Climate Forum Day 2 Highlights

September 23, 2019

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(Our Daily Planet) Here is a quick recap of the highlights of Day 2 of the Climate Forum on Friday — five hours of candidate interviews and it even got bi-partisan by the end. Two candidates — Booker and Buttigieg — made the argument in moral terms — referencing how future generations will judge us and how God will judge us if we fail to act now. Former Governor Bill Weld talked about his love of trees and his disdain for President Trump. Governor Steve Bullock said he was keeping his pick up truck and wanted to make climate change less of a partisan issue. And Tom Steyer talked about his track record of success in actually getting things done at the state level winning ballot initiatives with his organization NextGen, and why he believes he can do the same at the federal level.

Why This Matters: The entire 12-hour marathon of Climate Forum coverage by MSNBC set a high watermark (bad pun) for other news organizations covering climate change. They also devoted two hours in prime time to climate change, as well as stationing correspondents to report in live from remote locations from Greenland to Guatemala. Moderators Ali Velshi and Chris Hayes did both deep dives into the substance of candidate plans and also got the candidates to open up personally about what drives their interest in and passion for this issue. MSNBC also sweat the details on the production of the Forum – with a visually beautiful set and fantastic live connections to students stationed at the University of Southern California, the University of New Hampshire, and Iowa State University in order to have student voices from coast to coast. We hope other news organizations will at least meet this standard from now on.

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Mayor Pete also explained the distinct roles of the government versus the private sector in addressing climate change with this analogy — “Think about it this way. The government invented the internet and Apple invented the iPhone.”
And he explained his sense of the scale of the problem, saying “I’m just not interested in plastic straws right now. Lives are on the line. I’m interested in carbon.”

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And Tom Steyer promised to make climate legislation the first law he passes if elected President.
Governor Bill Weld said he would put a price on carbon saying, “It’s not a tax, it’s an investment to sustain life on this Earth.” READ MORE

MSNBC’s Climate Forum 2020 (DAY 1) | MSNBC (YouTube/Our Daily Planet)

MSNBC’s Climate Forum 2020 (DAY 2) | MSNBC (YouTube/Our Daily Planet)

Bill Weld: 'I wouldn't take money from the oil and gas companies' (The Hill)

Governor Bullock Rolls Out A Plan for Public Lands (Our Daily Planet)

Steyer Outlines Robust International Climate Plan (Our Daily Planet)

Castro’s Climate Plan Puts “People and Planet” First (Our Daily Planet)

A Climate Conversation with Andrew Yang (Our Daily Planet VIDEO)

A Climate Conversation with Governor Steve Bullock (Our Daily Planet VIDEO)

A Climate Conversation with Marianne Williamson (Our Daily Planet VIDEO)

Climate is Shaping Politics in 2020, Dem Candidates Should Pay Attention (Our Daily Planet)

Factbox: Climate policies of top U.S. Democrats in 2020 presidential race (Reuters)

Excerpt from Our Daily Planet: This past June the Morning Consult began conducting a 2020 Climate Voter Tracking Poll for the Sierra Club in order to determine how candidates stack up with Democratic primary voters who are most deeply concerned about the climate crisis and the candidates’ plans to tackle it. Here are their latest results for which candidates climate voters prefer:

Joe Biden 31%
Elizabeth Warren 25%
Bernie Sanders 19%

Compared with the first round of the 2020 climate voter tracking poll in late June, Sanders is stable with 19% of the vote, Warren has risen 10 percentage points (from a 15% baseline) and Biden has fallen 6 points (from a 37% baseline).

What’s a Climate Voter? According to the Sierra Club, climate voters are likely Democrat voters who say that a presidential candidates’ climate plans are a “very important” factor in their choice of who to vote for. In the Morning Consult/Sierra Club poll, the percentage of those voters has gone up significantly, with a full 62% identifying as such (+6 percentage points since the first round of polling).

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“Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, also told me that the poll’s findings are in line with other research. “Climate policy is very popular,” she said. “If you highlight the cost, it’s less popular. If you highlight new taxes, it’s less popular. But if you highlight job creation or the air-pollution benefits, it’s more popular.” READ MORE