Climate coverage in the 2020 election is set to reach unprecedented levels this week, with CNN’s seven-hour “Climate Crisis Town Hall” slated for September 4. It will be the most attention ever devoted to climate change in a presidential campaign, far eclipsing the meager (and yet somehow also record-setting) 20-minute discussion of climate change at the second Democratic debate.

But don’t conflate quantity with quality. The seven-hour marathon will in essence be a series of disconnected interviews, featuring generalist CNN anchors like Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cuomo asking individual candidates about their plans for climate action. The structure is almost sure to result in low viewership and superficial answers from candidates operating in isolated, 40-minute silos. Meanwhile, climate change continues to threaten the stability of human civilization. July was the hottest month ever recorded. The Amazon is on fire. Bedrock environmental statutes are under attack from the highest levels of government. Climate change is the defining crisis of our time, and it deserves top billing in the 2020 presidential campaign. The fact that it hasn’t received that so far is the fault of the Democratic National Committee, which voted in late August not only to not hold a climate-specific debate, but also to bar Democratic candidates from participating in independent climate debates.

There are no good-faith reasons to bar a climate debate. The two most common arguments against having a debate, deployed frequently and easily by Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez, are that having a climate debate will take candidates away from the campaign trail and unleash a deluge of single-issue debates. Those arguments, in essence, boil down to the idea that allowing a climate debate will alter the status quo of establishment politics, which makes the DNC uneasy. To which the answer can only be: If solutions to climate change that challenge the status quo make you uneasy, you either don’t understand the magnitude of the problem or you’re too scared to actually do what it takes to solve it.

The absurdity of the national party’s cowardice with respect to the climate crisis becomes even more shocking when one considers just how committed both voters and candidates are to the idea of a climate debate. In July, a CNN poll asked 50,000 viewers what issue they’d like to hear about most in a presidential debate. Climate change was the top answer, eclipsing both the economy and health care—topics lavished with such attention that they essentially have gotten their own debates—by more than a thousand votes. Meanwhile, the majority of Democratic presidential candidates—including front-runners like former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)—support the idea of a separate climate debate.

That means that, when it comes to the biggest crisis of our time, the only thing standing between the will of the Democratic voters and a prime-time debate on climate change are the 222 DNC members that voted against a climate debate. Because the DNC is an organizational institution rather than a public-facing political entity, the list of members who voted against the debate has not been made public, making it even more difficult for voters to hold the party accountable for its unconscionable decision. Without the DNC providing a public explanation for why it refuses to let candidates participate in a climate debate, voters are left with milquetoast platitudes and a party apparatus that has accepted tens of thousands of dollars in donations from fossil fuel executives. It’s a very bad look, and a dangerous calculation. The DNC is, essentially, telling voters that it is willing to risk the future of the world for the sake of the status quo, and betting that because voters who care about climate have nowhere else to go, they’ll stay engaged in the party anyway.