Quiz – Climate Control and Global Warming

Climate Change
Sen Tammy Duckworth
Amanpour and Company
Sept 14, 2020

 

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Hello, everyone, and welcome to “Amanpour and Company.” Here’s what’s coming up.

 

Fires rage apocalyptic images from the United States being around the world. We go to the front lines with L.A. Times photojournalist, Kent Nishimura.

 

And, with the president under pressure, I’ll talk about these crises and much more with Senator Tammy Duckworth.

 

Now, wildfires of historic proportions are ravaging America’s West Coast. They continue to burn millions of acres across California, Oregon and Washington. Entire towns have disappeared and thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes. At least 35 are dead and dozens are still missing. The pictures seen all over the world show complete devastation in some areas, and of course, this is all set against the backdrop of a pandemic that continues to kill hundreds of people every day.

 

The fingerprints of the climate crisis are all over these wildfires, of course, teeing up a political brawl as Democrats accuse President Trump of denying that reality. Not only as the president tried to muzzle climate science and roll back safely investigations, but the same is true of health officials who disagree with him on coronavirus. With nearly 200,000 Americans now dead, these crucial tests of leadership will be decided at the ballot box come November.

 

Joining me now is the Democratic senator, Tammy Duckworth, from Illinois. A retired army officer who served 23 years and was deployed to Iraq in 2004 where enemy attacks have left her a double amputee.

 

Senator Duckworth, welcome to the program. Thanks for joining me from Washington.

 

Vice President Joe Biden’s response to these fires has been very, very strong. He has, you know, said that this is what’s going to be destroying American neighborhoods, not race riots and the like, but this kind of thing. And he said this is what, you know, climate can give jobs, or rather, attracting climate science, can actually be a job creator rather than a job denier, as President Trump says. What do you make of the vice president’s response?

 

SEN. TAMMY DUCKWORTH (D-IL): Well, he’s showing good strong leadership, which is something we’re lacking in the White House right now, Christiane.

 

You see a lack of leadership has led us to displace, and I happen to agree with Vice President Biden. I myself have introduced my martial plan for coal country which would be a series of initiatives and would bring technology and investments into coal country to help them transition into new forms of energy production.

 

Illinois is a major energy state. People think of us as an ag state, which we are, but we have fracking, we have oil wells, we have wind power, we have solar, we have nuclear, we have it all in Illinois, and energy is an option for us and to get to that carbon neutral future, but also for us to develop the technology that creates those good-paying union jobs.

 

AMANPOUR: Let me just place a little bit about of what Vice President Biden said.

 

We will get to that in a moment, but then let’s talk about what President Trump has already said. You know, Gavin Newsom, who the president is visiting in California, the governor, has said, to any climate denier, just come to California. This is absolutely happening in front of our eyes. And yet, the president has talked so far about bad forest management and all it takes is good forest management to correct it.

 

I mean, what do you take from that, and what do you think the president, you know, is going to be able to do, because it is also a big election issue, isn’t it, climate? I mean, certainly, young people, both on the Republican side, and of course on the Democrat side, are very concerned about a serious method of addressing this climate crisis.

 

DUCKWORTH: Well, what we need first is a commitment to a carbon neutral future, and we need to be energy agnostic in how we get there. And whether or not you believe in climate change — I mean, you should, the evidence is here. One of my military officers, a general, said to a bunch of us once, she said, I don’t care whether or not you believe in climate change, but the sea ice is melting in the Artic and that’s opening sea lanes and Russia
is there, which means that U.S. military forces will have to go up into areas we’ve never had to go to before to defend those territories.

 

So, I don’t care if you believe in climate change, the results are here, and we’re going to have to act to resolve it. And that’s exactly where we are. The wildfires are here. You can deny it all you want, but you’re not going to stop a wildfire. So, we need to do better, we need to get to that carbon neutral future, we need to get more efforts into conservation, and we have an opportunity to create jobs while doing it at a time when we desperately need jobs in this country.

