AEA’s Top 10 Questions That Should (But Won’t) Be Asked at CNN’s Climate Town Hall Tonight

WASHINGTON DC (September 4, 2019) – Today, the American Energy Alliance (AEA) delivered to CNN a list of questions it has suggested be asked during tonight’s presidential town hall focused on the issue of climate change.
 
AEA President Thomas Pyle made the following statement:

“That fact that the Democratic National Committee, the entity responsible for identifying and promoting the issues most important to the party, voted against a climate focused debate is telling. Voters continually rank the economy, rising health care costs, education, immigration – in fact just about everything else – as more important than climate change. Tonight, while American families worry about making ends meet, the Democrats running for president will be working hard to outbid each other on who can raise electricity and gasoline prices the highest, and the fastest. Since CNN is going forward with this ratings bomb anyway, AEA hopes that at least the moderators will ask the types of questions the public really wants to know.”

Here are AEA’s top ten questions for the Democratic presidential hopefuls participating in tonight’s CNN town hall:

1. If climate change is an existential threat, do you support the rapid construction of nuclear power plants, which are a zero-emission proven technology that doesn’t suffer from problems of unreliability like wind and solar?
2. The policies associated with addressing climate change often make energy more expensive, disproportionately harming the poor, elderly and minorities. What is your plan to keep hundreds of thousands of Americans from plunging into poverty due of the implementation of your climate plan?
3. In his research, William Nordhaus – who won the Nobel Memorial Prize for his work on the economics of climate change policy – shows that the UN’s temperature targets would cause far more damage than benefits. Does that concern you at all? What is your ideal temperature for the globe?
4. According to standard modeling, even if all governments (including the U.S.) met their Paris Agreement pledges, the world would still experience at least 3.0 degrees Celsius of warming, blowing well past the UN’s recommended safe range of 1.5C – 2C. At what point should we admit that President Trump was right to exit an agreement that would have caused undue economic harm to American families while doing nothing to save us from the impending catastrophe that you are warning us about?
5.  Will you provide the public with an audit of your campaign’s carbon footprint?
6. Are you in favor or opposed to carbon dioxide?
7. The Washington Post reported that Cong. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s Chief of Staff said the Green New Deal “wasn’t originally a climate thing at all … we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Is that how you look at it? Is this actually a way to put politicians in control of consumer’s energy decisions?
8. Technology often associated with a green energy economy, such as battery storage or renewable energy forms like solar panels, rely on rare earth minerals which must be mined. How can you be for these types of technologies, but against the industry that must produce them?
9. If rising sea levels are a certainty, do you have a comment on why President & Mrs. Obama recently purchased a $15 million-dollar beach house on Martha’s Vineyard?  What do they know that we don’t?
10. Given that Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who centered his presidential campaign on the issue of climate change and who has failed three times impose a carbon tax on families in his state, has already dropped out of the race, where do you rank climate change on your list of platform priorities?

The town hall is scheduled to air live on CNN at 5:00 p.m. EST and expected to last seven hours long.

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