2019 Town Hall: on Environment

Amy Klobuchar: Environmental justice: impacted community gets what's needed

KLOBUCHAR: I do have a price on my plan. What I would do is first of all putting a price on carbon, and you can do this with cap-and-trade, or you can do it with simply a carbon tax, or you can do it with a combination with the renewable electricity standard. That alone will bring in trillions of dollars. And some of that can be used to help communities that are going to be affected by this, and make sure people have jobs coming out of this. Then the other part about it is environmental justice, right? And making sure that the communities that are most affected get the help that they need. Once you repeal parts of that Republican tax bill that were so regressive, using some of that money for infrastructure, you get the funding you need--the $2 trillion to $3 trillion range, part of it is with matching funds.

Amy Klobuchar: Supports Endangered Species Act, but supports de-listing

KLOBUCHAR: Let me make very clear, I am strongly in favor of the Endangered Species Act. I have always supported the Endangered Species Act, and I would do anything to reverse some of the suggestions that the president has made recently to repeal it or to water it down. The wolf in Minnesota, what you are referring to, is a situation where they actually made the numbers in a big way to get off the endangered species list. President Obama's administration supported getting the wolves off of the list. If you follow the rules--once you're over the number of animals then you should allow them to be delisted--otherwise it doesn't really make sense. So that's where we are on that right now, and we'll see what happens if this time the plan will make it through the courts and obviously if they go below the levels they should be delisted.

Andrew Yang: Reformulate GDP to account for clean air & clean water

YANG: The first thing I would do is rejoin the Paris Accords. And then I would we redefine our economic bench marks actually to include environmental sustainability. Because right now, the trap that Democrats are in is that, we're being told that moving towards a green economy is bad for jobs, it's bad for business, and that couldn't be further from the truth. We actually need to redefine our economic measurements to include clean air and clean water and let America.

Q: How do you change that?

YANG: Well the great thing is we made up GPD almost 100 years ago, really. And even the inventor of GPD at the time said this is a terrible measurement for national well-being and we should never use it as that. Let's upgrade it with a new score card that includes our environmental sustainability, health and life expectancy. [Then we won't] fall into this false dichotomy that what's good for the planet is bad for the economy.

Andrew Yang: Clean water is a fundamental human right

And this is, again, the problem with having the almighty dollar running our society, where people look up and say, "oh, replacing the pipes is expensive." Are you kidding me? You know what is expensive? Poisoning our kids.

Bernie Sanders: Deal with existing nuclear waste before creating any more

SANDERS: We got a heck of a lot of nuclear waste, which is going to stay around for many thousands of years. We don't know how to get rid of it right now. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to add more dangerous waste when we don't know how to get rid of what we have right now. Number two, it costs a lot more to build a new nuclear power plant today than it does to go to solar or to go to wind. So I think that it is safer and more cost effective to move to sustainable energies like wind, solar, and geothermal, and not nuclear.

Q: Can you go carbon neutral without nuclear in the short term?

SANDERS: I think you can. And I think the scientists tell us, in fact, that we can. And I think if you talk to the people in Japan in terms of what happened at Fukushima, talk to the people in Russia what happened in Chernobyl, they may not feel so comfortable with nuclear power.

Bernie Sanders: Reform FEMA to stop rebuilding in same place after storms

SANDERS: Yes.

Q: How would you implement those changes?

SANDERS: We have the absurd situation where FEMA will only pay to repair a facility or a piece of infrastructure where it was before it was destroyed. That's pretty stupid. I mean, if it was destroyed once and you rebuild it, it's destroyed twice, it doesn't make a lot of sense to put it there again. So the answer is, absolutely.

Q: So would people in coastal communities, have a house right on the beach, would they have to move?

SANDERS: Well, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to rebuild that house so that it is knocked down again in the next storm. You do your best through carrots and sticks at the federal level. But if people want to rebuild in an area which will be devastated by the next storm, they're certainly not going to get any federal assistance from my administration to do that.

Cory Booker: I'm vegan, but I won't take away your hamburgers

BOOKER: Oh my gosh. Let's go right at this because I hear about it all the time: "Booker wants to take away your hamburger."

Q: Well?