 

AMANPOUR: So, many, many military commanders, many vets like yourself are saying that climate is a national security threat. I just want to play a little bit of what the governor of California has said about this, because what’s happening there is not just the fires, it’s the record heat, it’s the aridity, it’s the death of trees, it’s poison water, it’s poison air. This is what he said.

 

—– (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) —–

GOV. GAVIN NEWSOM (D-CA): Forgive me, I’m being a little bit long-winded but I’m a little bit exhausted that we have to continue to bait this issue.

This is a climate damn emergency. This is real, and it’s happening. This is the perfect storm. It is happening in unprecedented ways year in, year out.

—– (END VIDEO CLIP) —–

 

AMANPOUR: I mean, just the scene is apocalyptic. There he is standing, you know, in front of just — you can barely see through the smog behind him.

 

Why do you think it’s taken the president, I mean, a long time to address it? This is the first time he’s going to be presumably addressing it when he meets and talks with the governor.

 

DUCKWORTH: Because he’s not a leader. Donald Trump hasn’t led anything his entire life. All he’s about is taking care of Donald Trump. This is something that needed leadership on day one. Instead of providing leadership on the climate crisis, he actually withdrew us from the Paris Accord. We should be rejoining the Paris Accord. We should be making these investments. And, you know, 100 military bases will be under water in the near future.

 

You can see what’s happening in California, its loss of agriculture, its loss of people’s livelihoods, their homes. People are devastated and in need of leadership right now, not a guy who continues to try downplay things because he thinks it’s going to help him get re-elected.

 

AMANPOUR: And scientists are now saying this is not the new normal, it’s going to get even worse. I mean, what we’re seeing now, which is the worse it’s ever been, could get even worse without any dramatic intervention. The vice president raised the issue of another four years of President Trump if he continued to roll back, you know, regulations and all sorts of environmental safety, and if they don’t take this issue very seriously.

 

This is some of what the vice president said.

 

—– (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) —–

JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We have to act as a nation. It shouldn’t be so bad that millions of Americans live in the shadow of an orange sky and they’re left asking, is doomsday here?

—– (END VIDEO CLIP) —–

 

AMANPOUR: So, as that question is posed, I want to ask you specifically to sort of maybe join up the dots between what’s happening in the denial of climate science by the administration but also the denial of the severity of COVID, as we’ve seen and we’ve all now been introduced to the president’s, you know, issues through the Woodward book, not telling the American people when he knew how dangerous it was. Just the idea of muzzling and denying those kinds of life or death issues, how do you see it playing out?

 

DUCKWORTH: Well, Christiane, you’ve seen it play out. We’re approaching 200,000 dead Americans because this president has downplayed the severity of this virus from the very beginning when he knew there was at least, in his own words, it was at least five times deadlier than the worse of the flu. Same thing with climate science, he’s saying, oh, it’s not that bad, and yet, you have people in Louisiana who are losing their home due to — you know, he talked about coastal erosion, no, it’s climate change that’s causing it.

 

You have a president who continues to shirk his duties as commander in chief, as a leader in our nation, at a time when we actually have an opportunity to create jobs, we have an opportunity to address this pandemic and to fight it back in established ways that we can respond to future pandemics. We have an opportunity to invest in the technology that we’re so good at developing here in this country to lead us towards a greener future. And we have an opportunity to regain our place as leader of the free world, whether it is in national security alliances like (INAUDIBLE) or whether it is in the Paris Accord to try to move the entire earth towards a greener future.

 

But we can’t do it with Donald Trump because he’s showing that he’s now willing to lead anybody anywhere. All he’s willing to do is go down to Mar-a-Lago and play golf. That’s not what America needs right now. We need to come together and we need to have some real frank talks about what we need to do.

