Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Christian Science Monitor has written about a fascinating climate split in the Democrat Party, between “cynical” politicians and “young hawks” who see climate as an existential issue.
The Democrats’ climate change conundrum
A large majority of Democrats are concerned about climate change. But they’re split over how radical the remedies should be.
Climate change is a top liberal priority, but that very urgency is making the issue divisive as much as unifying for Democrats.
A wide rift has opened over a basic question: Just how ambitious should the Democratic Party be in trying to reduce carbon emissions and stabilize Earth’s climate?
Dueling views emerged as supporters of Hillary Clinton faced off against fans of Bernie Sanders in crafting the party’s 2016 platform. The Sanders camp is seeing the platform as a missed opportunity for the party to push for more meaningful action on global warming – notably a carbon tax and a ban on “fracking” as a means of fossil fuel extraction.
…
The question for Democrats is not whether to ramp up the effort on climate policy, but how and how rapidly.
“It’s a tough issue for both sides to talk about, but particularly for the left side to talk about,” says David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College. “When you get down to the specific policies, especially policies like a carbon tax [that] impose costs on voters, then it becomes an uncomfortable topic.”
…
One of Sanders’s delegates is Bill McKibben, a climate activist and founder of the environmental advocacy group 350.org, who last Monday wrote in Politico that the Clinton campaign was “obstructing change to the Democratic platform,” particularly on climate policies. In particular, he highlighted how two of his proposals – to call for a carbon tax and a ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in the platform – were voted down 7 to 6.
“The Clinton campaign is at this point rhetorically committed to taking on our worst problems, but not willing to say how. Which is the slightly cynical way politicians have addressed issues for too long,” he wrote.
Two days later, one of Clinton’s delegates on the drafting committee, Carol Browner, shot back with her own Politico column.
“It’s perfectly fair to debate the best way to achieve our shared goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius this century,” she wrote. “But debating the merits of different policy solutions is quite different from setting up a litmus test for what it takes to be ‘serious’ about climate change.”
…
But this approach may not pass muster with climate hawks who increasingly see climate change not as a political or policy issue, but as an urgent existential one.
“There’s been progress made, and I’m happy to see that, but that doesn’t mean I’m satisfied,” says Adam Hasz, executive coordinator for SustainUS, a youth-led environmental advocacy group.
…
Read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2016/0706/The-Democrats-climate-change-conundrum
The Christian Science Monitor is a publication of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, founded in 1875.
I think the author makes a very interesting point, about the range of views in the Democrat Party, and the friction between climate hardliners who demand immediate action, and less committed Democrats who see climate as an important issue, but don’t embrace the urgency demanded by the hawks.
Whether this split will widen into civil war within the Democrat Party is an open question. The recent strong public exchange between McKibben and the Clinton team in my opinion suggests tensions are still running high. If the Clinton team is forced to distance her campaign from climate issues, say due to a vigorous effort to promote awareness of the damage climate regulations do to job security, tensions between hardline climate hawks and the Clinton team could boil over. The Democrat Party might split right down the middle.
Note: the link to the Bill McKibben Politico piece has been updated – the original link in the Christian Science Monitor post didn’t work.
House slaves fighting over accommodations.
We don’t really need another political echo chamber.
I am hoping that what has afflicted so many human kind is a sort of empty-skulled echo amplification and forced feedback effect that has taken a few awful ideas and bounced them back and forth, like the dull pulsing squawk that emerges from magnetic tape recorders when the playback head is routed to the recording head.
All these ideas of pure-CO2 climate hysteria, solar and wind running industrial nations, and irrational fear of nuclear power are actually emanating from a single source. Once we locate the source and mute it, these raucous echoes will diminish, sanity will prevail and humankind will return to its naturally lower background level of stupidity.
Like that proverbial woman who has a baby every three seconds. Be on the lookout for her too.
“All these ideas of pure-CO2 climate hysteria, solar and wind running industrial nations, and irrational fear of nuclear power are actually emanating from a single source. Once we locate the source and mute it, these raucous echoes will diminish, sanity will prevail and humankind will return to its naturally lower background level of stupidity.”
