Video: Clinton and Trump advisers debate energy and environmental policy

• Marie Cusick
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  Marie Cusick was the Harrisburg reporter for StateImpact Pennsylvania.

If you watched the three presidential debates, you may have noticed there was very little discussion of energy and environmental issues. Notably, the debate moderators did not ask a single question about climate change.
But the Clinton and Trump campaigns did delve into these topics in a debate Tuesday evening between Clinton’s energy adviser Trevor Houser and Trump adviser Congressman Kevin Cramer (R- North Dakota) at the University of Richmond.
Cramer said Trump would roll back regulations and engage in a top-to-bottom review of the EPA, to get it back to its core mission of promoting clean air and clean water. He also does not subscribe to the mainstream scientific view of man-made climate change.
“We’d have to be a bit proud to think that somehow these last hot years are the fault of man and not some larger regular cycle of climate,” Cramer said.
Clinton has pledged to make the U.S. a “clean energy superpower.” Houser says energy and environmental policy is one of the starkest differences between the two candidates, noting that if elected, Trump would be the only leader out of 195 countries who does not believe in climate change.
“I don’t know how the Republican party got to this point,” Houser said. “If you read this year’s Republican party platform, it is a line-by-line attack on our bedrock environmental laws, most of which were enacted by Republican presidents.”
Watch the entire debate here:

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