By Meteor Blades

On Tuesday, the non-partisan ScienceDebate.org released answers to 20 science-related questions it had posed to the four leading presidential candidates. Only three of them responded: Democrat Hillary Clinton, Green Party nominee Jill Stein, and Republican Donald Trump. Libertarian Gary Johnson apparently couldn’t be bothered.

The questions covered a wide range of topics, from research, food and water to public health, education and energy. Climate change was on the list, too. As expected Clinton and Stein gave lengthy responses, laying out action-oriented plans for dealing with what is probably the greatest planetary crisis since modern humans emerged from Africa 70 millenniums or so ago.

And the Trumpanzee? The guy who once said climate change was a Chinese-fabricated hoax designed to undermine U.S. manufacturing? I’ll get to him in a moment.

Hillary Clinton told the group the science of climate change is crystal clear. She would, she wrote, set a floor of three goals “that we will achieve within ten years of taking office” to make the United States “the clean energy superpower of the 21st century.” The three are:

generating half of U.S. electricity from clean sources, with half a billion solar panels installed by the beginning of 2021

from clean sources, with half a billion solar panels installed by the beginning of 2021 cutting energy waste by a third and making U.S. manufacturing the cleanest and most efficient in the world

in the world and reducing U.S. oil consumption by a third with clean fuels and more efficient boilers and vehicles, including ships.

She also said she would “launch a $60 billion Clean Energy Challenge to partner with those states, cities, and rural communities across the country that are ready to take the lead on clean energy and energy efficiency, giving them the flexibility, tools and resources they need to succeed.”

The Green Party’s Jill Stein said she will offer a Green New Deal, a proposal that was first made concrete by the New Economics Foundation, a British think tank in 2007. Stein said she would “initiate a WWII-scale national mobilization to halt climate change” that creates 20 million new jobs in a transition to 100 percent clean energy by 2030. This would be achieved by “investing in public transit, sustainable agriculture, conservation and restoration of critical infrastructure, including ecosystems.”