In the second Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton deflected a question about her electability with an observation that could apply to pretty much any issue in the presidential race. She noted “there are some differences among” the Democratic candidates, but those differences “pale compared to what’s happening on the Republican side.” Climate change was one of the fundamental divides that she cited. In an exclusive interview last month, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta told me, “Politics is largely about friction. And I view this as a place of high friction with the Republican candidates today.”



“High friction” understates things. When it comes to climate, there are two entirely different political conversations taking place in the primaries. On the Democratic side, Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley are delivering the kind of earnest energy debate the climate movement has longed for, each with a plan for building on President Barack Obama’s executive actions. Yet every Republican in contention has vowed to undo or weaken Obama’s most significant policy, placing pollution caps on power plants under the Clean Power Plan. In the process of scaling back domestic action, the Republicans are also promising to handicap the first signs of global progress on the issue in 25 years.

“The Clean Power [Plan], we ought to repeal that and—and start over on that,” Jeb Bush—who is one of the few GOP candidates who’ve openly acknowledged man’s role in warming the globe—said in the most recent debate. Marco Rubio argued that the CPP would wreck the economy and also inevitably fail: “We are not going to make America a harder place to create jobs in order to pursue policies that will do absolutely nothing, nothing to change our climate, to change our weather.” Back in August, Ted Cruz staked himself out clearly for repealing Obama’s plan: “The President’s lawless and radical attempt to destabilize the nation’s energy system is flatly unconstitutional.” Ben Carson and Donald Trump, meanwhile, have joined the Texas senator in flatly rejecting the evidence that manmade climate change is real.

The Republicans’ willful ignorance will drag down the climate debate when the general election rolls around. Which is unfortunate, because Democrats have had a substantive conversation that goes beyond easy calls to promote clean energy. In their first debate, Clinton, Sanders, and O’Malley all mentioned climate change twice in their opening statements. O’Malley has proposed raising fees for leasing public lands and rejecting offshore drilling, and he took a memorable jab in the first debate at the Obama administration’s much-criticized “all-the-above” embrace of fossil fuels: “We did not land a man on the moon with an all-of-the-above strategy.” Sanders has gone further, insisting twice in debates that climate change is America’s greatest national security threat and introducing a bill to halt all future fossil fuel development on federal lands. All the Democrats, including Clinton, have promised to tackle Obama’s worst legacy on climate change, digging up more oil and coal.

But that heady debate will largely be over when general election season rolls around, as it turns into one about science believers versus science deniers. Environmentalists have made some of the greatest gains of any interest group in the final years of the Obama administration, benefiting—at long last—from a president willing to use his executive powers to break a political stalemate on the issue.