The phim heo tình d?cchatter going into the first 2020 presidential debate was that climate change wouldn't get much, if any, discussion.
But the debate's moderator, Fox News journalist Chris Wallace, threw a wildcard. "I'd like to talk about climate change," Wallace said during the second half of the debate.
"So would I," snapped former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee.
Climate change is an expansive topic, an issue former presidential candidate Jay Inslee argued would have benefited from its own primary debate (this climate-focused event never happened). But for 10 minutes on Tuesday night, a rare televised climate debate revealed four salient points about a growing problem that impacts the entire globe.
1. Chris Wallace dropped an essential wildcard
Chris Wallace did something no presidential debate moderator had done in 12 years, according to the climate policy organization Climate Power 2020: He asked a question about climate change (Wallace asked questions to both candidates).
The 10 minutes Wallace devoted to climate change was easily the most time in any single debate since 2000, based on an analysis from Grist. It's also likely the most time climate has ever received in any single presidential debate, ever. (Though Wallace using time to ask President Donald Trump if he believedin climate change is not a great question, as climate science is backed by deeply-vetted observations, research, and fact.) But climate change finally made it back to the scene, following what was easily the hottest decade in history. That's essential. After all:
Humanity has loaded the atmosphere with the highest levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in at least800,000 years, but more likely millions of years.
Arctic wildfires over the last two years are unprecedented in the satellite record.
A rapidly heating climate is amplifying wildfires in the Western U.S., which have doubled the amount of land burned in the West between 1984 and 2015.
Arctic sea ice is in rapid decline.
The most threatening glacier on Earth has destabilized.
The oceans are warming, rising, acidifying, and losing oxygen. That's bad.
And so on...
2. The president doesn't have a climate plan
When Wallace asked Trump about how he would "confront" climate change, Trump gave his usual answer (meant to avoid confronting the question) about wanting "crystal clean water and air."
Trump did not offer a climate plan to ambitiously reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and never does, because he doesn't have one. His devoted Republican party doesn't have a realistic nor serious climate plan, either. As Mashable noted earlier this year:
Republicans have a plan that hinges on planting a trillion treesover the next 30 years. Yes, plants do soak up carbon from the atmosphere, but even 1 trillion trees will make only a dentin civilization's burgeoning carbon problem (not to mention that trees are more susceptible to wildfiresin a warming world, and this burning pumps loads of carbon dioxide into the air)
Trump vastly reduced his incessant interruptions during the climate portion of the debate, compared with the other 80 minutes. (For much of the debate, Wallace pleaded with Trump to stop interrupting, at one point raising his voice to tell Trump "Let him [Biden] answer!”) The relative silence during the climate discussion likely stems from Trump's ignorance about the topic. He had little material to banter with.
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3. Joe Biden has a big, ambitious climate plan
Biden has a climate plan. You can read it here, on his website. It's expansive. Chris Wallace familiarized himself with it, and asked Biden about how it would work.
In the debate, Biden emphasized that the "Green New Deal" is not his plan. "I support the Biden plan," he explained, in response to Trump's efforts to tell Biden that Biden's plan is actually the "Green New Deal." The Green New Deal, rather, is a visionary framework, introduced by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and veteran lawmaker Senator Ed Markey in February 2019. It proposes an ambitious economic mobilization, largely founded on building renewable energy infrastructure, on "a scale not seen since WWII and the New Deal."
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Biden's plan has specifics, with plans to invest $1.7 trillion over 10 years in climate-resilient infrastructure and, critically, plans to wean the nation from burning fossil fuels. This new infrastructure, Biden emphasized during the debate, would create millions of jobs, boosting the pandemic-weakened economy. Biden has a climate task forcethat recommends transitioning to 100 percent renewable electricity (wind, solar, geothermal) in 15 years.
What's more, Biden plans to reenter the world's Paris climate agreement, which the Trump administration will leave on Nov. 4, 2020. The agreement is a historic global pact to avoid or limit the worst consequences of a warming climate, specifically by limiting Earth's temperature rise at well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures.
Withdrawing from the Paris pact certainly won't help mitigate planetary climate change.
"The United States cannot withdraw from planet Earth," Sarah Green, an environmental chemist at Michigan Technological University, told Mashable last year. "To withdraw from the most important international agreement to keep our world habitable is reckless and irresponsible."
"Pulling out of the Paris agreement is like being the guy who brags about peeing in the swimming pool while thumbing his nose at people trying to keep it clean," Green added.
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4. The president doesn't understand California's forests
For years, President Trump has repeatedly blamed California's fires exclusively on the state's historic mismanagement of forests — even when fires weren't burning in forests. (The federal government, however, controls nearly 60 percent of California's forests.)
During the debate, Trump again blamed California's record-breaking fire season on the state's forest mismanagement, rather than addressing climate change. "You've got to have forest management," said Trump. This is a lazy oversimplification of a complex environmental problem.
Last week, Mashable spoke with eight fire scientists about the drivers of the California fires. Each of them emphasized that both climate change and forest mismanagement are critical, dominant factors in fueling modern Western megablazes. It's misguided to simplify the causes.
"You can’t ever look at fire without looking at both things," Adam Coates, an assistant professor in forest fire ecology and management at Virginia Tech, told Mashable. "They're married together."
Yes, a century of U.S. Forest Service fire suppression has resulted in significantly more material to catch fire, but a rapidly heating planet is making forests, woodlands, and grasses significantly easier to burn, resulting in infernos.
As Mashable noted:
In the Western U.S., fire researchers have found human-caused climate change, which has driven drier fuels, nearly doubled the amount of forest firebetween 1984 and 2015. Separately, fire scientists concluded that wildfire in California has increased fivefold since the early 1970s, largely caused by drier fuels.
Importantly, the influence of climate will likely increase as the planet continues to warm this century.
"It takes just a little bit of warming to lead to a lot more burning," Jennifer Balch, an associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder who researches fire ecology, told Mashable.
Mashable reporter Kellen Beck contributed reporting to this story.