Party platforms clash on climate change
Republicans and Democrats this year are at odds about much more than guns and immigration. The two parties' 2016 national platforms severely clash over climate change.
That gives voters a clear choice come November between a Republican Party that rejects mainstream climate science and a Democratic Party that embraces it.
With polls showing growing concerns about climate change, some observers are wondering whether this will finally be the election global warming may matter in the outcome.
As Chris Mooney of the Washington Post writes, we have "a situation that many environmentalists have long hoped for – one in which a sharp contrast on climate change between the two candidates means that it might not only come up prominently in an election, but moreover, actually make a difference."
As Watchdog Earth reported in April, while just 47 percent of conservative Republicans think global warming is happening, that's up 19 percentage points over the past two years, according to a new survey by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
Still, the survey found that Democrats are more likely than Republicans to be convinced that people are causing the warming and are willing to support climate action – with potential implications in this election year.
That's played out in Cleveland and Philadelphia, with plenty at stake for the world, the United States and coal regions such as Kentucky and Indiana.
How do the platforms differ?
The big way is that Republicans have pledged to kill President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, which calls for cuts in energy sector greenhouse emissions of 32 percent nationally, with each state getting its own targets. Kentucky's target is a 41 percent reduction. Indiana's is 39 percent.
U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Majority Leader, has called the plan part of a war on Kentucky coal and its mining communities, even as cheap natural gas has outcompeted coal in the marketplace.
Appalachian coal mining to continue free fall
"The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource," the platform states. "Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda."
It also rejects a decades-old United Nations agreement that's brought scientists to forge a consensus on climate, leading to last year's Paris accord among 175 nations, including the United States, to fight climate change. The Paris accord should require Senate approval, GOPers concluded.
"For low-income Americans, expensive energy means colder homes in the winter and hotter homes in the summer, less mobility in employment, and higher food prices. The current Administration, and particularly its EPA, seems not to care," the GOP says.
For its part, the Democratic Party platform sees climate change as both a major risk and opportunity to drive a new cleaner-energy economy.
"Climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time," according to the Democratic platform. "Fifteen of the 16 hottest years on record have occurred this century. While Donald Trump has called climate change a 'hoax,' 2016 is on track to break global temperature records once more."
Scientists: 2015 was hottest on record
Coastal cities are threatened by rising seas and other regions have been battered by "superstorms," floods and drought. "The best science tells us that without ambitious, immediate action across our economy to cut carbon pollution and other greenhouse gases, all of these impacts will be far worse in the future. We cannot leave our children a planet that has been profoundly damaged," the platform says.
They promise to build on the Clean Power Plan and support the Paris agreement, while helping coal communities make the transition. "The fight against climate change must not leave any community out or behind – including the coal communities who kept America’s lights on for generations."
"Democrats reject the notion that we have to choose between protecting our planet and creating good-paying jobs. We can and we will do both."
That's the contrast. Now, the big questions are whether the candidates will discuss their climate views, whether the national media will press them on their climate proposals, and whether voters, in the end, will care.
James Bruggers writes this Watchdog Earth blog. Reach him at (502) 582-4645 and at jbruggers@courier-journal.com.