Hothouse 2020: An out-of-bounds look at election day and what it could mean for the climate
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Welcome everyone to The Run-Up, a podcast from The Real News Network that's going to help you stay informed, engaged, and empowered this election season. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I'm the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and we've got another important installment of The Run-Up for y'all today.

In this climate-focused episode of The Run-Up, our climate reporters Aman Azhar and Steve Horn cover the rights of nature, an emerging people's third party, the future of global climate reparations, and they speak to Democratic mega-donor and 2020 Democratic primary candidate Tom Steyer. Let's go.

Welcome to this special Real News Network edition of The Run-Up. I'm the host and climate correspondent, Aman Azhar. And I'm Real News Network climate correspondent, Steve Horn. In the past few months, we have witnessed a host of climate-related emergencies, including continuing wildfires in the West, floods, and record number of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico.

Climate change also came roaring back in this year's elections debate and became a strategic handshake between the progressive and conservative-leaning Democrats. But questions remain over Biden's take on fracking and reliance on questionable solutions such as carbon capture and sequestration.

In the first interview for this episode of The Run-Up, I put some tough questions to Tom Stare, a San Francisco Bay Area based retired hedge fund manager and a major Democratic Party donor who also campaigned to be a 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. And I began by asking him, why are Democrats and Republicans trying to outbid each other on the issue of fracking? Take a listen. The schedule

That the biden plan has us moving off fossil fuels. It is really aggressive. So do I understand? That there are real issues with fracking. Yes, of course I do but I think if you look at the biden plan Including the two trillion dollars up front in the first four years to rebuild infrastructure build clean infrastructure Around the country if you look at a hundred percent, you know, uh greenhouse gas neutral

by 2050 economy-wide, and you look at the time when we're going to have 100% clean electricity generation, I think it answers the questions in a big way. And I think that that's appropriate. And I know that Joe Biden deeply cares about this because I've talked to him about it multiple times. I know that he's very knowledgeable about it. And so I think that the plan itself is a good answer for the question.

They could have phrased it in terms of transitioning the way you were explaining it, but they didn't. They said clearly that they're just going to oppose it. So which makes one kind of confused, kind of confusing whether they're Democrats or Republicans, because you can't tell who's trying to frack more. Well, I'll say this. There is a gigantic chasm between what Joe Biden represents, how he cares about climate change,

and Donald Trump, who we've heard repeatedly, both Donald Trump and Mike Pence in these debates, refuse to answer any question about energy or climate in any meaningful way. And I think the key question here is, does he understand not just that we need to address the climate crisis? Because look, you wouldn't be asking these questions the way you are if you absolutely didn't know how urgent it was.

But that is almost a way of thinking about it vertically. I think the best thing about the Biden plan is that he understands we can't just attack climate. This is a hugely economic issue that goes throughout our society in the deepest way. So his plan...

When you spend $2 trillion in four years, you create millions of good paying jobs. And Joe Biden really relates to this through the idea of those jobs and the union workers who need them and the families that need a decent middle class living wage. So let me ask you this then. Go ahead. Let's take the Green New Deal, which both parties have distanced themselves from. Green New Deal, which

which also ties into 2018 UN report, which says that we have until 2030 to do a serious reversal of climate change. Do you think a Green New Deal is necessary? It's green. That's new. Look, the point of the Green New Deal

which I thought was a huge step forward, was to do exactly what I was just trying to describe, Iman, was to say, you don't do climate in a vacuum. You do climate in the context of the economy and the world we're in. You do climate as a way to address unemployment and jobs and the need for better pay and stronger unions. You do it as a way of addressing pollution,

And what we're seeing, look, the Green New Deal is the government setting up a framework. And, you know, that was just it really was an idea. It's an idea.

about coming in with a broad-based approach to climate, which is exactly what the Biden plan does. I understand the point. The point that I'm laying this out is because the rest of the civilized world or the Western world, especially Europe I'm referring to, they're actually aligning their politics according to the Green New Deal, which is closely tying into Paris agreements and other kind

kind of instruments that we have to watch where we are headed in terms of climate change. But the phrasing, Tom, matters. When you say that you're not going to adhere to framing, you're not going to adhere to things like that, you send out a message, clear one. Look, we are in an urgent crisis. You know, I quit my job eight years ago because we are in an urgent crisis, and it didn't make sense to me not to be focused on solving something that I thought would

endanger the safety and lives of people all over the world. And by the way, literally all over the world. And so when I talk about climate, I'm not coming at this from the point of, you know, there's some things in politics that people fight over really, really hard. And there might be a right and a wrong answer, but I don't think there's God in the distinction between a 36 and a 39% tax rate. It's like, there might be a right answer, but