BOOKER: That is the kind of lies and fear-mongering that they spread out there, that somehow the Democrats want to get rid of hamburgers. Look, I am a vegan. I take my diet very seriously. I actually became a vegetarian when I was still a college football player. But this is the point: We live in a society right now, with the corporate consolidation that we're seeing, where the farming practices are becoming so perverse. And so let me tell you where we've got to go as a country. Freedom is one of the most sacred values--whatever you want to eat, go ahead and eat it. But I'm not going to be a president that's giving tax breaks to people who are destroying our environment.

Cory Booker: Next-generation nuclear power is safe with little waste

BOOKER: The disasters--from Chernobyl to Japan--trust me, when you live in a community as New Jersey does with nuclear plants--and my mom who lives in Nevada and all the righteous fights to protect what they plan to do at Yucca Mountain, I'm very aware of these things. And so I decided, I'm going to read everything I can about nuclear, I'm going to visit with nuclear scientists, and this is the exciting thing. Next generation nuclear, where the science is going, is to me, at first it sounded like science fiction. Where the science is going right now is "new nuclear": where you have no risk of the kind of meltdowns we're seeing, where they eat spent fuel rods. We actually can go to the kind of innovations that make nuclear safer or safe.

Cory Booker: Deforestation of Amazon started long before current fires

BOOKER: We may be noticing the fires but the crisis of the disappearing of rainforest on this planet have been happening every single day. More and more rainforest is being torn down, principally by the way for grazing lands and large international corporate animal agriculture and more. We have a crisis at a time that my plan calls for the planting of billions and billions of trees from urban areas that desperately need them to all throughout our nation. And by the way, they hear that number and they say, "oh, he's a big dreamer." We did it under FDR which was the last time we had the most massive period of reforestation from something that I'm going to reinvigorate, called the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Elizabeth Warren: Help Native Americans continue stewardship of their lands

WARREN: It's got to be hard to watch your homelands disappear. [In my climate plan] I want to work on this with the communities that are affected--making sure that this money goes down to the community level, that it doesn't go, I'll be blunt, to governors. [In all my policy plans], it's not going to be a one and done that's all confined. So, for example, on the policies about our federal government's relationship with our native tribes, it's about respecting the tribe's ability to take care of their own land, to be good stewards of the land. I will not approve any plans for the use of federal lands that can affect what happens on tribal lands--I will not do that without the prior informed consent of the neighboring tribes. I think that's how we help tribes be the stewards of the land that they have been for generations and I know they will be for generations to come.

Elizabeth Warren: We need a Blue New Deal to protect our oceans and fisheries

WARREN: I like that. We need a Blue New Deal, as well [a Green New Deal]. I just want to say on this one about the oceans. The rising acidification and the fact that now, in Boston, the lobsters move to Maine because it's too warm in the waters. I talk to folks who fish commercially off our shores [in Massachusetts]. They keep pulling stuff up that they don't even know what it is--[because those species used to get caught] off the coast of Florida. Here's what really scares me. This isn't slowing down. It's speeding up. We count on our oceans for life, not just for food, but what it means in our entire climate. So you want to call it a Blue New Deal, count me in. But part of getting the carbon out of the air, out of the water, out of the soil is also about the change in what's happening in our oceans.

Julian Castro: Backed fracking as mayor; leave bans to each community

CASTRO: She's right. When I was mayor of San Antonio, I did believe that there were opportunities to be had in fracking that was going on in South Texas. Back then, almost a decade ago, we had been saying that natural gas was a bridge fuel. We're coming to the end of the bridge. And my plan calls for moving toward clean, renewable, zero emission energy in the years to come. That's what I would focus on.

Q: So just to clarify on fracking, if you were president, would you ban fracking?

CASTRO: Look, I support local communities and states that want to ban fracking. I have not called for an immediate ban on fracking. hat I am doing is moving us away from fracking and natural gas and investing in wind energy, solar energy, other renewables to get us to net zero by 2045.

Julian Castro: Reinstate private right to sue polluters

CASTROI connect the dots to places like Flint, Michigan, and I know that too often it's people who are poor, and communities of color, who take the brunt. And so my plan actually calls for new civil rights legislation to be able to address environmental injustice, including making sure that there's a to make a claim. I want to vest that power back in the people so that when we can show a disparate impact of certain practices of companies, of polluters that everyday Americans are able to file suit to try and get some sort of recourse.

