AP Photo In the Arena The Truth Behind the Democratic Platform Debate Accusations that the Clinton campaign isn’t serious about climate change are absurd.

Carol Browner served as director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change for President Barack Obama and for eight years as EPA administrator for President Bill Clinton.

This election year, I have the privilege of serving on the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee. The charge we had was this: To craft a progressive blueprint for the future that represents the diversity of the entire Democratic coalition. Following weeks of meetings, testimony from 144 witnesses, and votes on amendments offered by both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, we have succeeded in drafting a platform that “moves our party firmly toward justice, fairness, and inclusion,” in the words of my fellow committee member Keith Ellison—and above all, a platform that will win in November.

This is a platform that will make history. For the first time, it explicitly calls for repealing the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funds for reproductive health care and disproportionately affects low-income women and women of color. It sets down a marker that every American should earn at least $15 an hour. And it contains a robust, detailed, ambitious section on one of the most serious challenges we face: tackling climate change.


Which is why it was so disappointing to see other members of our committee accusing the Clinton campaign of obstructionism—and claiming we did not approach the climate crisis as seriously as we should. In both cases, nothing could be further from the truth.

The 2016 draft platform moves decisively beyond an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, calling for rapidly accelerating the transition to clean energy, getting half our electricity from clean energy sources within the next decade, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80 percent by 2050. The draft proposes harnessing a wide range of tools to achieve these goals—from strengthening fuel economy standards, to defending and extending tax incentives for clean energy, to updating building codes to boost energy efficiency.

Last Friday, the drafting committee met in St. Louis to debate amendments to this platform. We worked together to create a draft that was even stronger than it had been that morning, with new shared goals and ideas. As a representative of Clinton’s campaign, I was proud that we came together as Democrats to articulate the boldest climate vision ever to appear in our party’s platform. And the allegation that the Clinton team is not fully committed to solving climate change is absurd.

Here’s what happened: The Sanders campaign’s representatives put forward nine amendments on climate and energy. We worked together to turn four into “unity amendments” representing common ground, including an amendment opposing utilities’ efforts to undermine renewables; an amendment asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether fossil fuel companies misled their shareholders; and a bold commitment to power our economy with 100 percent clean energy by mid-century. As a regular bicyclist—and the daughter of a pedestrian who was killed on a residential street—I was pleased to support the amendment Sanders representative Bill McKibben introduced to strengthen bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure.

Eight members of the committee also voted to adopt an amendment I proposed to phase down fossil fuel production and deploy more clean energy on public lands and waters, after a related Sanders amendment fell short.

That means of nine amendments proposed by the Sanders camp, the committee found common ground on four, adopted a substitute on one, and voted down four.

That’s not obstructionism. That’s Democrats being democratic.

But my concern runs deeper than the misrepresentation of our committee hearing.

It’s perfectly fair to debate the best way to achieve our shared goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius this century. Regulators, scientists, politicians and researchers do that all the time.

But debating the merits of different policy solutions is quite different from setting up a litmus test for what it takes to be “serious” about climate change. And that is what the Sanders campaign and its representatives have done, claiming that the Democratic platform falls short because it does not include their preferred amendments to enact a carbon tax and immediately ban all oil and gas production through hydraulic fracturing.

If we were to accept that a carbon tax and a fracking ban are the only “right” policies, every state that we consider a climate leader would fail the test. California has some of the most ambitious climate targets in the country, with a governor and state legislature that support climate action. But as the pioneering chair of their Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols, told our committee, California uses a range of standards, incentives and other tools to meet its climate targets—because that is what the state’s leaders find most effective. They have decided to regulate fracking, rather than ban it outright. They put a price on carbon, but through a cap-and-trade program, not a carbon tax. Even Sanders’ home state of Vermont does not have a carbon tax.

In short, we have more than two tools at hand. And it's a good thing, because there is no single, magic lever that will solve this crisis. Climate change will impact every corner of our country and every sector of our economy. It will affect everything from our national security to our children’s health. There are no simple solutions to challenges as complex as this one.

I have spent my entire career fighting to protect our environment. And we do face a serious threat to the future of our country and our planet: the possibility that Donald Trump, a man who has said climate change is a hoax, could succeed Barack Obama as president of the United States. Clinton is committed not just to building on the progress Obama has made, but accelerating it, making America the clean energy superpower of the 21st century, and creating millions of good-paying jobs. That is the vision we set out in the 2016 Democratic platform—and it is a vision we can all be proud of.