You know, it's not something that's going to shake the world in 100 years. People are going to say, man, Amman was for 36. Is that crazy? It was 39 was right. But this, this is something where we're looking at an impact on every person in the world, every single American citizen. We're looking at something that can grossly damage health, endanger lives, destroy our economy and cause strife all over the world. And so I see it. And, you know, I'm sure you read,

the same scientific reports that I read to try and keep abreast of how we're doing. So I am very, very focused. I live in California. I mean, we're not imagining the climate crisis. We're not projecting the climate crisis. We are living the climate crisis right now. Great interview, Aman. We'll have more on the role of progressives within the Democratic Party and outside of it later in the show. For now, a fight over the rights of nature.

The global order is governed by a system of human rights. The U.S. legal system is governed by civil rights. But what about nature's rights? In one of Florida's most populous counties, a grassroots movement got a Rights of Nature ordinance on the ballot. Here's how it fits into the global movement to codify these rights in the name of tackling the climate crisis and saving biodiversity. Florida is always a key presidential battleground state, and 2020 will be no different.

It's also a state at the center of the climate crisis. Climate change poses a threat to cities like Miami via sea level rise, is causing ever intensifying hurricanes and leading to increasingly intense heat in the Sunshine State. In the midst of these threats, environmental activists in Orange County, Florida, home of Orlando and Disney World, have taken things into their own hands. They say current environmental regulations in Florida fail to protect local waterways.

Citing that failure, they are pushing a ballot measure on Election Day, granting rights of nature to Orange County's rivers and other bodies of water.

Here's Chuck O'Neill, Director-at-Large for the Florida Rights of Nature Network. So in 2018, it kind of all came to a head and you probably saw it because it was national news. The guacamole water that we had in our estuaries and bays here, it was killing thousands of marine mammals and fish.

We have blue-green algae, which produces toxins, microcystins, and things like that that actually affect brains in humans and can lead to Alzheimer's. So this is a problem that's not an overnight problem, but it's been building up for years due to poor regulation and enforcement of our regulations.

The BAL Initiative push and the broader statewide network is a piece of a growing global rights to nature movement. Mary Margo, Executive Director of the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, says the movement has arisen in pockets across the U.S. because the environmental law apparatus legalizes ecological ruin. We have environmental laws at the federal level and at our state level, such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act,

those legalized activities that bring known environmental harm such as fracking or industrial hog farming or mining or other things. And of course, the consequences that we're seeing ecosystems collapse around the globe, we're seeing species extinction accelerate far faster than normal background rates, and of course, climate change. Instead, Margo says the fight in Florida exemplifies a need for a legal paradigm shift.

Now, there are people who are seeing their communities being environmentally harmed. They're seeing the rivers and the waters that they depend on being harmed. And they're moving in a new direction, which is recognizing that the current existing conventional environmental law that legalizes this environmental harm is not going to move us to a place of environmental protection. For O'Neill's group, the path toward winning rights for nature has proven turbulent.

Months after getting the ordinance on the ballot, the Florida legislature passed legislation denying local governments from enacting, quote,

any legal rights to a plant, an animal, a body of water, or any part of the natural environment, unquote. So they knew exactly what they were doing with the body of water. They knew what we were working on. According to a Real News review of committee hearing documents, the legislation received lobbying support from the Farm Bureau and Agricultural Coalition, Chamber of Commerce, and Home Builders Association.

He is Representative Blaise N'Goglio, the former chair of the Florida Republican Party and bill author, at a February 12th hearing speaking on behalf of the law. Issuing permits may be nearly impossible with this heightened standard of review, and the challenges to the issuance of these permits would be much harder to defend. This will be chaos and will damage our tremendous economy. The Florida Rights of Nature Network member group behind the ballot measure, Speak Up Wakeva,

responded to the law's passage by suing Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican ally of President Donald Trump. Speak Up Waukeva argues the legislation is unconstitutional under the 9th and 14th Amendments, quote, by infringing upon Florida citizens' constitutional right to local self-government, unquote.

