the Republican presidential nominee against Obama, John McCain, campaigned on a cap-and-trade plan to rein in carbon emissions, while former GOP Speaker Newt Gingrich and Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi filmed an ad for Gore’s nonprofit in which they sat on a sofa and agreed that climate action shouldn’t be partisan. Things changed after Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party, as Washington Republicans came together to shoot down Obama’s cap-and-trade plan and climate became a new battleground in America’s political culture wars. Conservative media routinely portrayed global warming as a loony-lefty scam for the Birkenstock crowd, and the few Republican politicians who embraced the science tended to become ex-politicians.

 

Trump amped up that skepticism as a candidate, dismissing climate change as a hoax manufactured in China while pledging to restore the coal industry to its former glory. That hasn’t happened during his presidency, but not for lack of trying. His administration has pushed hard to ease rules limiting pollution by coal plants and other fossil-fuel interests, heavy industry, agriculture and other major emitters of greenhouse gases. The president often portrays the climate movement as an elitist plot against the American economy; his top climate adviser compared the campaign against carbon to Nazi Germany’s “demonization of the poor Jews.”

 

Still, Trump’s advisers can read the polls suggesting voters outside his base are concerned about his anti-environmental record, which helps explain an unusually defensive speech he recently delivered highlighting America’s relatively clean air and water. He’s particularly out of step with young Republicans; more than one third of his own supporters under 40 disapprove of his brazen denial of climate science, which helps explain why some Republicans who can usually be relied on to defend his policies are distancing themselves from his stance on global warming.

 

ClearPath director Rich Powell, whose group advocates conservative approaches to climate action, says there’s been a “sea change” among congressional Republicans, with consensus-builders replacing bomb-throwers atop several key committees, and backbenchers who represent coastal states and suburban districts starting to endorse climate policies beyond “no.” In recent months, Republican stalwarts have proposed tax credits for clean-energy innovation, investments in clean-energy research, and modest carbon taxes to encourage a shift away from emissions. Even Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a staunch Trump ally from a district along the Gulf of Mexico, unveiled a “Green Real Deal” that would accelerate renewable energy projects on public lands and upgrade the electric grid, while urging his Republican colleagues to “support a solution, not just stick their heads in the sand.”

 

“That’s a sign of the times,” Powell says. “Swing voters really care about this. Even for the base, dismissing climate change isn’t necessarily a slam dunk.”

 

 

In fact, some Democrats are worried that the new GOP rhetoric on climate could help blur partisan distinctions on the issue in 2020, shifting the debate from basic science to complex policy. In an interview before he launched his White House run, Steyer argued that Republicans who acknowledge climate science but call for more study or warn against economically disruptive responses are as committed to inaction as outright deniers. But he acknowledged that the yes-but crowd might sound more compelling to low-information voters than the hell-no crowd.

 

“It’s like the civil rights movement. It’s almost better to have Bull Connor on the other side, so everyone understands the enemy,” Steyer said. “It’s one thing when they say: ‘The earth is flat.’ But when they say, ‘Oh, we’re reasonable, but you crazy socialist eggheads are going to kill millions of jobs,’ the politics are tougher.”

 

The politics are especially tough when Fox News is hammering away at the crazy-socialist-egghead message. Polls show that frequent Fox watchers hear much more about the Green New Deal than other Americans do, and dislike it much more than other Americans do. Data for Progress, another liberal group pushing the Green New Deal, has found in its focus groups that Fox messaging is having a powerful effect, with many voters associating the plan with “cow farts” and a tendentious “$93 trillion price tag” that Fox personalities keep flogging. Fossil fuel interests have also poured money into PR campaigns and think tanks pushing against climate action; Steyer says he started intervening in energy-related state ballot initiatives because environmental groups were getting outspent 25-to-1.

 

“We’re up against a very effective and centralized propaganda machine, and we need to fight back,” says Julian Brave NoiseCat, a 26-year-old indigenous rights activist who is now the strategic director at Data for Progress. “We can’t just remain in a defensive crouch, and that’s what Democratic leaders in Congress have done.”

 

NoiseCat’s dissatisfaction reflects another challenge for climate politics, the divisions within the Democratic Party. And those divisions have less to do with the substantive details of climate policy than contrasting visions of what the party is about, how the party should behave, and who is going to decide.

 

***

 

 

Whether or not they support the Green New Deal, most Democrats support aggressive investments in wind and solar power, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, public transit, and just about any other proven approach to reducing emissions. Similarly, most Democrats want to reduce government subsidies and other support for fossil fuels, tighten regulations on carbon and other pollutants, and undo just about everything Trump has done in the climate arena.

 

There are some internal disputes about whether to encourage carbon-free nuclear power or technology to capture carbon from fossil-fuel plants, how much climate policy should rely on market-oriented solutions like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade, and how aggressively to pursue keep-it-in-the-ground policies on federal and private land. But the Green New Deal was careful to sidestep those disputes, proclaiming the need for spectacularly ambitious changes without spelling them out.

 

“The truth is, the situation is so dire that we don’t need to argue which of these policies is best,” Schatz says. “We literally need to do all of them.”

 

Still, the arguments persist, and they help explain why congressional Democrats have been so vague about their climate policies. They also could cause problems for the party’s presidential nominee, who will irritate some Democrats whether he or she comes out as pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or somewhere in between. The troubling reality of climate math has created an internal dynamic where just about any candidate’s plan can be criticized as inadequate by activists who don’t like the candidate. When Beto O’Rourke unveiled a far-reaching $5 trillion plan to zero out emissions by 2050, exactly what the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have recommended, the Sunrise Movement trashed it as weak sauce that would fail to “give our generation a livable future.”

