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Senator Bernie Sanders is seeking to re-frame his Presidential campaign in Iowa on the issue of climate change with a huge ad buy there touting his support for the Green New Deal (see below) and a climate summit to be held this weekend with Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez attending. Vox reports that Sanders’s Iowa State Director said, “[w]e think climate change is the way we win the caucuses….This is an issue that more and more Iowans can’t ignore.”
Why This Matters: Climate change has fallen out of the debate since the Our Daily Planet and MSNBC climate forum in mid-September. Sanders has consistently been in the top 3 candidates in Iowa so his focus on the climate issues will ensure that they are discussed again — and that is good news. But by staking his campaign on the issue of climate change, he is, in essence, putting climate on the ballot and that is a “gamble” that could prove dispositive for the issue if he does not do well in the caucuses.
Climate Chicken and Egg Problem
Since Governor Jay Inslee dropped out several months ago, no other candidate has taken up the climate change mantle until now. The Deputy State Director for the Sanders campaign in Iowa explains their thinking:
“There is a chicken and egg situation. Either it doesn’t win because people aren’t talking about it or people aren’t talking about it because it doesn’t win. Our campaign looks at that and says, we seem to know thousands of Iowans whose houses were flooded, so we are going to talk about it.”
As we have reported recently, an August poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Communication found that about 70 percent of Iowa voters polled were worried about climate change, and 74 percent were concerned about its impact on the state’s agriculture.
Betting on Youth and Climate Jobs
The climate gambit is a youth play for sure — as one can see from the line up of young people appearing at the summit. But the question is whether the Sanders campaign can get young people to turn out in numbers at the caucus. So according to Vox, the Sanders campaign will try to also focus on how addressing the climate crisis through a Green New Deal plan could boost the economy and create good new jobs.
The Guardian and S&P Global reported that after days of haggling, the European Commission settled on an $864 billion USD recovery fund for the next 3 years, plus a five year budget with a target of spending 30% of that to support the EU’s climate commitments.
Why This Matters: Activist leader Greta Thunberg immediately criticized the deal as not being good enough.
Continue Reading 491 wordsToday is World Environment Day. As you read this, it is clear that globally we are at a crossroads and that the inequities we see at home are also reflected across the broader planet. The pandemic has instigated a moment to re-examine our relationship with nature and the planet’s resources.
Why This Matters: Most of the world is moving ahead on this reset they see conserving nature and economic development as consistent
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The Senate Democrats’ Environmental Justice Caucus laid out in a letter on Monday their vision for the next round of economic stimulus funding and the benefits in their proposal are intended to address the inequities of the virus’ impacts on the poor and minorities.
Why This Matters: These 16 Democrats are speaking up on behalf of members of low income, rural and communities of color (known as an environmental justice or frontline communities) who are especially vulnerable to the virus and don’t have access to quality health care that could vastly improve their chances of recovery.
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