The CO2 hysteria is emanating from the bastardized surface temperature charts the Climate Change Gurus have foisted on mankind.
The Alarmist show you a surface temperature chart (hockeystick) that looks like the days keep getting hotter and hotter for decade after decade, from the early 20th century forward. What would you think, if you are the average Joe whose life doesn’t revolve around the hard sciences? You would probably be alarmed. You should be alarmed, if you believe what you are seeing.
The charts make it look like the temperatures are going up, up, up! How do you argue with that? Where’s the chart that says that isn’t so? Where’s the counterargument to that (other than here on WUWT)?
It doesn’t surprise me at all that a lot of people believe the CAGW hype. There is a lot of effort going into convincing them, and it is working on a lot of people.
The one fly in the Alarmists’ ointment is the temperature record for the 21st century which shows very little to no warming over the entire century to date. If the temperatures continue to decline, even the hockey-stick chart won’t be enough to convince people.
But that is pretty much what it is going to take: Temperature declines that put the lie to the CAGW theory.
Sanders is deluded – fraccing does not cause global warming. End of story.
Horribly, the only real point of reassurance is that Hillary Clinton is so dishonest she will betray the greens like everyone else she is pandering to. She must, as her promises to various conflicting groups, like Wall Street and the socialists in her party, means she must fail to satisfy at least one side.
That would be the side with the shallowest pocket.
This comment is no doubt true, I see her the same way- ultra political. But with that nose in the wind she’s also capable of doing something she knows to be destructive if it’s politically expedient.
A shameless opportunist in the proud Aaron Burr tradition. Hillary has not yet needed to go as far as to jump-ship from one party to another like Burr did, but I would not put it past her.
Here’s to hoping that the hardliners bolt to the Green party to teach Hillary a lesson.
Some Bernatics plan to (or say they do) vote for Trump. Ironically, they could even be the swing vote necessary to put Trump over the top.
To ban hydraulic fracturing in the development of wells is akin to banning diesel engines in construction. Is there any question why I see McKib as an unhinged nut.
Ooh, forgot the “?”
You mean there’s doubt?
““It’s a tough issue for both sides to talk about, but particularly for the left side to talk about”
Well, that’s hardly a surprise within the political left.
Not when their chief talent is the silencing of rational debate and the smearing of all critical voices.
Ultimately, the left will destroy itself via its own assault upon reason.
In the final days, men with a psychiatric disorder that leads them to obsess that they are a women will be able to visit a woman’s bathroom with their adopted daughter of a non-white minority.
But, when they get there – the lights won’t work and the toilet won’t flush and they will be unable to wash or dry their hands.
Inevitably the left will seek to blame their failings on infiltration by their political opponents.
Then a period of purges will follow.
And then their dreams of utopia will collapse into either stagnation or self-destruction.
It’s always the way.
The conclusion is either Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Kim Yong-un’s North Korea.
Take your pick.
But I suppose that they will claim success in having prevented dangerous sea level rise acceleration.
An easy win – considering that such acceleration was only ever a figment of their deranged imaginations.
You are possibly prophetic about our future. The side that wins will be the one with the most bullets in this country and the guts to pay the price. Makes me glad I am 72 and have a good chance of not being here when it starts.
The times are a changin’.
Superior weaponry will dominate.
The losing side in future conflicts will always end up resorting to pitching flesh and blood against the robot drones of their enemy.
Than again, industrial and technological domination has been the real winner of wars.
All that has changed now, is that the winning side do not need to approach the battlefield.
Except, perhaps, for the post-extermination clean up!!!
Good times! Lol! The world is the same mess it always is.
In the last several elections, the Democrats have gone completely “silent” on the topic of global warming.
In the lead-up, they give climate change “lip service” to placate the left-wing base and to gain donations, but once the real election starts, they stop talking about it.
How many times did Obama talk about global warming in the last election. Almost never. Once he had won the election, suddenly it was all about carbon taxes again.
The Republicans did their part by letting them off the hook in the last several Presidential and Congressional elections by not forcing the issue and making the Democrats state a position.
