Trump and Biden: Little Room for Climate Change in 2020 Election (excerpt 2): Deutsche Welle

Trump digs coal.

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"U.S. President Donald Trump has undone many major pieces of climate policy during his term, walking out on the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming and eliminating numerous Obama-era environmental regulations. 

 Trump's Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, has promised as part of his presidential campaign to invest $1.7 trillion in a "clean energy revolution and environmental justice" over the next decade. It falls some $14 trillion short of what the progressive U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, pledged on climate action during the Democratic primaries.........................."

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Related:  Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC
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"......  Growing Impatience Among Young Republicans

Some younger Republicans are starting to become critical of their party's inattention to climate change. During the recent Republican National Convention, a small group turned to Twitter during the online event, to ask "#WhatAboutClimate"?

Another Pew study from June 2020 found that millennial and Gen Z Republicans, currently aged 18 to 39, are more likely than older GOP voters to think humans have a significant impact on the climate and that the federal government is doing too little to tackle the problem.

Trump and climate

That doesn't mean they're ready to switch allegiance to the Democrats, though. 

"Being a Republican is very much rooted in my upbringing," said Kiera O'Brien, who founded the group Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends (YCCD). "Conservatism at home in Ketchikan, Alaska, has a focus on community and nature." 

O'Brien dislikes the Democrat's "regulatory approach to climate" and is instead lobbying for free market solutions to climate change through YCCD.

Biden and climate change

Reframing Climate Action  

Environmental policies can be a complicated issue when it comes to federal elections and hard to address for presidential candidates. Many regions in the U.S. have unique challenges: from wildfires in California and storms wiping out harvests in Iowa to water pollution in Flint, Michigan.

Harvard's Ansolabehere also pointed out that opposition to climate policies in the past were typically connected to the fear of losing jobs and that prohibiting coal or retooling the auto industry will "adversely affect employment" in places like Kentucky and Michigan.

How Climate Change is Killing Us: Book

Daron Shaw added that Republicans typically "try to frame environmental issues as a matter of high taxation and job killing proposals with the hope that they can peel off Democrats."

Biden might be trying to assuage fears that tackling climate change means job losses by framing his plan as an opportunity for employment in new industries and a reinvigorated green manufacturing sector.

But when it comes to the swing states of Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio, Trump's climate record and support for jobs in the fossil fuel sector might give him the upper hand. His backing for ethane cracker plants, which take natural gas and converts it into the basis for making plastics, has received a lot of support, said Ansolabehere, especially from local unions. 

Go to original article.. By Julia Mahncke in Deutsche Welle 

The last generation who can do something about climate change

Related:  Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC

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‘Climate Donors’ Flock to Biden to Counter Trump’s Fossil Fuel Money (excerpt): New York Times

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Koch Industries are behind Trump

WASHINGTON — In 2009, the Obama administration’s environmental team called a group of climate activists to the White House to deliver a message: Climate change doesn’t sell and only provokes economic attacks from the right that are too difficult to counter.

As former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to assume the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, the changing climate is now a core campaign issue — and a focus for fund-raising. Plans for tackling rising global temperatures will be in the spotlight Wednesday at the Democratic convention. And Mr. Biden has raised more than $15 million in candidate contributions from hundreds of new donors who specifically identify with climate change as a cause.

Biden: Build Back Better

That climate-specific fund-raising may make up just about 5 percent of the total he has raised so far. It’s dwarfed by fossil fuel donations to President Trump, who took in $10 million from a single fund-raiser in June, held by the oil billionaire Kelcy Warren, and whose super PAC,America First Action, has seen millions pour in from coal and oil moguls, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks campaign donations.

It is not known how much unregulated money is going to super PACs aligned with Democrats from other self-identified climate donors.

But the hard money climate donations represent a growing counterweight to oil, gas and coal money that has long warped the

Biden and Harris at first joint campaign event.

energy conversation in Washington. Self-identified “climate donors” are a new phenomenon in the 2020 election and are working overtime to show candidates that campaigning to eliminate emissions from fossil fuels pays — in cash.

“That is a sea change. We’ve now got a class of people called ‘climate donors’ in a way we had environmental donors before,” said David Bookbinder, general counsel for the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Trump's environmental rollbacks

“Climate has taken over as an issue on its own. People are finally understanding that we have a truly existential crisis on our hands,” Mr. Bookbinder added. Publicly embracing climate change solutions was viewed as a political liability, as recently as a decade ago, he said. During Barack Obama’s re-election run in 2012, the issue was hardly mentioned.'

Now donors are sending a new message: “We want to make it easy to do the right thing. We should reward campaigns and candidates for having the right policies,” said Matt Rogers, a co-founder of the digital thermostat company Nest."  ............

"A version of this article appears in print on

By Lisa Friedman

• Aug. 18, 2020

Aug. 19, 2020"

Go to complete NYT online article

Related:  Trump will roll back more environmental regulations if reelected, says EPA chief: CNBC

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