If victorious on Election Day, O'Neill says he expects litigation from governments and industry. It's like, you know, the ballot initiative is getting through the playoffs, right? And then we get to the championship. Before that, though, those behind the ballot measure have to win first on Election Day.

Even though Florida is a contested battleground state, O'Neill says the right of nature ballot measure has ushered in a bipartisan and multiracial grassroots movement.

We have a lot of transplants from Puerto Rico. And the Puerto Rican community has taken a special interest in this, as well as the Black community, because these are two communities who are largely affected by pollution. Let's turn to the global stage now.

The United States formally exits the Paris Agreement on November 4, one day after the presidential election. The Paris Agreement is a global handshake to rein in greenhouse gas emissions and keep the global average temperature under 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also provides further financial means for developing countries where a majority of the world's poor are based to cope with the challenges of climate change and global warming.

Now, Joe Biden has committed to rejoining Paris Agreement if he wins the election. But what if he doesn't win? And what does the American presidential election mean for the global effort to confront the climate crisis, in particular for developing countries? I put this question to Professor David Ohr, a Paul Sears Distinguished Professor for Environmental Studies and Politics and author of several books on the subject. That's a complicated subject, as you know.

And I think on one side, let me just mention two parts of it. At one side of this, this is a moral issue. If you look at the amount of carbon the global north has put into the atmosphere, the United States, one of the largest, we bear a burden of having left this legacy of climate change go for so long. So it's a moral issue. Who did the most to harm the global climate? Well, it was the industrialized north.

The other thing I would say is that given the development of technology, which has been very rapid, the global south should not replicate the infrastructure of the electric grid or nuclear power plants or coal burning plants. We know enough that the combination of advanced efficiency, now technically possible, economically feasible,

and renewable energy, whether it's biomass or solar photovoltaics or wind power, can make up the difference. So to put together entirely different energy scenarios. So that means that aid organizations, UN and private organizations and private foundations,

should be spending money and helping to invest in that new infrastructure. I think it would be a profitable investment, but it should not replicate what we did in building the largest machine on the planet is the electric grid. And there's no necessity. It's simply an expense. It doesn't have to be incurred. And combustion should not be part of that energy future. This should be a future driven by wind power, solar electricity, and then

Advanced efficiency. And I mentioned a third thing, and that is simply better design, where you're eliminating a good bit of a need to have energy because you've designed a society where things are proximate. Housing is proximate to employment and shopping. You build more densely designed cities and better designed cities.

Right. And could you say if under the Biden presidency, if that happens, how could the United States specifically help the developing countries to combat the threats from climate change and global warming? Well, I think there are a number of things, starting with U.S. leadership on its own case. I mean, the United States has got to take very seriously a climate policy.

for our own sake, but for the world itself. And I think U.S. leadership is an important part of this. It's been absent for

the past four years. It took President Obama into a second administration before he got actively involved in the issue. But U.S. leadership is one thing. And then the second thing is technology transfers and the means to move technology worldwide. The third thing is financing of renewable energy systems. And these ought to be, whether in the United States or third world, ought to be employment positive. They ought to be good investments. They ought to make money, put people to work.

So the idea here is to take the climate challenge, which appears to be an overwhelming challenge, and use our response to solve multiple problems. Good stuff, Aman. In at least one key area, Joe Biden has pledged to rejoin a global initiative to usher in sustainable development in the global south.

It's called the Green Climate Fund, a financing vehicle funded by the Global North countries to spur green growth in the Global South. Here's President Obama discussing that initiative in 2014. We are going to contribute $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund so we can help developing nations deal with climate change. Along with the other nations that have pledged support, this gives us the opportunity to

to help vulnerable communities. The fund is still in its early years. It has raised $7.2 billion so far and spent $4.6 billion on projects. Participating countries recently pledged an additional $10 billion, far short of the $100 billion per year pledged by 2020 for participating countries over half a decade ago.

