The Democratic Party meets in Philadelphia this week at its national convention to name a presidential nominee and adopt a party platform. The latest version of the platform released late last week holds the same principals on climate change and energy agreed to at the last meeting of the party platform, held in Orlando on July 8-9.
This election’s Democratic platform is unique as the platform committee was not selected solely by the party’s nominee, because at the time the 15 panel members were appointed in May there was no clear nominee. Therefore, instead of the platform essentially being built on the campaign promises of Hillary Clinton, who has since emerged as the Democratic nominee, committee members appointed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who ran a more liberal campaign, had some say in the final document.
Sanders named five drafting committee members, Clinton named six, and the rest were appointed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), chair of the Democratic National Committee.
The first drafts of the platform rejected several of the Sanders camp’s priorities, including a carbon tax, a ban on fracking, the end of fossil fuel leasing on federal lands, and mandating that federal agencies consider the potential climate effect of their actions.
In Orlando, however, the groups were able to agree on a “unity” amendment, integrating many of Sanders’ ideals into the platform, save for the fracking ban.
“Democrats believe that carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases should be priced to reflect their negative externalities, and to accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy and help meet our climate goals,” the platform says.
The platform also includes several provisions from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s energy plan. “We are committed to getting 50 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources within a decade, with half a billion solar panels installed within four years and enough renewable energy to power every home in the country,” the document says, mirroring the candidate’s energy plan.
The platform also addresses the current tax code, calling for elimination of “special tax breaks and subsidies for fossil fuel companies as well as defending and extending tax incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy.”
The Democrats are calling for the implementation and extension of the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon emissions standards for existing coal-fired power plants, stating that “climate change is too important to wait for climate deniers and defeatists in Congress to start listening to science.”
The platform ridicules the climate beliefs of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump: “While Donald Trump says that climate change is a “hoax” created by and for the Chinese, Democrats recognize the catastrophic consequences facing our country, our planet, and civilization.”
Democrats, on the contrary, “share a deep commitment to tackling the climate challenge; creating millions of good-paying middle class jobs; reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050; and meeting the pledge President Obama put forward in the landmark Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperature increases to ‘well below’ two degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” the platform says.