Julian Castro: PAW: connect the dots for Protecting Animals and Wildlife

CASTRO: We actually need to undo the damage that this administration has done and then expand the lands that we're protecting in our country. We can do that. A few weeks ago, I put out something that we called PAW, Protecting Animals and Wildlife. And I have to be honest with y'all, some people when they heard that, were like, what? You're putting out a plan to protect animals and wildlife? It's not usually something that a lot of presidential candidates do. But again, we need to connect the dots. I've connected the dots of actually preserving more of our lands both for the benefit of wildlife and for our benefit to combat climate change. And so we would go back and reclassify places like Bear's Ear and other land that this administration has gone backward on, and then look for other land that we can also protect and preserve. And we need to do it. We need to do it and we can do it.

Kamala Harris: Declare drinking water emergency on Day One

HARRIS: Well, I certainly would declare an emergency--a drinking water emergency. And, if you don't mind, I'm just going to stand. And, also, I think it's critically important that we immediately on day one get back in the Paris agreement. I think it's important that, on day one, we immediately ratify the Kigali agreement in terms of the Montreal Protocol and that amendment. And I think it's critically important, on day one, that we end any fossil fuel leases on public lands. And, that, I'm prepared to do on day one as a matter of executive action.

Kamala Harris: Ban fracking & offshore drilling

HARRIS: There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking, so yes. This is something I've taken on in California. I have a history of working on this issue. We have to acknowledge that the residual impact of fracking is enormous in terms of the impact on the health and safety of communities.

Q: Would you also ban offshore drilling?

HARRIS: Yes, and I've again, worked on that. You can talk to the folks in Santa Barbara about the work that I've done there where it's a big problem--but it's a big problem in many areas of our country--and yes, I would. Yes.

Kamala Harris: Ban plastic straws & bags; limit single-use plastic

HARRIS: Everyone needs to see the images of what these plastic bottles and straws and everything are doing to our oceans. [The solution] is about one, creating the incentives. We banned plastic bags in California--people had to get used to it.

Q: So would you ban the single-use plastic?

HARRIS: I think we have to create incentives. Look, those little plastic grocery bags when I was growing up--we used them as garbage bags. Then we didn't have those anymore so we used paper bags as garbage bags--we can adapt.

Q: Do you ban plastic straws?

HARRIS: I think we should, yes. I'm going to be honest--it's really difficult to drink out of a paper straw. Let's encourage innovation and I think we could do a little bit better than some of those flimsy plastic straws but we do need to ban the plastic.

Kamala Harris: I like cheeseburgers, but less meat in food pyramid

HARRIS: Yes, in a broader context, as a nation we actually have to have a real priority at the highest level of government around what we eat and in terms of health eating because we have a problem in America. We can talk about the amount of sugar in everything; we could go on and on. So the answer is yes. But we have to strike a balance around creating incentives and then banning certain behaviors. I love cheeseburgers from time to time. But in terms of creating incentives--that we will eat in a healthy way, that we will encourage moderation--the government has to do a much better job of that.

Q: Would you support changing the dietary guidelines? The food pyramid, to reduce red meat specifically?

HARRIS: Yes, I would.

Kamala Harris: Figure out what to do with nuclear waste--not Yucca Mountain

HARRIS: The biggest issue we face in terms of nuclear energy is the waste and what are we going to do with that. Yucca Mountain--that's a nonstarter for me. The kind of disposal that has happened at Yucca Mountain--and also taking away that state's ability to make decisions--this administration was, in the middle of the night, carting waste in to Yucca Mountain without the authority and the permission of the leaders of the state of Nevada.

Q: Senator Bernie Sanders now says he wants to phase it out, get rid of nuclear power. Do you agree?

HARRIS: We have to figure out what we're going to do about the waste. My bottom-line is that I'm not going to allow the federal government to go in and impose its priorities on any state--it's going to have to be those states who make that decision.

Pete Buttigieg: Regulate plastics; incentives for non-plastic replacements

BUTTIGEIG: It does, because this is one more example of where corporations are literally pushing out the true cost of what they do into a place where it can't be seen only it comes back to us. It ruins environments and it is profoundly irresponsible. So we need to make sure that we have regulations and incentives that promote things like biodegradable alternatives to plastic. There's already so much going into this--we've got to double down on those kinds of investments so that we feel proud rather than guilty when we do handle something that takes the place of plastic, looks like plastic but it is much more responsible for the environment.