2019 Town Hall: on Foreign Policy

Beto O`Rourke: U.S. investment in Brazil incentivizes burning the Amazon

O'ROURKE: Our involvement and investment in Brazil is one of the pernicious outcomes of Donald Trump's trade policies. This trade war with China is providing an incentive for people to burn down the Amazon rainforest to plant soybeans so that they can sell into China because China right now is looking for new producers for those soybeans that they are no longer buying from the U.S. Our focus [should be] to save the lungs of the planet that produce 6 percent of the oxygen that we breathe and to ensure that we do not trigger a crisis in the Amazon. Once it is set, we will never be able to roll back. This is our opportunity. That is the threat that we face. And so we must be an international leader on these issues.

Beto O`Rourke: We left Puerto Rico unprotected & under-funded for disasters

O'ROURKE: I hope it makes everybody angry the way that we've treated the people of Puerto Rico, our fellow Americans who were left in harms' way without the necessary investment in the infrastructure to mitigate the storms that we knew were going to hit them. There are only more severe and more frequent and more devastating, thanks to our emissions & our inaction in the face of climate change. And to add insult to injury, President Trump is taking money away from FEMA. So I want to make sure that we fully fund those disaster response agencies. I want to make sure that we fully fund pre-disaster mitigation grants because we know the people of Puerto Rico are going to see more storms--only much larger and much deadlier. And so we need to invest ahead of time, not afterwards.

Beto O`Rourke: Syrian War partly based on climate; expect more migration

Pete Buttigieg: Syrian Civil War partially based on climate security

But I think the real issue, especially in very conservative places like where I live in Indiana, the real conversation we've got to have is about what's at stake here beyond the traditional battle lines that have been drawn. This ought to be a bipartisan issue. This once was a bipartisan issue. And now it's gone completely off the rails.

So let's talk about some other dimensions of what's at stake. Let's talk about national security at a time when our military leaders say that this is one of the greatest threats to stability. There's a lot of evidence that the Syria civil war is one of the first that was partly caused as a consequence of climate change. We really want to talk about security, let's talk about securing the lives of future generations.