 2020 presidential candidate Jay Inslee, who is the governor of Washington. He's basically running on climate change That's his number one go-to issue and he's not my number one choice But I do find what he's doing admirable He's trying to draw attention to climate change and he originally floated this idea that we hold an entire debate on Climate change itself now I wasn't sure how to think about that at first But the more I thought about it the more that I loved it because we have an entire party 50% of elected people in power who deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change So if you got more than a dozen candidates running for president on the stage for more than an hour, I'm assuming and They didn't debate whether or not climate change is happening But they had a real debate on what to do about climate change that really could be an educational Experience for the American people because you're not setting up this false debate between whether or not it exists Or it doesn't you're debating what the best plan of action should be so I absolutely Really like this idea. Although the DNC who sanctions all of these debates They responded and they said no now I Think a lot of people will probably question. All right. Well, they said no, but why not just have the candidates Subvert the DNC and have MSNBC or CNN host a climate change debate Well, you see the problem is that the DNC once again brought back this exclusivity clause meaning that if you participate in a non DNC sanctioned debate you will be barred from participating in future debates So if the DNC says no debates on climate change There will be no debates on climate change if you want to get into future debates now of course since a lot of people namely young people care a lot about climate change this wasn't a very popular decision and Tom Perez was confronted by activists because he shot down this idea So he defended himself Here's what he had to say as Christina Cabrera of talking points memo reports Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez told environmental activists that it would be impractical for the party to host a primary debate on Climate change according to a Sunday Tampa Bay Times report on Saturday The activists confronted Perez at a gala in Orlando, Florida and asked him about the party denying 2020 Democratic candidate and Washington governor Jay Inslee's request to hold a debate for the candidates to discuss solutions to global warming Perez told them that once you have one single issue debate then every debate leads to become a single issue Debate in order to address the concerns We will have issue areas in debates including but not limited to climate But it's just not practical for us to have one debate on democracy reform one debate on voting But chairman said and as someone who worked for Barack Obama the most remarkable thing about him was his tenacity to multitask and a President must be able to multitask Inslee who's made climate change a cornerstone of his campaign expressed disappointment on Wednesday when he announced the DNC's decision the DNC is silencing the voices of Democratic activists many of our progressive partner organizations and nearly half of the Democratic presidential field Who want to debate the existential crisis of our time Inslee said the climate crisis merits a full discussion of our plans Not a short exchange of talking points. Yeah, so I'm actually siding with Jay Inslee here I think Tom Perez is wrong and his reasoning is completely bogus. He's using the Slippery slope argument, which is a logical fallacy Because what he's saying is we'll look if we allow for a debate on climate change Then we're gonna have to allow for a debate on healthcare and a debate on Democratic reform and you know once you open up that door then it just becomes a little bit too You know a little bit too difficult to manage. So let's just keep it to multi-issue debates and that's that except a slippery slope is a logical fallacy because it almost never comes to fruition and in fact since the DNC is Sanctioning debates you can say All right, I'll I'll allow it on climate change and then no other debates will be a single issue oriented debate Everything else will be you know various issues, but for climate change We will allow for this one exception But he's saying no And then he says I worked for Obama and he was a fantastic multitasker So if you're gonna be the president you have to be able to multitask That doesn't even make sense. Like what does that have to do with talking about climate change? Here's the thing about climate change. This issue is unlike every other issue. It's so incredibly important It's literally an existential threat to humanity It is more important than any other issue. The only other issue that you can argue is relatively equal in terms of importance is Campaign finance reform because it's going to be difficult To get climate change Legislation enacted if you have these fossil fuel industry Shills and these oil and gas companies bank rolling politicians But with that being said climate change is such an important issue That it totally makes sense for you to allow an entire debate on this if we Put these candidates in front of a national audience And people get to hear them talk about solutions to climate change for two hours Can you imagine the impact? That could have it would be really educational But tom pares is shooting it down and he just his reasoning is really bad. It's a slippery slope Okay, but you're the dnc chairman. You can stop that slope from being a slippery slope like it Okay, whatever, but you're not making much sense here tom imagine how awesome it would be to see Each candidate present different plans as to how they're going to tackle climate change. That would be incredibly Incredibly constructive and eventually somebody is going to win and go up against donald trump What's that debate going to be? It's going to be about. Oh, well climate change is real versus climate change is not real When that's not The range of the debate with regard to this issue We need people to see that this is a very serious issue and here's a whole range Of policies that we can address climate change with But you know, it's it's just a missed opportunity, right? It's a missed opportunity If you're looking about This in terms of the broader impact it could have on political discourse with regard to anthropogenic climate change And people acknowledging how important it is then having presidential contenders debated could do a lot It could raise awareness about this issue, but You know Tom Perez is rejecting it. So I guess we don't get to Debate climate change now. Will it show up? At the democratic party debates. Yes, but will it be given the amount of time that is justifiable? Absolutely not given the scale of this crisis So I support having a debate exclusively on climate change And I hope that J. Insley as well as others fight it But um, you know, it's disappointing because this could have been really informative educational and just overall constructive