“I have no reason to believe that he's ever going to release his tax returns, because there's something he's hiding. And we'll guess. We'll keep guessing at what it might be that he's hiding. But I think the question is, were he ever to get near the White House, what would be those conflicts? Who does he owe money to?” —Hillary Clinton
Like too many debate moderators before him, Lester Holt did not ask one single question about climate change. But the subject did come up once, when Hillary Clinton initiated a brief exchange with Donald Trump.
HILLARY CLINTON: Take clean energy. Some country is going to be the clean energy superpower of the 21st century. Donald thinks that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. I think it’s real.
DONALD TRUMP: I did not. I did not.
HILLARY CLINTON: I think the science is real.
DONALD TRUMP: I do not say that.
HILLARY CLINTON: And I think it’s important—
DONALD TRUMP: I do not say that.
HILLARY CLINTON: —that we grip this and deal with it, both at home and abroad.
Donald Trump and Mike Pence have both praised Russian President Vladimir Putin as being a better leader than President Obama. Amy-Rose Lane in a Huffington post piece answers Hillary’s question “Who does he owe money to?”
It is clear that the Trump campaign has financial interests invested in fossil fuel conglomerates. By connecting the dots of his Bromance with Putin, Trump’s embrace of coal and oil in this country, his loathing of clean energy and his ignorant and dangerous promise to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord can be easily explained.
For instance, consider his choice of staffers. Paul Manafort worked for Viktor Yanukovych’s campaign in Ukraine between 2004 and 2010. Yanukovych ended his tenure in Ukraine wanted for mass murder, and Manafort went home to eventually work for Trump. However, the controversies blanketing Manafort ended his run with the GOP frontrunner once it was revealed he was secretly taking millions of dollars in off-the-book payments from pro-Russia political groups.
This week, Carter Page stepped down as Trump’s foreign policy advisor under similar circumstances. As a foreign policy advisor, one should be free of any perceived biases. Nobody must have relayed the message to the Trump campaign, as Page has been intimately involved with Russian energy and politics since the early 2000s. Page lived in Moscow, working in the energy sector and brokering deals with Russia’s state-run energy giant, Gazprom. Putin personally owns 4.5 per cent of Gazprom, while the Russian government he helms owns 50 per cent of it. Carter Page has his own wealth invested in Gazprom and attends the annual investor meetings.
Before Page’s resignation on Monday, Yahoo reported that U.S. intelligence officers were “looking into” Page’s connections in Moscow after he flew there shortly before the RNC convention in Cleveland.
x YouTube VideoThe below transcript is from Democracy Now’s interview with Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, and Guardian journalist Oliver Milman.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Michael Mann, despite what you said about the scientific consensus and what the national security leaders in this country say, a report by a U.K.-based research group, which surveyed 20 countries, including China and India, found that the United States had more climate change deniers among their respondents than any other country. So what do you think accounts for that?
MICHAEL MANN: Well, you know, what are the countries where we have the most powerful and entrenched fossil fuel companies and corporations? The U.S., Australia. And that’s where we see the most rampant climate change denial. It’s not coincidental. Fossil fuel interests are doing exactly what tobacco interests did decades ago. They have manufactured a campaign of misinformation and disinformation to confuse the public and policymakers from acting. In the case of tobacco, we know that millions of people died because the tobacco industry hid the adverse health impacts of their product. With climate change, many more people will suffer and perish if we don’t act. In some ways, the campaign by fossil fuel interests to confuse the public about the reality and threat of climate change is an even greater crime against, you could say, humanity or the planet. It’s literally a crime against the planet.
And we need to make sure that they’re answerable for the disinformation campaign that they have run. They’ve set us back decades. If we had acted on this problem when ExxonMobil’s own internal documents from the 1970s revealed that they recognized—this is their own words—they recognized the impacts of climate change could be catastrophic. These are in their own internal documents from the 1970s. But what did ExxonMobil do in the subsequent decades? They spent tens of millions of dollars on a disinformation campaign to deny the reality of climate change.
We can’t allow that. We have to move on. We have to hold bad actors accountable, and we have to move on to the worthy debate, which is what we should be debating in Congress: how to solve this problem. What are the mechanisms to decrease our carbon emissions and to transition to renewable energy? There’s a worthy political debate between progressives and conservatives to be had about that topic, but there’s no worthy debate to be had about whether the threat exists. We have to get past that. Again, in November, we may have an opportunity to try to get past that by electing leaders who will act on climate.
“We believe the United States must lead in forging a robust global solution to the climate crisis. We are committed to a national mobilization, and to leading a global effort to mobilize nations to address this threat on a scale not seen since World War II. In the first 100 days of the next administration, the President will convene a summit of the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.” The 2016 Democratic Platform
x YouTube VideoThis clip was produced by James Cameron and it premiered at the Democratic National Convention. Spoiler alert—everyone drowns at the end.