Thanks Bernie! Hillary Clinton鈥檚 tilt at the US presidency is poised to turn a deeper shade of green after pressure from her former rival. Democrats gathering at their national convention in Philadelphia on Monday are set to approve a platform that .
A non-binding road map for the party鈥檚 elected officials, it proposes strong limits on the fossil fuel industry and sets a target for the US to be completely powered by renewable energy by mid-century. This goes further than and thankfully a lot further than Barack Obama鈥檚 re-election campaign four years ago, which had a domestic energy approach that prioritised gas and oil alongside renewables.
Why the shift? In short, the significant popularity of Bernie Sanders, Clinton鈥檚 main challenger in the Democrat primaries, who early on called on Clinton to support a national carbon tax and a fracking ban.
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Although he couldn鈥檛 get Clinton to budge, Sanders鈥� sizeable support among Democratic voters meant he had the right to appoint some members of the party鈥檚 platform committee. His choices included climate activist Bill McKibben, who for the proposed tax and ban, accusing the Clinton campaign of opposing serious reforms.
Clinton鈥檚 backers had countered that a carbon tax would not only risk alienating key swing voters, but would also be blocked by a hostile, Republican-controlled Congress. They also argued that natural gas was likely to be an essential source of cleaner-burning, reliable energy in the US transition to renewables.
Good compromise
Compromise was always the likely outcome. And compromise does not have to be a dirty word. Negotiations over the party鈥檚 platform have achieved laudable results, and McKibben, even if many green allies are less enthusiastic.
Rather than advocating a national ban on fracking, the platform calls for restoring full authority to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate it, and for states and communities to have the right to ban fracking. Instead of a carbon tax, the platform calls for the more ambiguous 鈥減ricing鈥� of greenhouse gas emissions. This goal can at least be partially achieved via pending EPA restrictions on coal power plants, executive actions which bypass Congress and are .
The platform reflects the best of what the rival Democratic camps can cooperatively achieve during the first half of a Clinton presidency. That said, activists would still need to push for more aggressive steps on climate change and pragmatists would still need to craft policies that are politically and technically possible.
But before all that, Democrats must win the White House. Republican nominee Donald Trump has said he is 鈥渘ot a believer in man-made global warming鈥�, declaring that climate change is a 鈥渉oax鈥� and 鈥渂ullshit鈥�, 鈥渃reated by and for the Chinese鈥� to hurt US manufacturing. He has promised to abolish the EPA, and to withdraw the US from the Paris accord.
Some disaffected Sanders supporters say they may not vote, or may risk playing the spoiler card by . They would be wise to turn their support to Clinton.
The prospect of a Trump presidency would dash any hope for progress on climate change, much less the dream of a just, sustainable, renewable economy.
