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With hundreds of thousands of Americans forced to evacuate their homes in the western US, Donald Trump has not said a word about the wildfires raging across multiple states in nearly three weeks.
But some national Democratic leaders have also been slow to draw attention to fires in California, Oregon and Washington that have killed more than 20, forced millions to breathe ash from sun-blocking orange-tinged skies, and seen hundreds. of thousands. of people flee their homes.
Climate activists say the tepid political response, particularly from Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is another sign that American politicians are far from ready to take concrete action to confront the realities of climate change, let alone write laws to stop fossil burning. fuels to slow down its effects.
Another four years of Trump in office would devastate the international climate movement, but even a government controlled by Democrats is not guaranteed to substantially address the crisis.
Pelosi made little mention of the fires, which are ravaging her own home state of California, last week until Thursday, when asked about them on MSNBC and at a weekly news conference.
In a 17-minute update for journalists, she spoke of the fires, which are getting worse by human-induced climate change, only briefly before speaking at length about what she sees as the Republicans’ failed response to the coronavirus.
When asked if Democrats would immediately pursue major climate change legislation if they gain control of Congress and the White House, Pelosi gave a confused answer.
“Well, we will have … we will have, obviously, hopefully the Covid pandemic will have subsided, if you think that Republicans in Congress will pay attention to the science,” he said.
“Right now they are in a place where they don’t believe in science and they don’t like governance. So they don’t want any reason to have to govern, to demand standards to defeat the virus… but the virus, of course, in other words, to open our schools and our economy, it has to come first and foremost. But yes, it will be an initial part of the agenda. “
Pelosi added that climate change has long been her “flagship issue,” talking about a 2005 energy bill she helped pass, and noting that House Democrats have produced a climate report.
Pelosi spokesman Henry Connelly noted Pelosi’s comments on wildfires and climate change in interviews and press conferences two weeks ago, on August 26 and 27. He said that under his leadership, the House had made it a priority to pass climate-focused legislation, noting that this weekend he would convene the heads of parliament of the G7 nations on the climate crisis and economic and environmental justice.
However, Pelosi has previously mocked the Green New Deal, a progressive large-scale spending proposal to combat inequality and the climate crisis simultaneously, calling it the “green dream.”
So has Dianne Feinstein, the top Democratic senator from California, who last year told kids that they came to her office asking her to commit to a Green New Deal that didn’t go along with the plan, even because ” there was no way to pay it. ” ”.
Feinstein, in a recent opinion piece, linked the most intense fires to climate change and called for policy changes to help communities prepare for and fight the fires. But he did not write about any policy to stop rising emissions.
“You look up at the sky and wonder. It’s not just Republicans who let us down. It’s the Democrats who are not fighting for a better climate future either, ”said Rebecca Katz, progressive political consultant and founder of New Deal Strategies. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that delaying climate change is the same as denying it. And it’s hard not to see that point clearly on a morning like today. “
Joe Biden has a $ 2 trillion plan to try to virtually eliminate climate emissions by 2050, but he frequently reiterates that he would not attempt to ban fracking, the process that has fueled the gas drilling boom in the US. Doing so has won the support of some reticent unions.
“Biden’s campaign understands that embracing an aggressive climate change agenda could create problems for the upper Midwest,” said Dan Schnur, who served as an advisor to former California Gov. Pete Wilson and Arizona Sen. John McCain. . “Trump has shown no desire to talk about California beyond using it as a liberal punching bag to defend his conservative base.”
On Thursday, the Biden campaign tweeted a video of the destruction and said: “Make no mistake: climate change is here, and we are witnessing its devastating effects every day.
“We have to get President Trump out of the White House and treat this crisis for the existential threat that it is.”
Sabrina Singh, a spokeswoman for Kamala Harris, said Biden and Harris “have been closely monitoring the wildfires ravaging the state and highlighting the urgent need to address the threat of climate change.”
Barack Obama also tweeted photos of a bright, smoky San Francisco and told his supporters to “vote as if your life depended on it, because it does.”
That compares with Trump, who has held 46 public events since Aug. 23 in which he could have addressed the wildfires, but did not, according to a review by the Climate Power 2020 group.
When asked why he hadn’t done so, White House spokesman Judd Deere said Trump was “closely monitoring” the fires and had sent federal funds and personnel to help states fight them. Deere dialed a cheep and noted that Trump spoke with California Governor Gavin Newsom to “express his condolences for the loss of life and reiterate the administration’s full support for helping those on the front lines of the fires.”
The acknowledged Democratic nods to the climate crisis are an improvement over just a few years ago, when the issue was barely addressed in presidential debates. However, activists say it is not enough. The planet is already 1 ° C warmer than before industrialization. It’s on its way to getting at least 3 ° C warmer. The wildfire season is expanding and the weather-driven drought is making the fires more dangerous. The strongest hurricanes are tearing apart communities along the Gulf Coast. Iowa and other Midwestern states are still reeling from an entitlement.
“It is unfortunate, given that the speaker’s own district is being affected by what is happening right now,” said Anthony Rogers-Wright, policy coordinator for the Climate Justice Alliance.
“There are too many in the Democratic leadership who believe that climate change is a wedge problem. When what it really is is a problem that, if articulated correctly, could unite everyone ”.
On Thursday, the Climate Justice Alliance joined “a coalition of grassroots groups, unions, black, brown and indigenous leaders” to support a congressional resolution aimed at “creating nearly 16 million good jobs, reviving our economy and address the intertwined climate crises of change, racial injustice, public health and economic inequity ”.
Without saying the words “Green New Deal,” the goals of the measure are closely aligned.
The resolution has sponsors from across the Democratic political spectrum: Senators Chuck Schumer, Ed Markey, Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren; and representatives Deb Haaland, Debbie Dingell, Donald McEachin, Sheila Jackson Lee, Raul Grijalva, Rosa DeLauro, Brendan Boyle, Barbara Lee, Ilhan Omar and Ro Khanna.
In a virtual press conference Thursday, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon spoke of the “near apocalyptic moment” in his state.
He blamed an influx of “dark money” from the fossil fuel industry on political campaigns, saying his contributions brought Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to power.
“We see the regular arrival of bigger and more intense disasters that are absolutely consistent with what happens when you have a warmer planet,” Merkley said. “Now we have to translate that into a determined, hopefully bipartisan effort to have a bold and massive company to tackle it.”
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