I was inspired reading the Time magazine article (read the whole thing here) on Al Gore where he was quoted as saying "If I do my job right, all the candidates will be talking about the climate crisis."
Hmm. I visualize Al Gore being the moderator at a Democratic Presidential Candidate debate that has one topic and one topic only: the environment.
Can you imagine? He would ask them great questions. They would be forced to bone up on the issues of climate crisis and come up with credible responses. If we're going to be faced with ten or twenty debates this year anyway, why not have one of them facilitated by Gore and focused on one extremely important issue?
The candidates of both parties are getting away too easily without having to face tough questions about the environment. Each candidate needs to be confronted by a knowledgeable questioner:
- What would you do about carbon emissions?
- Are you in favor of a carbon tax replacing the payroll tax (as Gore has proposed)?
- Would you allow new coal plants to be built?
- Do you think nuclear power is part of the solution?
- How would you advance biofuels, particularly cellulosic ethanol from corn stalks, straw and switchgrass?
- How can the United States become a world leader in reducing emissions?
- Will you create and enforce CAFE standards for automobile miles/gallon?
- How would you incent Americans to drive hybrid cars?
- Would you invest in solar and wind power research?
- Would you work on building a hydrogen infrastructure for fuel cell cars?
I really, really want to know what the candidates answers to these questions are. Do you? What do you think?
Maybe after that we could have a healthcare debate moderated by Dr. Andrew Weil.
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