Climate change is a “loser” position in politics because the 20% fervent believers are already locked into voting Democrat. It is the swing voters that will switch to Republican if the Democrats take a draconian Carbon tax position or even just make it a minor issue at.
Hillary and other Democrats lose 5% in the polls when they talk about global warming. The swing vote. They don’t care about climate change but they do care when someone is talking about a new tax or a new program for the far-left. That 5% is all it takes for her to lose the election. For that reason, by September or so, one will not hear anything about climate change from the Democrats.
Trump needs to press her into taking an extreme position on it if he wants the 5% make-or-break vote. Other Republican candidates need to do the same.
JFK Put a Man on the Moon, Obama Put a Man in the Girls’ Bathroom
– See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/06/jfk-put-a-man-on-the-moon-obama-put-a-man-in-the-girls-room#sthash.DbtIzgcF.dpuf
To support the reordering of our economy to fight “climate change,” it is not enough to believe that human actions are contributing to temperature increases. No, you must also believe that the climate is so sensitive, and the human ability to control climate so carefully calibrated, that we can not just bring the temperature down, but bring it down to the “proper” level. After all, if we, by our actions, are making it dangerously warmer, we are just as likely, by other actions, to make it dangerously cooler.
How absurd that anyone who thinks this “crisis” is real would advocate dealing with it by trying to further manipulate the climate rather than by seeking to insulate ourselves from the effects of climate!
Nuts, I left out the line about what happens if we impoverish ourselves to push the temperature in one direction only to find that we’ve overdone it and gone too far in the other direction, but are left too spent to push it back again? The only rational response to a climate this fickle is not to try to micromanage it, but to protect ourselves from it.
It is a big task sorting out all the agenda in the Party cloak room.
There is the cost of the radical step to offer free college education, the cost of increasing social security benefits, the cost of the war on climate. the cost of the war on inequality, and the cost of war on U.S. businesses. But it always helps to leave the word “cost” out of the discussion and they are very good at that. Besides Bernie showed us that there is a lot of wealth out there to be tapped. All are welcome under the big tent as long as you leave rationality and the word “cost” at the door.
They always tastefully forget to mention that even in the free-college nirvanas of Scandinavia, it’s not really free. They just change when and where you pay for it. Instead of tuition and fees up front, it’s taxes taxes and more taxes once you’re out the door.
I think the desire to ban fracking altogether is based on the frustration that fracking has driven gas prices down to where fewer people and fewer countries are looking for alternate forms of energy. If they were concerned about the environment they would want to pass laws to “clean up” fracking, limiting what is used in the process, at least show some effort to compromise with the fracking industry to leave open the possibility that it could continue in some form if it could be done in a “green” manner. But the switch away from gas and petroleum is not going to get much support unless gas prices are high, and fracking is the main reason why gas prices have come down so much over the past couple years, so the leftist extremist want fracking gone altogether.
“Getting support” from the American people is outdated. It’s all decided for them now.
Let’s hope not.
It is a war against fossil fuels and corporate capital by people who can’t do arithmetic and don’t understand money or efficiency or their own consumption. A wise man once said,” if people can’t have what the other guy has, then they don’t want him to have what they don’t have” It’s mostly just jealousy and fear of the powerful. That’s why trade comes into it. People don’t feel safe from the actions of foreign entities. It needs to be addressed.
There is still no such thing as “the Democrat Party.” Yet I suspect it is not a typo to many on this blog.
There is also no such thing as the “Democratic Party” since the American left rejected democratic rule in favor of executive directives and judicial overrides. The “Democrat” label is intended to distinguish between a democratic system and Democrat system.
Thus confirming my suspicion.
The name of the party is the Democratic Party. Use of the term Democrat Party indicates a highly partisan twit preaching to the choir, and therefore renders anything else said as useless garbage. Same applies to the use of “carbon polution”. If you can’t bring yourself to say Democratic Party, just refer to “the Democrats”, instead of destroying your credibility.
cbr: “The name of the party is the Democratic Party. Use of the term Democrat Party indicates a highly partisan twit ”
Since when?
Since the history re-write? Oh, I understand now …
Democrats sure are sensitive about their name, aren’t they.
