IT'S CLIMATE TIME

Presidential Debate Recap

There’s this line I think about on the reg but have been unable to attribute. It’s short and sweet:

“The future is a policy decision.”

It’s one of those aphorisms that get more true the more you think about it. And it can be applied to a range of topics: all you need do is add “about ______” to the end of the sentence, then fill in the blank.

Football: The future is a decision about the policies that are necessary to ensure player safety.

It’s not about knowing what the outcome will be. Instead, it’s about naming that upon which the outcome will depend.

Healthcare: The future is a decision about our policy of loyalty to an employer-subsidized system nobody has ever liked.

Now let’s try the topic du jour.

Climate Crisis: The future is a decision about policies we needed in the past.

Both candidates entered their first and possibly only head-to-head with the full weight of their parties behind them. Every reply to every question had been carefully worked out beforehand by their teams. Now, a lot of ink has been spilled on who won and whether that will make a lick difference. But let’s jump clear to the end and hear a) what they had to say about climate policy, and b) how they chose to say it.

MODERATOR: We have another issue that we'd like to get to that's important for a number of Americans, in particular younger voters, and that's climate change, [a term that smells bad to lots of regular people, owing to the $1 billion a year Big Oil spends trying to make it stink.] [Former] President Trump, with regard to the environment, you say that we have to have clean air and clean water. [But what you’ve actually done is brag that we’ve already got “the world’s cleanest and safest air and water. AMERICA!”] Vice President Harris, you call climate change an existential threat. The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? One minute for you each.

That’s two whole minutes. Two entire minutes to lay out diametrically opposed climate agendas and unpack wildly different policy platforms. It’s fair to ask if that’s enough. But perhaps it’s just as possible that two minutes is a bit too much.

“When it's with me, girl, you only need two minutes because I'm so intense.”

—Flight of the Conchords, “Business Time”

Now, some people might claim that one minute is not a lot of time to lay out your vision for a suite of policies to address an urgent problem that many viewers have been convinced does not exist. But those people clearly don’t know how much a focused speaker can pack into a minute. That’s why ABC News, in their wisdom, not only gave candidates half as much time to address the climate fight as they did for literally every other question, but they also placed the question last. Right before closing statements, ensuring that there’d be no time for the rebuttals, which hardly matters because basically everyone has given up and gone to bed by this point.

KAMALA HARRIS: Well, the former president had said that climate change is a hoax. And what we know is that it is very real. You ask anyone who lives in a state who has experienced these extreme weather occurrences who now is either being denied home insurance or is being jacked up. You ask anybody who has been the victim of what that means in terms of losing their home, having nowhere to go.

Compelling! Not strictly true, as there are plenty of people who’ve been taught by Big Oil not to correlate extreme weather events with climate change. Nevertheless, a decent strategy.

HARRIS: We know that we can actually deal with this issue.

Terrific. Can’t wait to hear you tell us how.

HARRIS: The young people of America care deeply about this issue. And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested a trillion dollars in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.

Pause real quick. Did you just carve time out of your Momentous Climate Minute to brag about fucking fracking? Why oh why? Hopefully because you’re setting up your next point about how annual methane leaks from US fracking sites are equivalent to the emissions of 500 million cars. But why does it seem more likely that you’re about to start jabbering about “clean coal” before pulling off your Mission: Impossible mask to reveal that you’re actually George W. Bush from 20 years ago?

HARRIS: We have created over 800,000 new manufacturing jobs while I have been vice president. We have invested in clean energy to the point that we are opening up factories around the world.

Okay, nice recovery, clearly setting up a point about the value of scalable green infrastructure that can be exported, since the most viable solutions are the ones with the potential to go global.

HARRIS: Donald Trump said he was going to create manufacturing jobs. He lost manufacturing jobs. And I'm also proud to have the endorsement of the United Auto Workers and Shawn Fain—

There’s not a ton of ticks left in your Magnificent Climate Minute. Sure you want to be carving out time for shoutouts?

HARRIS: —who also know that part of building a clean energy economy includes investing in American-made products, American automobiles.

You’re really doing this? You are, aren’t you? You’re using your Mammoth Climate Minute’s big finale to give Mango Mussolini a reason to bark bark bark about cars.

HARRIS: It includes growing what we can do around American manufacturing and opening up auto plants, not closing them like what happened under Donald Trump.

Fuck me.

DONALD TRUMP: That didn't happen under Donald Trump. Let me just tell you, they lost 10,000 manufacturing jobs this last month.

The net loss was actually 24,000. Speaking of, let’s go ahead and predict a net loss of 60, which is the number of seconds that will pass in your Bigly Climate Minute without climate change so much as entering your mind.

TRUMP: It's going—they're all leaving. They're building big auto plants in Mexico. In many cases owned by China. They're building these massive plants, and they think they're going to sell their cars into the United States because of these people.

These people?

TRUMP: What they have given to China is unbelievable. But we're not going to let that. [!] We'll put tariffs on those cars so they can't come into our country.

But you’ve said like five times tonight that “they” will pay the tariffs because they won’t have a choice.

TRUMP: Because they will kill the United Auto Workers and any auto worker, whether it's in Detroit or South Carolina or any other place. What they've done to business and manufacturing in this country is horrible. We have nothing because they refuse—you know, Biden doesn't go after people because supposedly China paid him millions of dollars. He's afraid to do it.

Finally, somebody who’s not afraid to say it! And while we’re getting into the nitty gritty of climate policy, how does Hunter fit in?

TRUMP: Between him and his son. They get all this money from Ukraine.

There we are.

TRUMP: They get all this money from all of these different countries. And then you wonder why is he so loyal to this one, that one Ukraine, China? Why is he? Why did he get $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow's wife? Why did he get—why did she pay him $3.5 million?

Strong rhetorical finish. It’s always smart to finish answering the question put to you—which, as a reminder, was “what would you do to fight climate change?”—with a question of your own. You want to leave the audience with something to chew on. In this case: Who the hell is the mayor of Moscow’s wife?

MODERATOR: We'll be right back with closing statements.

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