The DNC actually has a fine reason for declining Inslee’s request: Adding a single-issue climate debate would be against its rules, which it wrote to account for, and avoid, the bitterness left over from 2016. But the DNC is pretty weak here. Polls suggest that climate change is a top-tier issue for the party’s primary voters. At this point, 14 candidates have expressed some interest in a climate debate—15, if you include Joe Biden’s quick assent to the idea, captured on video by a Greenpeace activist. If five of them, including Elizabeth Warren, go rogue and hold a climate debate of their own, will the DNC really bar them from its official debates?

Read: The unprecedented surge in fear about climate change

All of this is political tactics—forgettable and kind of whatever. (Though maybe it should concern the DNC that a candidate polling at 1 percent could play it for a week straight.) What’s more interesting is the loose consensus among climate and energy experts that a climate debate would do more harm than good. When three writers at New York magazine discussed “Should Democrats hold a climate-change debate?” they concluded that Inslee was right on the substance and wrong on the politics. A climate debate would be lousy television, they said. It would be too wonky to interest voters. And it could ultimately endanger the party’s general-election hopes. “The deeper candidates get into the weeds about actual policy, the likelier they are to say something that backfires in the fall,” wrote David Wallace-Wells.

I understand this argument. Climate-change policy, as I have written in the past, can be staggeringly boring. But it’s not all dull, and voters seem to care about it. A climate-change debate is a swell idea. It just requires rethinking much of what’s accepted about climate politics and about debates.

What’s the point of a presidential debate? More than 20 years ago, in a story for this magazine, James Fallows pointed out a fundamental divide between the kind of information that journalists create and the kind of information that most helps voters. Journalists try to generate news: gaffes, scoops, novel data, interesting interpretations of who’s up and who’s down in the political game. But voters ask about the what of politics: “the effects of legislation or government programs on their communities or schools.”

As we hold them today, moderated by television journalists and broadcast live, debates seem designed to generate that first kind of news. Recently, the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes noted that a straightforward question a voter posed to Warren—“What are you going to do about the opioid crisis? It’s affecting everyone.”—was “the kind of question a journalist … almost certainly wouldn’t ask.”

This is not an atypical critique of political journalism, and Americans have partly absorbed it since the 1990s. Yet it still infects our debates, which are one of the best opportunities to inform voters about the actual policy stakes of an election. A 2016 report from public-policy researchers at the University of Pennsylvania recommended a number of improvements to the televised-debate format. (Vox made a good video about it.) One of their recommendations that has stuck with me the longest: “Enlarge the pool of potential moderators to include print journalists, university presidents, retired judges and other experts.”