Climate change in presidential debates

story by Melanie Reese

Climate change is an important topic that somehow didn’t make the cut in any of the four presidential debates. Instead, commonly mentioned topics were the Syrian civil war, immigration and abortion. The two primary candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, had no problem wasting time arguing about the corrupt actions of each other and calling each other things such as ‘nasty woman’ and ‘Putin’s puppet’. Yet, there wasn’t enough time to discuss the global warming crisis.

Climate change is one of the biggest threats to our future and wasn’t specifically brought up at all. The closest question to climate change was asked during the second debate by Ken Bone, a man who received more attention for sporting a red sweater instead of  the fact that he works for a coal company that is opposed to climate regulations. His question was, ‘What step will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?”

That was closest that any of the debates came to discussing what the scientific community sees as the largest environmental threat our planet is facing.

“The politics for taxes and such are sure great for living and the economy,” Junior Haley Hoffman said, “but if one day the Earth is nearly uninhabitable due to climate change, those won’t really matter will they?”

Though the topic was not brought up in the debates, both Clinton and Trump still have stances on global warming. Trump has said to believe that global warming is a ‘Chinese hoax’, but later commented that it was a joke. He went on to say that he believes climate change is a very expensive form of tax, and to answer Bone’s debate question, he is willing to drill in America to gain more than enough oil to pay off our national debt.

Clinton has an opposite view of how to tackle climate change. To begin, Clinton believes that climate change is very much real and a problem. Clinton claims she would uphold the Paris Agreement, and slowly tackle greenhouse gas emissions by cutting oil subsidies and investing in clean and renewable energy.

“I feel that climate change is a problem that needs a little mix of both government and private companies to help solve,” said Siam Boyd, Sr.s