This week’s Democratic National Convention will provide a study in contrasts between our nation’s political parties on the greatest issue confronting humanity. The contrast could not be starker.

The Republican Party’s position on climate change? It’s not an issue. The word “climate” appears exactly nowhere in the GOP’s party platform.

Subsequent to the GOP convention, in what he dubbed “The Dumbest Climate Conversation of All Time,” Bill McKibben zeros in on the part of the conversation where Donald Trump and Elon Musk seem to concur that climate change won’t be a threat until CO2 in the atmosphere reaches 1,000 ppm from its current level of 420 ppm, several hundred years from now. And that will only be a problem because, according to Musk, “if you go past 1000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea.” McKibben notes “Scientists think that anything above 350 parts per million is intensely dangerous.”

This is the same Elon Musk who in 2017 said “Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” a point of view “shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.”

For more gob-smacking fun and thrills, check out Emily Atkin’s fact check of the interview between the world’s richest man and the world’s most dangerous man. Bring your own oxygen.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, the Democratic Party has fielded the climate movement’s Dream Team at the top of its ticket: Harris and Walz.

As Professor Leah Stokes wrote in The Guardian recently:

“As a senator, Harris introduced a bill in 2019 that would electrify school buses, and just two years later, Congress committed $5bn to the effort. Today, almost 200,000 kids are riding clean buses to school every day – a very fast change for a legislative body that’s known for taking decades to get policies passed.

“The water investments in the bipartisan package were also Harris’ ideas. She was the lead author on legislation that would replace lead pipes. Today, $15bn is being spent on this effort across the country, and the Biden-Harris administration is on track to replace 1.7m lead pipes. And she was particularly vocal on drought funding, traveling to Lake Mead to drum up media coverage and get the bill passed.

“If she hadn’t focused on these investments, making over 150 calls to legislators as they negotiated the bipartisan bill, they likely would have fallen out of the package. It’s not as if Republican senators had co-sponsored legislation with Harris on electric school buses or lead pipes.”

Governor Walz has also been at the forefront of the climate action. He led a historically successful legislative session in Minnesota that mandated 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2040. The next year, he went the extra mile to make that goal a reality by signing vital cleantech buildout-accelerating permitting reform legislation. (Here’s more on Walz).

The contrast between the Republican and Democratic Party’s positions on climate? Denial versus survival. Fiction versus fact. Insanity versus sanity.

The most striking fact about this contrast is how little coverage it has received in national media.  

And that calls for a new Campaign of the Week for CANdoers!