About an hour and twelve minutes into last night’s chaotic, disturbing and ultimately unsatisfying presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace departed from his list of previously announced debate topics to acknowledge the environmental crisis facing California and the West.
“I’d like to talk about climate change,” Wallace said.
“So would I,” said former Vice President Joe Biden, who was no doubt grateful to escape a nasty attack about his son Hunter that President Trump rudely interjected into the former vice president’s comments about his other son, Beau, who died of brain cancer.
“The forest fires in the West are raging now. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people,” Wallace said.
Then, referring to Trump’s recent visit to Sacramento, the Fox TV anchor noted that “when state officials there blamed the fires on climate change, Mr. President, you said, ‘I don’t think the science knows.’ What do you believe about the science of climate change and what will you do in the next four years to confront it?”
Trump’s answer was initially non-responsive.
“I want crystal clean water and air. I want beautiful clean air. We have now the lowest carbon. If you look at our numbers right now, we are doing phenomenally,” Trump said without any evidence.
Wallace pressed for an actual answer.
“What do you believe about the science of climate change, sir and what will you do in the next four years to confront it?” he asked.
“I believe that we have to do everything we can to have immaculate air, immaculate water and do whatever else we can. You know, we’re planting a billion trees,” Trump said.
Asked “do you believe that human pollution, greenhouse gas emissions contributes to the global warming of this planet?” Trump gave a brief nod to the question, then pivoted to his favorite culprit, forest management.
“I think a lot of things do, but I think to an extent, yes. But I also think we have to do better management of our forests every year,” Trump said.
“Every year I get the call. ‘California is burning! California is burning!’ If that was cleaned, if that were if you had forest management, good forest management, you wouldn’t be getting those calls.”
As Governor Gavin Newsom noted when he met with Trump recently, 57% of the forests in California are under federal, not state, control.
“In addition to everything else, the forest floors are loaded up with trees, dead trees that are years old and they’re like tinder and leaves and everything else. You drop a cigarette there, the whole forest burns down,” Trump said.
Governor Gavin Newsom contradicted that notion in a tweet moments after Trump made those comments.
CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL. https://t.co/Bg9q8W2idU
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 30, 2020
Defying the overwhelming consensus of environmental scientists and climate change experts, Trump also bragged about removing the United States from the historic Paris Climate Agreement signed by the U.S., China, India, Russia and dozens of other nations in 2016.
“If you look at the Paris Accord, it was a disaster from our standpoint,” Trump said. “And people are actually very happy about what’s going on because our businesses are doing well.”
It’s not exactly clear who Trump meant is “very happy” about abandoning the accord, but it surely does not include the environmental and scientific communities, which saw the agreement as an important step toward addressing the main cause of global climate change, carbon emissions.
The moderator also reminded the president that he had rolled back environmental regulations and initiatives from the Obama Administration that were aimed at reducing carbon emissions.
Referring to Newsom’s recent executive order requiring that all vehicles sold in California by 2035 be emission free, Trump dismissed the policy.
“I’m okay with electric cars, too. I think I’m all for electric cars. I’ve given big incentives for electric cars. But what they’ve done in California is just crazy,” he said.
For his part, Biden promised to rejoin the Paris Agreement if he is elected and stressed the need to move away from fossil fuels.
“Nobody is going to build another coal fired plant in America. No one’s going to build another oil fired plant in America. They’re going to move to renewable energy,” Biden said.
“We’re going to make sure that we are able to take the federal fleet and turn it into a fleet that’s run on, they’re electric vehicles, making sure we can do that. We’re going to put five-hundred-thousand charging stations on all of the highways that we’re going to be building in the future,” Biden added. He also promised to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and new homes.
Biden’s answer wasn’t his most coherent moment of the night — he stumbled over his position on the so-called Green New Deal among other things — but anyone still listening to this train wreck of a debate was able to see and hear clear differences between the two men on environmental policy.
“We are going to be in a position where we can create hard, hard, good jobs by making sure the environment is clean and we all are in better shape,” Biden said. “We spend billions of dollars now, billions of dollars on floods, hurricanes, rising seas. We’re in real trouble.
“Look what’s happened just in the Midwest with these storms that come through and wipe out entire sections and counties in Iowa. They didn’t happen before. They’re because of global warming. That’s why we have to get back into the Paris Accord.”
And with that, moderator Chris Wallace moved on to an important final topic, “election integrity,” and with it, another round of misinformation from the president regarding the security of mail-in ballots.
Copyright 2020 KQED