Where do the parties stand on the environment?

With all the attention on Hillary’s emails and Trump’s latest headline-grabbing pronouncement, it’s easy to lose track of the issues in this Presidential election.
Chris Clarke, our colleague at KCET Redefine, gets us back on point with a series of commentaries on the environmental planks in the various party platforms. And his take on their positions is not especially flattering to any of them. He writes:
If you’re a concerned environmentalist voter that’s unhappy with the Democrats’ lackluster environmental platform, but even more so with the Republicans’ expressly anti-environmentalist platform, you might be wondering whether a third party might offer you an alternative.

In one sense, the answer is “no,” at least in 2016.

First, Clarke’s take on the Democratic Party platform. He says that – apart from the section on climate change – the platform offers little by way of specifics in meeting any environmental goals.
Climate activists have expressed frustration with the lack of hard detail even in the relatively well-fleshed-out climate change section. Where the Republicans, for instance, come right out and oppose a carbon tax, the Democratic framers make vague promises to reduce greenhouse gases without an overarching strategy to do so, other than nibbling away at emissions through a raft of more or less related policies.

But while he highlights the vagaries of the Democrats, Clarke has even harsher words for the Republican’s environmental stance.
Regardless of your political leanings, regardless of your feelings about individual candidates and the merits of each party’s general political outlook, one hopes we can all agree that statements in a party platform offered up as fact should actually be factual. The environmental portions of the Republican Party’s 2016 platform fail that test abysmally.

Clarke goes on to take the Republicans to task for calling coal a clean source of energy, claiming that the environment is improving, and for protecting our forests from wildfire and insect invasion by cutting down the trees.
 
So do the Green and Libertarian Parties fare any better? First the Libertarians. Clarke includes their entire environmental platform, which totals 126 words. His summary: “…privatize everything, then assume that property owners act in their long-term self-interest by protecting the ecological value of their resource.”
 
On the other hand, the Green Party platform is devoted almost entirely to green issues, and weaves the environmental topic through most other sections of its platform. But at 10-thousand words, it’s doubtful that more than a handful of voters will even read it. Our thanks to Chris Clarke for boiling it down this “surprisingly authoritative, wonkish policy paper on ways U.S. environmental policy could be improved.” for the rest of us.