 

Climate wonks complained publicly that O’Rourke was being punished for echoing the science, and several climate activists grumbled privately that their movement was being hijacked by Sanders fans who cared more about a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party than serious emissions reductions. “Are we in this to do climate, or are we in this to nationalize industry?” one Green New Deal activist asked me. Sunrise later backed off a bit, acknowledging that its initial statement was too negative, but not before O’Rourke signed a pledge that he wouldn’t accept donations from fossil-fuel interests, a demand Sunrise had been making for months.

 

“We need a president who will stand up for our generation, and it can’t just be any Democrat,” says Stephen O’Hanlon, Sunrise’s 23-year-old spokesman. “We’re putting a lot of pressure on the candidates, and we’re gaining a lot of traction.”

 

 

The most prominent Democratic dispute about climate policy is whether it should focus exclusively on climate, or whether it should take on broader issues of economic injustice. The Green New Deal resolution was widely criticized for tacking on utopian progressive ideas like job guarantees (“to assure a living wage job for everyone”) as well as universal health care and the even broader mandate for “any other measure the committee deems appropriate for economic security.” Some centrists in Congress and even some mainstream environmental groups believe those contentious add-ons will send a politically damaging message that Democrats don’t welcome bipartisan cooperation, that their most strident radicals will be running the show. “I’m worried about the focus on the loudest voices,” says the moderate Representative Slotkin, who served as a CIA analyst before working for Obama in the Pentagon.

 

But Green New Dealers argue that a single-minded focus on emissions targets and warming scenarios would be bad politics and bad policy, narrowing and demoralizing the potential coalition for climate action, increasing the danger of a backlash like the “yellow vest” protests against France’s carbon taxes. They argue that climate hawks should focus on economic fairness and justice, on helping inner-city residents who breathe dirty air from coal plants, on dismantling power hierarchies that favor oil billionaires and agribusiness conglomerates over low-income minority consumers. They say the only way to fix the climate will be to inspire a new progressive coalition to take back Washington, and they’re skeptical that a technical goal like keeping average global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius will offer enough inspiration to mobilize the poor, the young and other less reliable voting groups to the polls.

 

It’s no coincidence that the Democrats arguing for the political benefits of full-menu progressivism happen to be full-menu progressives. But there is a real strategic argument behind the ideological opportunism, a climate version of the debate among Democrats about whether to target base voters or swing voters, whether persuasion or mobilization is the key to victory in 2020. Steyer points out that in 2018, he financed mobilization campaigns that helped carry clean-energy ballot questions to victory in the swing states of Michigan and Nevada, although a similar campaign failed in Arizona after Republican politicians changed the wording.

 

“Intensity is what drives turnout,” Steyer told me. “And climate lends itself to intensity. People are trying to kill your kids! Those are the facts. Why be polite?”

 

 

It’s also no coincidence that Steyer, before launching his own presidential campaign, was the leading advocate for Trump’s impeachment. There are real divisions among Democrats over pipelines, carbon taxes and the Green New Deal, and the rise of climate-curious Republicans is a real phenomenon. But the president has a knack for dominating the national conversation, and it’s hard to imagine that the climate conversation will be any different in 2020. As the Trump administration whacks away at fossil-fuel regulations, while the Trump campaign sells plastic straws designed to mock concern for the environment, Democrats hope and Republicans fear that the complex nuances of climate politics will be boiled down to whether voters care or don’t, believe experts or don’t, trust Trump or don’t. In that scenario, every climate-driven heat wave, fire and flood can help convince swing voters that the president is ignoring a problem—and help turn out the base, too.

 

Then again, Trump has already signaled his plan to switch the spotlight to the radicalism of the Green New Deal and Democratic climate action in general. The problem for Democrats is that their plans, assuming they’re serious, really are quite radical, because they’re all in line with the international scientific recommendations, which are also quite radical. A dramatic shift away from fossil fuels could impose dramatic costs on fossil-fueled states, which helps explain why the Brookings Institution found that the 13 states with the highest per-capita emissions all voted for Trump in 2016, while the eight states with the lowest per-capita emissions voted for Hillary Clinton. The solar and wind boom is quickly changing the energy mix in red states like Texas and Georgia, but it’s not clear the changes will be quick enough to matter in 2020.

 

Mark Muro, a Brookings senior fellow, says those fossil-fueled red states could form a “brown wall” protecting Trump and other Republicans before they transition to clean energy. “Some of these red states are decarbonizing fast, and that’s incredible, but political realignment doesn’t usually happen that fast,” Muro says. “Tribalism is pretty durable.”

 

Trump has framed climate as a classic tribal issue, another us-against-them battle in America’s political culture war, pitting coal miners in hard hats and dirt farmers in overalls against pointy-headed scientists and kale-eating environmentalists. So far, he doesn’t seem to be persuading many Americans outside his base. But he gets to make a case against wrenching change, while Democrats have to argue for upending the status quo and imposing some short-term costs in order to avoid hard-to-quantify disasters in the future. And they can’t even promise that their actions will make things better; in fact, scientists believe that things will almost certainly get worse even actions are taken to avoid catastrophe.

 

“It’s the policy problem from hell,” says Yale’s Leiserowitz. “Politicians need to take hard decisions now to help the world in 2050, when all the political incentives favor short-term thinking. The danger is that by the time we feel serious pain and it’s reall