The candidate’s answers are what we have come to expect from his campaign—long on platitudes, short on specifics. PHOTOGRAPH BY EVAN VUCCI / AP

I just lost what I thought was a sure bet. For the past two Presidential election cycles, my colleagues and I at ScienceDebate, supported by nearly every major science organization in the country, have asked the candidates to answer a series of questions about science and technology policy, in recognition of the fact that these matters will ultimately present the most important challenges to the next President. The questions range from health to education, energy to the environment, and security to the economy. Two days ago, after receiving responses from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and also from Jill Stein’s, I bet my colleagues fifteen dollars that, for the first time since 2008, one of the two major-party candidates would decline our request. Within an hour after we had made our wager—and who knows whether my colleagues already knew the result and took my money anyway—Donald Trump’s campaign sent in his answers. They were released on our Web site today.

The odd man out here is Gary Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, whose campaign did not respond. This is not so remarkable, because many of the twenty questions involve what role government ought to play in helping promote innovation, and the Libertarian platform abhors anything that smacks of government interference. Jill Stein’s Green Party response is, well, green. It can be summarized relatively succinctly: stop spending money on the military and invest instead in a second New Deal, using the funds to combat climate change, move to a hundred per cent renewable energy by 2030, and provide single-payer, government-sponsored health care to all Americans.

Clinton’s responses are by far the most thorough of all the candidates’. They are what you might expect from a policy wonk. With few exceptions, she describes specific, programmatic proposals to address each issue. She makes the case for supporting education and basic, curiosity-driven research—scientific work without any immediate practical application—as a necessary precursor to economic growth. When it comes to question No. 3, about climate change, Clinton reiterates her three-point plan for the country: to generate half of our electricity with clean sources by the end of her first term, to cut energy waste by a third, and to reduce oil consumption by the same amount. These are bold goals, indeed, and Clinton plans to accomplish them in part with a sixty-billion-dollar federal Clean Energy Challenge, which will partner with state and local communities. Characteristically for the candidate, the style here is not flashy, but there is no shortage of substance. A proper accounting of the depth and breadth of her responses requires actually reading them.

Trump’s proposals, as is often the case, are easier to summarize. I was surprised to find that, at first glance, some seem measured, even well-considered. Even if, upon closer reading, there are major problems of internal consistency, his responses do present what one might almost call an over-all philosophy, which is that innovation, education, and a healthy environment are best fostered by letting private industry act unfettered. Beyond that, however, there are few specifics. Although Trump acknowledges the need for long-term investment to meet major scientific and technological challenges, he keeps largely mum on what exactly the government might do (apart from fund space exploration, which he seems to have a soft spot for). As we have come to expect from Trump, he will cross those bridges later, before he builds walls around them.

I was most eager to see how Trump would respond to the climate-change question. As I have noted before, his record in this area is strongly anti-science. In the course of the campaign, he has said that he is “not a big believer in man-made climate change.” Several years ago, he tweeted—jokingly, he later claimed—that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Meanwhile, his running mate, Mike Pence, has said that the evidence for climate change is “very mixed,” and that the mainstream media has refused to report on “growing skepticism in the scientific community.” (As a member of Congress, where he served until 2013, Pence espoused a number of empirically questionable views, stating at various times that “smoking doesn’t kill,” that “global warming is a myth,” and that “only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe.”)

While the campaign’s response to question No. 3 contains no reference to a Chinese conspiracy, it also fails to attest that climate change is real. (The phrase appears once, in scare quotes.) Trump mostly ignores the question, writing instead about the need to insure access to water and food for people around the world, to conquer malaria, and to seek better sources of power. For someone who has often advocated letting the rest of the world solve its own problems, this feels like a dramatic rhetorical departure. Trump later comes back to his point by saying that the availability of water may be the most urgent issue we face as a nation. I agree with him, although I would add that one of the chief causes of the challenge is, of course, climate change. Elsewhere, Trump argues that agriculture in the United States should not be centrally regulated at all but driven by market forces—except when we must safeguard our national security by protecting farmers from “losses to nature” (a.k.a. climate change).

The net result? There is something here for everyone, because every view, no matter how inconsistent, is presented somewhere. On the question of preserving public lands, Trump replies that our elected officials have spent too long rewarding “special interests,” by which I assume he doesn’t mean petroleum companies and the Bundy family. On the question of vaccinations, he argues that the government “should educate the public on the values of a comprehensive vaccination program,” without saying whether the value is positive or not. On the question of information security, he claims that, in a Trump Administration, the U.S. government will not spy on its own citizens. If true, this would represent a turn away from the strong language that he has used about identifying terrorists on our soil. On the other hand, it would leave open the possibility of foreign-sponsored cyberattacks on Americans, like the one that he asked Russian intelligence to perform against Clinton back in July (another supposed joke).

Trump’s response to question No. 6, about treating mental illness, appears, in isolation, to be his most reasoned. He strongly supports increased federal support for state and local treatment centers. He does not outline any mechanism by which this might be done, but the goal is laudable. Unfortunately, later on, when responding to a related but more general question about public health, Trump argues that we are already spending too much on government research, and that new priorities must be set, with priorities to be determined only after he is elected President. He brings to mind Marie Antoinette: even when bread-and-butter investments in health-care research are beyond our financial means, the cake of a good mental-health policy is not. Of course, we should care about both.

There is a lot more here, and the reading is fascinating. In some ways, the questions frustrate the sound-bite-friendly format that candidates are used to. When considering real-world issues, particularly those that touch on science and technology, it is harder to speak in platitudes, or rely purely on emotion or fear. Substance, or its lack, becomes harder to mimic or mask, which is why I wish we had a true televised Presidential debate on these subjects. But I fear that, once again, we won’t see that in this election. In its absence, these written answers reveal a great deal about the choice we voters have ahead of us.