June 12, 2019

The Democratic Party Just Got Hit With Hundreds of Thousands of Demands for a Climate Debate

“We’re not settling for soundbites.”

MaryFrances Vorbach/Greenpeace

Activists gathered Wednesday at the steps of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in Washington, DC, to demand a climate change debate for the 23 contenders in the 2020 Democratic primary.

As Mother Jones reporter Rebecca Leber wrote Tuesday:

The pressure for a debate on climate change is only escalating since the Democratic National Committee rejected a call to devote one of its dozen debates to a subject that’s grown in urgency and salience among the Democratic base.

At Wednesday’s rally, organizers delivered more than 200,000 petition signatures, collected by groups like Greenpeace, US Youth Climate Strike, Sunrise Movement, 350 Action, and Women’s March National, asking the DNC to organize a climate debate.

One of the activists, Karla Stephan of US Youth Climate Strike, told Mother Jones that even if the DNC doesn’t agree to hold a debate centered on climate change, she wants the candidates to at least to agree to one so they can still hold the debate. If candidates engage in debates not sanctioned by the DNC, they risk being barred from the main stage.

Joe Biden, a 2020 Democratic frontrunner, reportedly expressed his support for a climate change debate Tuesday in a video that Greenpeace recorded in Iowa. Janet Redman, Climate Campaign Director for Greenpeace USA, said that they will “continue pressing every candidate to support a climate debate,” adding that the debate “has to do with economic justice, racial justice, generational justice.”

“All of these groups have power on their own, but together we are unstoppable.” Stephan said, “We’re not settling for soundbites.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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