I never got around to wrapping up the Colorado CD-2 energy and climate debate from last Tuesday so here goes.
I’ll start with this: I agree with Will Shafroth’s opening premise that climate and energy are the defining issues of our time.
Health care, education, war, crime, poverty, taxes. These and a host of others are all issues we deal with in every election, issues we’ve been writing legislation on for decades and centuries, and therefore issues on which we will only ever see incremental change. Climate change is new, unplowed ground. Further, climate change, and the energy challenges wrapped around it, has popped upon us as the one issue that — if we do not solve it — makes all the other issues irrelevant.
Not only is dealing with climate change the biggest challenge we face as a nation, it is also the one that a CD-2 rep can have the most impact on. In the 111th Congressional session, only one issue is going to see massive, ground-breaking movement and it is climate change and the energy legislation that goes with it. Any movement that health care, education or foreign policy do see in the next session will be incremental at most. There will be no major changes to the status quo on those issues and thus little for a CD-2 rep to have influence on. Climate change is a different story. An economy-wide climate change bill is going to be written while one of these three is in Congress, and this bill is going to have long-ranging impacts.
The 111th Session is likely to be the first time this country has seen a suite of bills that reach every component of the economy. The bills are new, still largely unwritten, especially on the House side, and so the chances for our CD-2 rep to have influence on the outcome — especially if that rep comes in with expertise on the subject — is much, much greater than for the other issues I mentioned. Either of our three candidates will have a choice of committee assignments when they hit D.C. Of the three candidates, only Shafroth will make climate and energy his top priority. So while Joan Fitz-Gerald and Jared Polis would give us reliable, predictable votes on energy and climate bills, their biggest priorities — ostensibly labor for JFG and education JP — will not be on influencing what will become the most important package legislation that we will pass in a generation.
As far as the debate itself, I came into the debate having closely vetted the positions on the three candidates and the debate did nothing to change my conclusions. After watching the debate I believe more than ever that there is clear separation between the three candidates. Some observers and blog commenters elsewhere have shaped this as a race between three identical candidates. It is clearly not. At least on climate and energy, the distinctions I made between them on March 10 still stands: Shafroth stands out, Polis is a quick study, and Fitz-Gerald isn’t engaged.
As I suspected she would, JFG pegged her expertise in climate/energy on bills she had helped carry in the state Senate. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t indicate deep knowledge of or engagement in the subject. Indeed, Fitz-Gerald so often name-dropped on people she knows or has worked with, and relied so heavily on railing against the Bush Administration’s malfeasance (it was part of her opening and closing remarks, and certainly appeared throughout her answers), that it distracted from answering the issues being debated. I took her tangents and non-sequiturs as direct proof that she is not engaged in this issue. She might have gotten high marks from audience members who soaked up the anti-W stuff, but she didn’t get high marks from this observer who knows the issues well and was listening for real answers. Joan had two good answers all night, one on nuclear and one on China and coal. I don’t agree with her answer on nuclear but I appreciate the nuance. Her point was that you have to know your district and CD-2 has had too many bad experiences with nuclear to make it worth fighting for here. On coal, her quote was something like, “I think we’re crazy if we think China’s not going to use its huge coal reserves to make itself an industrial giant.” She segued that point into one about carbon sequestration (although she didn’t connect the dots well and missed the key point: that the Chinese won’t pursue CCS on their own and will need our research investment in the technology handed to them).
As I suspected he would, Jared Polis had some good talking points and had studied up on the issues, but doesn’t seem to hold a deep well of knowledge on them. The biggest indication of this to me was the reliance on his stock issue, corruption and special interests. He brought up the special interests angle in his opening remarks and returned to it throughout, making the oil/gas industries and their political influence the reason we are in a bind. Much as I saw JFG’s point straying as smoke-and-mirrors distractions to cover up a lack of depth on the issue, I see JP’s reliance on the special interest bogeyman as the same kind of distraction. (Maybe it’s just because I reject Polis’ point on special interests. We all have special interests. The term is only pejorative when those interests are aligned against you. But even when they are aligned with you, Jared, they’re still special interests.) Maybe bogeyman-poking plays well to the ultra-lib audience in attendance, but if so, let’s wake up, people! The oil and gas industries are the middlemen. We are the consumers. We are the problem, and we need to be the solution. While Polis made some good points, sometimes did seem to have the best answer on a question, and clearly outperformed Joan Fitz-Gerald, his performance was not overwhelming.
Will Shafroth clearly gets it. He connects the dots, and this was best illustrated by his CFL prop ploy. On a question about population control (see 7:09 PM entry in this post), Will first talked about getting women in developing countries actively involved in their own businesses. He then moved on to the origin of what has become the Stuff White People Like of the energy world: compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Pulling a CFL out of his pocket was tangential on the face of it, but linking CFL production with where and in what environment they are produced, with the fact that they are produced in countries that cannot afford to have any focus on human and environmental health was spot-on. The answers said to me that Shafroth gets what JP and JFG don’t: environmental progress in the U.S. means nothing without global environmental progress, and if we want global progress, the economies and thus the standard of living of developing countries must somehow be brought nearer to the levels we enjoy. We can afford to think about the environment, but until citizens in developing countries can likewise afford such a luxury, there will be no progress and we will continue to export our environmental problems (mercury in CFL’s, to use the operative example) to places that cannot afford them.
Finally, for what it’s worth, coverage in the local papers was terrible, a complete disservice to the community. The Daily Camera covered the debate as if everybody sounded the same, missing all of the important issues and moments and giving irrelevant quotes. The Denver Post story was about the same. A few reader comments on the Daily Camera story shape it up better, but not enough to make the story complete. The DC and DP stories made it clear to me that the local press is totally uninterested in covering this race. There are clear differences between the candidates, but I hope none of the campaigns are relying on the press to explain them to the voters.
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