Think Progress reports on a John Podesta tweet that states climate change and energy policy will be at the top of her presidential priorities if elected. This will make her presidential campaign the first campaign ever to put climate change as a major priority.
John Podesta ✔ @johnpodesta
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Helping working families succeed, building small businesses, tackling climate change & clean energy. Top of the agenda. #Hillary2016
4:45 PM - 12 Apr 2015
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This would make Hillary’s campaign the first major presidential campaign ever to make combating climate change a central issue.
Al Gore, who would go onto win a Nobel Prize for his advocacy of climate change, did not make it a key issue of his campaign for president in 2000. The environment section of John Kerry’s 2004 website did not mention climate change. (The issue gets one paragraph in a 14-page white paper on the campaign’s environmental policies.)
In 2008, Clinton and Obama more readily acknowledged climate change as a serious issue, but is was hardly a central policy issue in a campaign dominated by the fallout from the Iraq war and the emerging economic collapse.
In 2012, with no primary opponent and an opposition party that mostly refused to acknowledge climate science “neither Obama nor Mitt Romney was asked about the issue in any of the presidential debates, and it has not featured prominently in any of the plans for their presidencies.” (Ultimately, Obama embraced aggressive action on climate change during his second term including important new rules for power plants and a landmark agreement with China.)
Meanwhile, nearly all Republican candidates won’t acknowledge the existence of climate change or — if they do — suggest nothing should be done about it.
We of course need to hear more from the candidate herself. For me this is hopeful news as maybe, just maybe, we can build on some of the work that President Obama has done on climate issues and give life as we know it a fighting chance.
Some of the life or death issues for what we are facing when it comes to run away climate change can be viewed in the below clip. As I said before, if this issue does not become a major issue in the campaign we are in even deeper trouble than we are now. Americans, and particularly American conservatives, do not believe the science or they do it to enable the fossil fuel industry to continue to make profits at our expense. Climate action issues however presented is fine with me. To the critics of this diary, thank you for the opportunity to lay the case for elevating climate change in even starker terms that it deserves, and the importance of this issue which is critical in any presidential campaign. There is no other issue that can begin to compare with humanity getting it's act together today on stopping this potential human extinction event. And it's soon, very soon with no historic world wide action to slow it down.