Pence On Climate "Policy" Shows That Getting Rid Of His Boss Won't Be Nearly Enough

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And yet Pence could not even say it's a threat. He waffled on the scientific consensus that it is real. He pivoted to a claim about how Obama intended to "skyrocket" utility rates—which appears to reference a cap-and-trade plan Pence himself first attacked, with the same line of rhetoric, in 2009. That plan did not pass and is not in effect. There is obviously no evidence that the Green New Deal would "break the economy," which is a child's assessment. For instance, wind and solar power are now cheaper than coal in much of the United States, and getting cheaper by the week. And note the snide delivery on "green technologies," as if they're something to be mocked rather than the way to produce the energy we need while avoiding climate catastrophe.

But he was not done.

TAPPER: So you don't think it's a threat.
PENCE: I think we're making great progress reducing carbon emissions. America has the cleanest air and water in the world, we'll continue to use market—
TAPPER: It's not true. We don't have the cleanest air and water in the world.

Tapper is right. This zombie lie, which Pence borrowed from our president, will not go away. Trump frequently says things like "we're setting records environmentally," despite the fact that, according to the AP, air quality has not improved under his administration. Obama set the records in 2016. In 2017, Trump's first year, the number of “unhealthy days for ozone and fine particle pollution" in 35 major cities spiked 20 percent year-over-year. That's according to Trump's own EPA. According to the State of Global Air 2019 report cited by AP, we're eighth-best in terms of particle pollution, which kills 85,000 Americans every year. On overall environmental quality, Yale University’s global Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. 27th—though we're one of 10 countries tied for cleanest drinking water.

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But never mind all that. We've got to listen to the Vice President of the United States extol the virtues of "clean" coal—which is not real—in 2019, when the Midwest is submerged in biblical floods and the permafrost is melting 70 years early and the Arctic is turning into the Caribbean. The only goddamn sensible thing that Pence said is that nuclear power will, as it stands, probably need to be part of the mix if we want to cut emissions while supplying the energy we need. But the rest of it was the usual two-step.

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https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a28166786/mike-pence-climate-change-jake-tapper-donald-trump/