Democrat Town Halls Show the Climate’s Changed Already
The broad approach of all the top candidates to global warming is for sweeping changes, not incremental ones.
Big Energy faces potentially far-reaching change in November 2020.
Photographer: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
One telling episode late in Wednesday evening’s climate-change town-hall-athon on CNN was Beto O’Rourke’s argument for cap-and-trade carbon pricing instead of a tax. It was telling chiefly because, apart from those few, earnest minutes, this once-hot topic barely featured in seven hours of programming. Fossil-fuel producers tempted to dismiss the event as inchoate grandstanding should pause on that for a second.
Consider a few names: Bullock, Delaney, Hickenlooper, Ryan. Most likely, you’re struggling to put faces to them. The important thing is that at the last candidate debates in July, they constituted the relative skeptics about Green New Deal-type measures. None made it to these town halls. Nor will they be at the next debate in a week.