So you care,as to the label others use, with respect to your preeminent Kleptocrats?
Government by thieves for the benefit of those thieves.
Usually lasts as long as the Hosts patience.
Just because these self styled progressive, call themselves the “Democratic Party” does not mean the taxpayer is obliged to agree.
The Useless Parasites and Thieves Party of course is just a little harder to sell.
The name these people chose is pretty much opposite their known actions.
Quite amazing how those laws,only seem to apply to the little people.
So answer this question: Are you a Republican or a Democrat?
Or should the question be: are you a Republican or a Democratic?
Democrats love using the word “Democratic” because of the inference of them being the party of democracy.
How does taxation lower temperature again? I’ve forgotten the correlation. A family just decides to stop driving, eating, and conditioning their home because of a tax? Or am I missing something. Giving the government money lowers temperature? It hasn’t fixed poverty, educated our children, solved our health problems, eliminated ISIS, but it’s going to lower the planet’s temperature? Is that it? Really? Holy shit Liberals are stupid.
You won’t be able to consume as much OR drive as far; the ‘poor house’ has that effect …
Anybody know what the sexual harassment policies are at the Clinton Global Initiative University? And how they are enforced?
Bill heads a review committee .. any questions?
Bill thinks “peer” review means you sneak a peak at a woman to see if she is good enough to have sex with.
Spankings! Every Friday over drinks.
President Careless, But Not Illegal will see you now.
She just didn’t know.
I know this is vastly oversimplified, but I hope that this is a sign that “Republican vs Democrat” (in the US) is returning to how much of a tax dollar should be spent on books to educate or bombs to defend.
I said this elsewhere. I repeat it here to clarify a bit.
Gunga Din July 7, 2016 at 2:32 pm
I guess the most “you can’t see me” administration in history isn’t as transparent as it thought.
I pray we never have to see how “transparent” another Clinton administration would be.
What I meant was a difference in priorities that will still hold The US Constitution and The Bill of Rights as the limits on the US Government.
It’s hard to say where the Democrats and the Democrat-Lites (the Republicans) are going legislatively. It’s hard to separate one from the other too many times.
In the (probably butchered) words of fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers: “If there’s a man who can tell the difference between our two parties, he makes a sucker out of Solomon.”
With the exception of social issues, elections over the last 30 years have been a choice of candidates, but not of platforms. Voter apathy is perfectly understandable in such a state of affairs. If Trump accomplishes anything, it will be getting people interested in politics again, because for the first time in a long while we have a half-way real choice of platforms.
True.
I don’t think The Founders envisioned a two party system. The original didn’t have a “ticket” running, President and Vice-President. It was the guy running for President who got the most votes in the Electoral College was President and the next runner up was Vice-President. They learned real quick that that wasn’t going to work. (Imagine Al Gore being Vice-President to President G. W. Bush.)
In today’s politics in the US a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote.
I think we need a Constitutional tweek. (Along with Senators being being chosen by a State’s government.)
In any Federal election, Congress or Senate or President, anytime the “winner” receives less than 50.1% of the popular vote, they must face a runoff against the 2nd place candidate or ticket within one or two months.
If most of voters didn’t want them, why should they be in office?
Third party candidates and issues could no longer be completely ignored.
(We may have been spared two term of Bill Clinton.8-)
“The question for Democrats is not whether to ramp up the effort on climate policy, but how and how rapidly.”
Why is that a problem? The ends justify the means don’t they, comrades?
Worth double the price of admission – recent talk by Dinesh D’Souza on various subjects including his new movie:
“Hillary’s America 2016”
(Start at the 3:30 point to skip the introductions)
https://youtu.be/hXggkzLORLc?t=227
The FBI have just cleared her of any wrong doing with personal emails and classified documents etc. No muck sticks to these people. Any other lesser moral would be in gaol by now.
Good. If tensions continue to run hot then maybe the libs will explode into a party that bends to the will of the people (like reps under Trump) rather than expecting it’s voters to bend to the will of the party as per the present dems.
….and then we can have a government run by the people rather than the plutocrats again.