 

AMANPOUR: The Biden plan, as we all know, because it was issued months ago, is some $2 trillion of a climate response and a climate plan to try to mitigate this. And as you say, also creating jobs. I wonder what you feel, personally, but also for the wider community of disabled, because coronavirus is affecting many different constituencies disproportionately, including those with disabilities, and I just wonder whether there is any mitigation, there is any help coming and how you personally are dealing with this.

 

DUCKWORTH: Well, the disability community is absolutely hard hit with this, and the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ attempts to cut back funding for home health care workers, for example, is really hitting the disability community very, very hard. Also. we need to be investing more money in Medicaid, we need to be investing more money in Medicare, and we need to make sure people have access to health insurance.

 

And their refusal to even open the Affordable Care Act exchange so people can actually have access to health insurance is shameful.

 

Bottom line, we need to fight back against this pandemic by making the right investments in science, in testing in the real data. Now, we’re hearing stories and reports that data is present. We’ve known that ever since they tried to suppress hospitals from sending real COVID datas — on data on COVID positive cases to the CDC, for example. A denial is not going to get us out of this situation. And addressing them and coming up with a plan to attack all of the problems facing us is how we’re going to survive and how we’re going to thrive on the other side of this pandemic. And that’s not something Trump wants to do.

 

AMANPOUR: And we understand that Congress is going to start investigating some of the administration’s attempt to manipulate the CDC information, statistics, et cetera. But I want to ask you about the military, being a vet yourself. Some of the things that President Trump has been quoted as saying about the military, obviously, you know, the World War II dead. He’s accused the actual Pentagon currently of valuing alliances over trade deals. He’s accused them of wanting to start wars in order to profit from military sales. What do you say to that? How do you respond to that?

 

DUCKWORTH: He’s a liar. He lies. After all, this is the president who appointed as the defense secretary a Raytheon lobbyist. If he’s anti-defense industry, then maybe he should start with who he appoints to be the secretary of defense. He’s also the guy who continued to sell arms to Yemen after a bipartisan vote in the United States Senate prohibiting him from doing so, and he vetoed that resolution.

 

So, let’s be clear where this president stands. He likes to use the military like a bunch of toy soldiers that he can parade out to stroke his own ego. But when it comes time to actually support the troops, when it comes times to actually approve things like treatments for veterans who are still suffering from their service in Vietnam, he’s not there. He uses the military for his political gains, but he’s not there for the troops, he’s not there for their families, and he doesn’t understand courage because he’s never expressed it himself.

 

AMANPOUR: And, Senator Duckworth, you know, it doesn’t escape us, anyway, our colleague Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered by the Saudi regime and America, under this administration, continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia. But also, I wonder if you can speak to this, because part of the president’s election rhetoric has been to blame China for the virus, as you know. And it is extraordinary that he has been blaming China for so-called lack of transparency and not fessing up or admitting how dangerous it was, when now we see he himself by his own admission was doing precisely that.

 

That’s one issue.

 

The other issue is, what do you say — I mean, do you think any of your colleagues, Republican leaders in Congress were aware of the president’s feelings on coronavirus and knowledge about it early on? And why did they not stand up and say, you know, a lot more serious things when they could have done?

 

DUCKWORTH: There are no leaders in the Republican side of the Senate at this point in time, I’m sorry. We’ve been in negotiation — for example, negotiating for the next COVID relief package to help families that are really in trouble right now, and Mitch McConnell hasn’t shown up to a single one of those negotiation sessions. So, the Senate Republicans are absent. They’re AWOL. And frankly, I’m very disappointed in my Republican colleagues for not standing up to this president.

 

Recall that this president was telling folks that, you know, this virus would be disappeared just in a few weeks like magic. At the same time, he was also saying what a great job the Chinese were doing. But recall also that most of the cases of COVID that came to this country came out of Italy and Spain, from folks who were visiting Europe, not the folks who were coming in from China. He’s just using race as a way to distract the American people from the real problem, which is him in the White House.

 

AMANPOUR: Senator Tammy Duckworth, thank you so much for joining us today.