The U.S. leader’s challenges are obvious. For one thing, there’s plenty of international resistance to making any kind of short-term sacrifice to deal with global warming, and given the scope of the crisis, dramatic changes are required. For another, the Obama administration has to deal with the fact that an entire American political party is actively trying to sabotage American officials’ efforts at the Paris gathering.
But there’s also the fact that the president, who’s been laying the groundwork for these talks for quite a while, only has one year remaining in office, and much of the work will have to continue after Obama’s successor is elected. Depending on who that successor is, that could be very good news for our environmental future or very bad news.
MSNBC’s Tony Dokoupil had an interesting report over the holiday weekend on the candidates’ preparedness on the issue.
The Associated Press invited eight climate and biological scientists to grade the scientific accuracy of candidates in both parties. The material included debates, published interviews and tweets. The candidates’ names were not known to the reviewers. As an added protection against bias, the scientists were selected by professional scientific societies.The grades, which ran from 0 to 100, were mostly abysmal. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz was the strongest and the wrongest, receiving a grade of 6 points for accuracy. All eight evaluators placed Cruz dead last. Michael Mann, a Pennsylvania State University meteorology professor, wrote of Cruz’s statements: “This individual understands less about science (and climate change) than the average kindergartner.”
Of course, with Cruz, it’s often difficult to know whether and when he’s playing a political game. Is he actually ignorant or is he saying foolish things he knows to be wrong in the hopes of winning votes from his party’s right-wing base?
Regardless, if Cruz fared the worst, who fared the best?
I put together this chart showing the results by candidate, with red columns for Republicans and blue columns for Democrats.
Recommended
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."