With that shortfall in mind, I spoke to Lane Shalatek, Associate Director of the Heinrich Boll Siftung North America, the U.S. nonprofit wing of the German Green Party, about the past and future of the Green Climate Fund. Well, thank you for joining us on The Real News Network, Leanne.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Really excited to be with you. President Trump announced that he would be charging his administration to leave the Paris Climate Accord. And as part of that, the administration would also be leaving the Green Climate Fund, or at least ending its obligations under the Green Climate Fund. Here's a clip from when he said that. The United States will cease...

implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country. This includes ending the Green Climate Fund, which is costing the United States a vast

So, Leanne, what is the significance of that announcement by Trump and what has it meant in the past few years since that announcement in 2017? The Paris agreement, the Paris accord is the most important multilateral effort.

to try to combat climate change. And with the United States as historically the biggest polluter, it's important that the US plays a part, both in the Paris Accord itself and its implementation, but also more importantly, in supporting developing countries and doing their bit, their climate actions

in fulfillment of the Paris Agreement. And the Green Climate Fund is actually the most important financial multilateral mechanism to try to do that to support developing countries. So in Trump announcing that he would not continue supporting the Green Climate Fund, that effectively meant that the commitment that the Obama administration has made, namely to pay in $3 billion

US dollars in the Green Climate Fund did not come to pass because the Obama administration, by the time it left, had only paid in one billion, and that means two billion were left unpaid. So the US is in arrears. It's actually owing the Green Climate Fund money. That's the one thing. Second, obviously, is the signal that it sends. The Green Climate Fund last year, and with the US,

not only for not fulfilling its debt, but also not contributing, it's a very bad signal. So the Green Climate Fund, obviously, by most people in the progressive climate spheres ecosystem, if you will, is a great ideal, but

As those like your organization and others have pointed out, it feels like so far in the past decade or so in existence, execution has been maybe a little bit subpar of what the vision is. Can you talk a little bit more both about that and also the kind of things that

your organization and those you work with in coalitions would be pushing Biden to do if he were elected president on the Green Climate Fund? So there is obviously a lot of room for improvement. What I think is really important

to keep in mind. So again, it's the most important multilateral climate fund and it's the one in which a lot of developing countries put the most stock. It's one where developing countries have an equal voice to develop countries in making fund decisions, which for example is not the case in multilateral development banks, which are also supporting climate action.

but there is room to do a lot more, for example, making it easier for developing countries to access, while at the same time making sure that the money benefits the most vulnerable people in the most vulnerable countries the most. So going forward, when we are looking at what a Biden presidency would do, first of all, obviously, we hope that they would rejoin the Paris Agreement immediately.

and the Biden campaign, the Biden-Harris campaign had said that they would do exactly that. But then we obviously want them to go further. First of all, they need to pay up the $2 billion that they owe, which was a commitment under the Obama administration. But this is not enough. And there we really would hope that...

the Biden presidency would do not only paying the $2 billion in arrears, but contributing up to $6 billion. And I guess lastly, just to give some tangible examples, what have the top...

achievements been so far in its short existence of the Green Climate Fund? What would you point to if those who are curious about as things, projects that it's funded or things that are in the works right now? Well, I personally would say one of its biggest impact because obviously while it is a 10 billion fund, 10 billion is very

little in terms of what is needed overall. I think one of the biggest impact is the fact that it's really working with a large array of international organizations, commercial banks, national institutions. So they have what is called up

to over 100 implementing entities right now. So it's a signaling function that they do with all of their projects, collaborations and approaches that extends actually pretty widely into the climate finance architecture. They have pretty forward-looking policies on gender, on indigenous peoples, on environmental and social protection. And I think this is showing a signal that a good climate project is not just looking

at reducing emissions or building the resiliencies of a couple of people, but it's looking actually at a lot of other benefits that need to be provided and in ways that actually support the poorest people the most. It has done a lot of great work on particularly

renewable energy and addressing energy poverty in a lot of developing countries where actually poor communities can leapfrog from not having any electricity access at all to going straight to renewable energy. We have a couple of larger scale projects

that look at ecosystem restoration, the role that forests play. This is very important, sustainable transport. So I think there are a number of projects that are showcasing where you could go and how you could ramp it up if more money is available. Thanks for that, Steve.

