Some 70 percent of American voters support government action to address climate change, according to a new poll. But that won’t make it into the first presidential debate. Tuesday afternoon, it emerged that the topics chosen for President Trump and former Vice President Biden’s first debate would include their records, the Supreme Court, the pandemic, the economy, “race and violence in our cities,” and election integrity.
 
There was immediate outrage over the absence of climate change, and not just from the usual crowd. “If presidential debates don’t put the climate crises front and center, they will ignore one of the gravest threats to the health and security of the United States,” tweeted former evening news anchor Dan Rather. “If I were Joe Biden, I’d make a point of saying this.”
 
As several people pointed out, the debate next Tuesday will take place as wildfires exacerbated by climate change burn across the West—and it will be hosted by a journalist who clearly doesn’t prioritize the issue. “Chris Wallace, who ignored massive wildfires in the western United States on Fox News Sunday, and who did not ask a single climate crisis question in his 2016 debate, announced that he’ll ignore the issue in this debate as well,” tweeted Media Matters news director John Whitehouse.

There’s no question that moderators have a public duty to bring up climate change in presidential debates. The scientific consensus is all too clear. The disturbing thing, though, is that the omission of climate change in the first debate is consistent with how voters rank their concerns.
 
The aforementioned new poll—a collaboration between multiple outlets, including The Guardian, Vice, and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication—got a great writeup on Wednesday in The Guardian, which pointed out that voters want politicians to be more active than they’re being. Three-quarters of respondents, it noted, think the U.S. should generate all electricity from renewables within 15 years:

Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a presidential candidate who supports the complete shift to clean energy, with a further seven in 10 voters supporting US involvement in the Paris climate agreement, which commits countries to tackling dangerous heating. Two-thirds of voters said climate should be a priority for whoever wins the election.

That’s encouraging, up to a point. But as Genevieve Guenther, the director of End Climate Silence, observed on Twitter, that’s not all the poll said. The poll also found that, while people cared about climate change, relatively few called it the “most important issue” to them in voting for a president in November: Overall, climate change ranked thirteenth out of the 18 issues presented to voters. Ahead of climate change came the economy, the pandemic, health care, Social Security, government corruption, racist police violence, fiscal concerns, racism, Trump’s record as president, education, U.S. election integrity against foreign interference, and terrorism. No one would allege that those issues aren’t extremely important, too. But as Guenther pointed out, it does suggest that people “STILL don’t understand the urgency” of global warming.

So let’s talk about the urgency. As it happens, The New York Times published a startling piece on Tuesday titled “Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial.” The photos are spectacular, and you should definitely read the entire thing, but here’s the key excerpt:
 
Again and again, climate scientists have shown that our choices now range from merely awful to incomprehensibly horrible.
 
If we cut emissions rapidly, about one-seventh of the world’s population will suffer severe heat waves every few years. Failure to do so doubles or triples that number. If we act now, sea levels could rise another 1 to 2 feet this century. If we don’t, Antarctica’s ice sheets could destabilize irreversibly and ocean levels could keep rising at an inexorable pace for centuries, making coastal civilization all but unmanageable.
 
Consider sending that article to friends and family members who worry about climate change but don’t regard it as a top voting issue. As the piece points out, simply cutting emissions won’t be enough to ensure a livable future—we’ve already locked in too much warming. We also need adaptation strategies in order to live in a world of higher seas, hotter heat waves, and more powerful storms and wildfires.

That should make you anxious. But as several remarkable panelists argued Tuesday, during a TNR event on climate change: Action is a good remedy for anxiety.