The good news is, Fox News’ moderators for the first Republican presidential debate asked the candidates about climate change. The bad news is, it didn’t go especially well.
Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum didn’t just point to evidence of the climate crisis, they also showed the White House contenders a video clip of a young Republican who said the party’s indifference to the issue risked further alienating a generation of voters.
At that point, the candidates were asked to raise their hand if they believed “human behavior is causing climate change.” Gov. Ron DeSantis quickly denounced the exercise. “Look, we’re not schoolchildren,” the Floridian said. “Let’s have the debate.”
This apparently led the moderators to abandon the show-of-hands question, though the audience nevertheless learned a bit about how the participants view the issue. The New York Times reported:
Mr. DeSantis, a distant second in the polls to former President Donald J. Trump, who skipped the debate, deflected and criticized President Biden’s response to the wildfires in Hawaii. Vivek Ramaswamy, the millionaire entrepreneur whose campaign has dabbled in conspiracy theories, seized on the moment to deny the scientific consensus on climate change.
“Let us be honest as Republicans … the climate change agenda is a hoax,” Ramaswamy said, adding that, as far as he’s concerned, “the reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change.”
To be sure, the far-right entrepreneur’s answer was utterly ridiculous. The climate crisis is not a “hoax,” and the idea that people are dying from “bad climate change policies” is demonstrably absurd.
But while Ramaswamy’s answer was the worst, much of the field apparently wanted nothing to do with the question, and some struggled to deliver straight answers. Sen. Tim Scott, for example, declared, “If we want the environment to be better — and we all do — the best thing to do is to bring our jobs home from China.”
His fellow South Carolinian, former Ambassador Nikki Haley conceded that climate change is “real,” though she quickly added, “But if you want to go and really change the environment, then we need to start telling China and India that they have to lower their emissions.”
Or put another way, there’s a problem, but we should look to other countries to work toward a solution.
It was at roughly this point that President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign issued a written press statement: “Families across America are confronting the scary realities of the climate crisis every day. This summer alone, communities across the country have experienced the deadliest wildfire in a generation, devastating droughts and dangerous extreme heat, and historic flooding and storms. Despite another record-breaking summer, MAGA Republicans have railed against efforts to take action on climate and some continue to deny its very existence. While these extremists cozy up to Big Oil and Big Gas, President Biden and Vice President Harris are leading the charge in tackling the climate crisis with real action — including the most significant climate and green jobs legislation in American history.”
In other words, the Republicans on the debate stage apparently didn’t want to talk about the climate crisis, but Democratic leaders were quick to remind the public that one party remains serious about the issue. It didn’t have to be this way. As New York magazine’s Eric Levitz noted overnight, “In 2007, George W. Bush called for restricting carbon emissions from U.S. power plants. The following year, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, John McCain, proposed a mandatory limit on greenhouse-gas pollution in the United States. Fifteen years later, the eight candidates at the GOP’s debate could scarcely bring themselves to affirm the reality of climate change, following the hottest July on record.” Or put another way, the problem is not just that Republican presidential candidates got the question wrong last night. The problem is made worse by the fact that the debate offered evidence of a party going backward, even as the global crisis intensifies. All of which brings us back to the clip of the young Republican who was not only worried about global warming, but who was also concerned that the party’s indifference to climate change would push other young voters away. The answers from the debate stage couldn’t have been much clearer — or much worse.
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."
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