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Satellite evidence confirming record number of fires in the Amazon rainforest, August 15-22, 2019.  (NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens)

I don't do well with live TV.   Awards shows, debates, breaking news, sporting events give me hives.  I have a hard enough time with live life.  Where is the escape in watching life unfold spontaneously on my television?  Naturally I had trepidations about CNN's 7-hour Climate Crisis Town Hall on Wednesday night with 10 2020 Democratic candidates.  But I wanted to see certain of the participants, and as it happened, 4 of the top names on my list appeared back-to-back at the time I tuned in.  I caught Joe Biden's turn part-way through. I was tuned in long enough to see him squirm to the point of popping a blood vessel in his eye when confronted by an audience question concerning his plan to attend a fundraiser the following night hosted by natural gas entrepreneur Andrew Goldman, in violation of Biden's pledge not to take  money from fossil fuel executives. Goldman, though not currently an executive in a strict pedantic sense, co-founded the natural gas company Western LNG (which stands for Liquefied Natural Gas) in Houston.  (Contrary to Biden's shocked response when confronted with the fact about his donor on Wednesday, and an indication that he would not attend if found to be true on his review, he attended the fundraiser with open palms on Thursday anyway).  Of all the candidates running, Joe Biden is perhaps the only one who could be pointed to whose entire political career has arguably been contributing to the problem of inaction-- sorry, bipartisan inaction-- on climate change.  Tenuous frontrunner Biden's lack of interest in the topic (manifested in his ill-prepared off-the-cuff manner of winging it in this nationally televised forum on the issue) is a major factor in why the DNC rejected a Climate Change themed debate of their own.  Based on his performance on Wednesday night, he doesn't seem especially eager to make amends.  (His lack of empathy for millenials apparently doesn't stop with their unique and worsening situation with college debt.)

I also saw Elizabeth Warren, who acquitted herself rather well I thought, appropriately skewering the greed of fossil fuel billionaires as behind our current predicament, before contradicting herself on the question of whether utilities should be public rather than private by suggesting capitalism that rescues us from the catastrophe capitalism created is to be encouraged.  (I'm not fully convinced.)   Her performance coming on the heels of Bernie Sanders's tour de force was strong enough that it made a couple of tough acts for small town Mayor Pete Buttigieg to follow.  Buttigieg's performance was leagues beyond the low bar set by Biden naturally, but his run-of-the-mill technocratic adroit-on-his-feet approach suffered by comparison to the bold mastery of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and was about where my attention started flagging.

Bernie Sanders who immediately followed Joe Biden provided a startlingly competent and refreshingly lucid counterpoint to the former Vice President's performance.  The questions were for the most part excellent and Sanders remained on point.  While it was encouraging to learn after the fact how many of the candidates rose to the occasion, of all the plans discussed, Bernie Sanders' is the most aggressive, the most far-reaching and the least compromising on the uncompromisable.

To be honest, in retrospect, there was that one moment from his segment that struck a bit of an odd chord with me, and I was not too surprised to discover by checking Google News on the CNN event on Thursday that it was the day-after talk of alt-right media.  The question was addressed to him by a teacher, the crawl informed us, Martha Readyoff:

I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it is crucial to face.  Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?

The answer I formulated in my head for Sen. Sanders as I watched mouth agape was something like this:

Well Martha the answer is no, and let me tell you why.  While I will always support a woman's right to choose and will do everything in my power to protect that right which has become precarious under the Trump administration due to its manipulations of the Supreme Court with the assistance of a Republican controlled Senate, I would not presume to encourage a woman to choose birth control for any reason.  A woman who chooses on her own to be childless in response to scientific predictions about the effects of climate change on future generations and perhaps in an effort to personally address issues of population expansion should have the right to whatever means make her choice possible.  But, no,  I do not believe government should be in the business of interceding in what should only be a matter between a woman and her physician.

The precedent for rejecting the premise of a question had already been set by his response to an Andrew Yang supporter seeking his opinion on exploring advances in nuclear power as an alternative energy resource.  To that question, Sanders expertly rejected the idea on the well established objections to the concomitant and as yet intractable problem of what to do with the millenially radioactive waste that is a proliferating by-product of the technology.  But to Readyoff's question concerning birth control, this is the answer that Bernie gave:

Well Martha the answer is yes, and the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies, and make reproductive decisions... The Mexico City agreement, which denies American aide to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd. So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support.

I think the spirit of the answer I formed is in there, but I'm not sure that Sen. Sanders was tuned into the social engineering undertones of Readyoff's question that I picked up on (and could well have imagined) and their resonance with disturbing histories of eugenics.  If anything Sanders' tangent about the Mexico City agreement addressed the mirror image kind of social engineering policy that undermines a woman's right to choose-- if not within the US where it was at least until recently more fully protected, than outside the borders where we proffer aid.  I'll just say, Sanders answer surprised me nearly as much as Readyoff's question alarmed me.  But on sober reflection, I am less sure that the question was a trap to corner Sanders into publicly endorsing a draconian baby-culling social policy and more to see it in the light that no doubt Sanders did, as a somewhat fuzzy way to tie the very real threat to women's reproductive freedom posed by Trump, the Supreme Court influenced by his two picks thus far,  the Senate and an insidious Republican domination of State governments across the country to the issue, equally antithetical to the right, of climate change.  Nowhere does Sanders (contrary to what the shit storm of right wing media-slash-propaganda outlets simultaneously suggested) talk about government promotion of abortion-- his response as he states in the opening of it is-- as it should be-- all about the freedom of a woman to control her own reproductive destiny through whatever means of birth control are at her disposal.

Let me be perfectly clear:  I am opposed to sidetracking the government's response to climate change with formulating policy around the question of the ethics of procreation.  Population control could well be a path for individuals to consider, and seems to be a perfectly fine focus of a private sector non-profit.  It's not the place of government to do anything other than clear obstacles to the pursuit of birth control for those who see fit to practice it.  For my part- -and I'm not Bernie Sanders so I can be blunt-- this is probably not in my top 100 steps we could take to address the climate.  I do not think birth control should be a "key feature" of a government plan to address climate change. For one thing, it's too slow.   It's post hoc-- more a response and reaction to climate change and not necessarily a proactive step to mitigate it.*  I'm not convinced the invasiveness of the proposition of influencing individual women's choices to have children is warranted enough to require the involvement of the Federal government. While I'm more and more for social solutions to problems caused for the large part by unfettered havoc on the planet on the part of very powerful private interests, reproductive freedom is one area that I feel should remain forever free-- and procuring, protecting and preserving the freedom of it should be the extent of government's role in it.

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*Although fewer humans to engage in human caused global warming could not be a bad thing in the long run, given the concentration of blame for the climate crisis on less than 1% of humanity, the kind of humans being prevented is not irrelevant to its potential as an effective countermeasure.  In short, while I don't support government promotion of birth control as a solution in principle, forced castration of fossil fuel executives and their financial and legislative enablers (and for good measure their heirs) should not be off the table.