The head of a conservative climate organization that put forward a rare question on the issue to GOP candidates in Wednesday’s televised debate has said that Republicans “deserve to lose” electorally if they can’t show they care about the climate crisis.
The Republican presidential hopefuls were asked at the debate organized by Fox News what they would do to improve the party’s standing on climate policy by Alexander Diaz, a young conservative who is part of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a youth conservative group that pushes for action on the climate crisis.
When they were asked by the moderators for a show of hands over whether climate change is real, none of the candidates did so, with one, Vivek Ramaswamy, the far-right businessman, declaring that the “climate agenda is a hoax”.
According to reports, two other candidates, Tim Scott and Nikki Haley, accepted the well-established scientific reality of global heating but looked to shift the blame to other major carbon polluters, such as China, and even, in Scott’s case, to Africa, which is responsible for about 3% of the world’s emissions.
In his reaction, Benji Backer, who is the founder and executive chairman of ACC, said that the question on climate was “historic” and highlighted the desire among young Republicans for their leaders to take the threat of global heating seriously.
“That we didn’t get an immediate hand raise speaks to how much work we have left to do; young people will never vote for a candidate that doesn’t believe in climate change,” he said after the debate. “We’re not going away, we are normalizing this as part of the Republican conversation. Republicans deserve to lose if they are climate deniers and don’t have a plan.”
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Backer further said that Ramaswamy “has always been wrong on this issue” and that Haley’s answer was a “winning one” for young people. He noted how Ramaswamy, who he said an ACC colleague confronted about his remarks after the debate, was booed by the audience for his dismissal of climate science.
“Republicans are environmentalists, we are the original conservationists,” Backer told a debate after-party attended by campaign staffers, some Republican members of Congress and Ramaswamy, a video shared with the Guardian shows. “And by sitting on the sidelines and letting the Democrats take this issue and run with it over the last few decades we’ve not only lost an entire generation of young voters we’ve also ceded the ground to really, really bad policy that is impacting our day-to-day lives in so many ways.”
Current polling shows that there is growing concern among all Americans over the impacts of the climate crisis, which have been on vivid display this summer, with devastating fires in Hawaii, floods in California and Vermont and a series of punishing heatwaves that have broken temperature records across the US.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
