We at the Climate Desk plugged a few climate change keywords into word clouds for a side-by-side comparison of how frequently they appear in the two platforms. If a word appears in one and not the other, it’s because it isn’t used in the latter. For a reference on the sizes, “oil” appears ten times in the GOP platform; “climate change” appears twenty times in the Democratic platform:
Republican:
Tim McDonnell
Democratic:
Tim McDonnell
To judge a candidate by counting how many times they throw out certain buzzwords is a dangerous strategy. As David Roberts points out, even if President Obama repeated the words “climate change” like a mantra from now until November 6 and won the election, it doesn’t mean major cap-and-trade legislation would pass in his second term.
Still, how—and how much—Republicans and Democrats address climate change in their official party platforms can be a telling indication of where their priorities lie. Maybe even more telling is what they don’t include: the GOP platform never uses the word “renewables”; the Dems never mention Keystone XL.
