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In the last presidential election, it was controversial when Bernie Sanders said in a debate that climate change was the nation’s biggest threat, bigger than terrorism. This year, it would be controversial for a Democratic candidate to say otherwise.

A case in point is today’s Youth Climate and Clean Energy town hall in Concord, an unusual day-long event in which seven Democratic and one Republican hopeful will take the stage for an hour each, one after the other, giving their positions on tackling climate change and taking questions from “graduate, undergraduate, and high school student panelists engaged in climate research, clean energy, sustainable business, and environmental studies.” This follows CNN’s hours-long televised debate about the climate crisis in September.

As a result, voters who are using climate change to differentiate among the 11 major candidates left in the Democratic race must make some careful distinctions.

It’s not enough to go for somebody who supports ending subsidies on fossil fuels, because all of them do that. It’s not enough to want the U.S. to stay in the Paris Agreement. And setting a hard target for national net-zero emissions, which would have seemed radical not long ago, is universal among these candidates, leaving voters to decide whether the most commonly chosen goal of 2050 is properly realistic or way too late to be useful.

Things are more straightforward on the GOP side, where the presumptive winner, President Trump, doesn’t acknowledge human-caused climate change while his opponents do. Former Mass. Gov. Bill Weld is the only Republican at tomorrow’s Concord event.

Several environmental groups have tackled this question by giving grades to major hopefuls. As is often the case with such efforts, the grade depends on what topics are most emphasized, whether it’s support for the legislative Green New Deal, signing of pledges about not taking money from fossil fuel firms, or positions on fracking and other extraction technologies.

In most scorecards, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Bennet and Tom Steyer get marks at the top or near it, followed by Joe Biden and Pete Buttegieg, then Amy Klobuchar and Andrew Yang. Latecomer Deval Patrick does well when he is ranked.

An example of the complexity is nuclear power, long opposed by the environmental movement but now embraced by some as a necessary evil that provides large amounts of carbon-free electricity. Opinions range from Sanders, Gabbard and Warren, who would shut down existing plants to Bennet and Yang, who want to expand nuclear power, with most others keeping the current nuclear fleet but not expanding it.

For sheer amount of detail, it’s hard to beat an analysis done by two students pursuing master’s degrees at Antioch University New England in Keene. Caitlyn Hatzell, a candidate in environmental studies with a concentration in social advocacy, and Sara Lobdell, a candidate in environmental science with a concentration in education, assessed candidates’ climate plans against 20 benchmarks including transportation, green jobs, sustainable agriculture and environmental justice.

They got the help of six graduate students to rate plans as released by campaigns, then did “blind readings,” with the candidates not identified, to develop a score. But rather than just giving a grade to the ideas they also graded the level of detail in proposals, giving them light-to-dark color coding.

“A good climate plan needs to be thoughtful and comprehensive, and that’s what this tries to show,” said Hatzell.

By this measure, Sanders and Warren win hands down. The pair looked at 14 categories and Sanders had maximum details score in 9 of them, with Warren receiving top marks in 8 categories. Nobody else had more than 3 top marks while some candidates, particularly Bennett and Steyer, were ranked as mentioning a topic but giving “no detail” in almost every category.

“Yes, they are similar in the broad sense, but even just glancing across the benchmark table, you see the level of detail,” said Lobdell.

The analysis can be seen online.

If you go

NH Youth Climate and Clean Energy Town Hall; Bank Of New Hampshire Stage, 16 South Main Street, Concord; 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.