The 2020 Democratic Party primaries depicted sharp distinctions between the progressive wing of the party led by Bernie Sanders and the more moderate wing that Joe Biden commands. Here's a story by Steve Horn about activists, many of them former Sanders staffers, pushing for a party that breaks free from the Democrats. Climate concerns are a central part of their push. Progressive climate activists have come to a near consensus that

If elected, Joe Biden's climate plan will fall far short of what climate science dictates. It promotes fracking, enhance oil recovery, doesn't halt fossil fuel subsidies, and doesn't take on climate change causing agribusiness. It also offers a net zero by 2050 greenhouse gas emissions goal, far longer than most scientists say is needed to act on the crisis.

It was these very issues that inspired Bernie Sanders to run twice, in 2016 and 2020, as a progressive insurgent within the Democratic Party. But he also lost twice with strong resistance from the Democratic establishment. This has prompted many to say that progressive change doesn't happen within a corporate-funded party.

One of them is climate scientist Peter Kalmas. "Both parties are clearly beholden to the fossil fuel industry. It's as simple as that. Both parties take donations. One party certainly is in hard denial. They actually say this is a hoax, which just makes my head explode. But the other party also takes donations. The other party also participates in the revolving door." Kalmas spoke at the Movement for a People's Party convention in September.

That grassroots party is an outgrowth of the Bernie Sanders campaign, originally called Draft Bernie for a People's Party. Sanders never joined the party and has gone all in on the Biden campaign. Nick Brawnia, former National Political Outreach Coordinator for Sanders for the 2016 cycle, who founded the Draft Bernie Sanders for a People's Party and the Movement for a People's Party, spoke about the role climate change played in his decision to create a new party.

We face an economic crisis, racial justice crisis, a health crisis, a planetary crisis. The western half of the United States is engulfed in wildfires. If we don't fight now, there will be nothing left to fight for. We have to make our stand. The Movement for People's Party doesn't have a presidential candidate for 2020, saying it wants to begin running congressional candidates by 2022.

For Jonathan Martin, author of the book Empowering Progressive Third Parties in the United States: Defeating Duopoly, Advancing Democracy, he believes the Movement for a People's Party should reassess that goal. Personally, I think that's incredible to think that a third party can make that kind of progress. So it's certainly not a bottom-up approach. I have some serious doubts about that. But Martin also thinks the Movement for a People's Party has one major thing going for it.

It's not the Green Party.

The Green Party ticket of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker is polling at 1% nationally, according to an early October Pew Research poll. There's a sense that the Green Party has stagnated. The number of candidates they've elected has gone down in recent years. There's a sense that they are widely perceived to be not viable, not serious, because they run a lot of candidates who lose by huge margins. Yet Hawkins says that the scale of the climate crisis

and the lack of ambition in the climate plans of Biden and congressional Democrats moved him to run for the Oval Office in 2020. Trump calls climate change a hoax, and it's basically the old Democrats' all-of-the-above energy policy. Frack the hell out of the country for natural gas and oil and subsidize nuclear power.

It's a climate disaster, frankly. Here's Hawkins running mate Angela Walker speaking about the Green New Deal, a proposal to create millions of jobs and retool the U.S. economy to fight the climate crisis. The current frontrunner for the Democratic Party in their presidential election is not even talking about the Green New Deal anymore. She added that the Green New Deal...

which Hawkins campaigned on when running for governor in New York in 2010 and Jill Stein campaigned on when running for president in 2012 and 2016, has been watered down by U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other Democratic backers.

Their team calls for an eco-socialist Green New Deal. You know, we're big fans, obviously, we're socialists, of cooperatives, you know, putting the resources in people's hands. And that, you know, I would argue is the biggest difference between the eco-socialist Green New Deal and what the Democrats were calling a Green New Deal. For Movement for People's Party founder Nick Brawnia, it comes back to a simple premise.

follow the money. There is no such thing as a candidate or a party, a people's candidate or a people's party that takes corporate money. It's an oxymoron. You cannot serve the Wall Street oligarchs and Wall Street and corporations and the military industrial complex and the prison industrial complex and big oil and big act and the people. That was Steve Horne.

This also brings us to the end of this episode of The Run-Up. For myself and my colleague Steve Horn, it's goodbye and stay safe out there. All right. Thank you for listening to this installment of The Run-Up. We've got lots more election coverage coming your way, so stay tuned.

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