they are in fact making the environment much, much worse. they, in fact, have increased 4.5%. they have increased the emissions from china and so there has to be a price that they pay if they do that and that s why i would talk about dealing with how we deal with them in terms of tariffs relating to their products being sold, if in fact, they are involved in continuing to export, export this climate change. that s what they are doing. but you got to get the rest of the world in on the deal to do it. that s how you get it done and that s why it s important for us to meet the standards we say we re going to meet because it went up 2.5% in the united states it increased emissions. just in the last couple years under this president. it levelled out about 17 and now it s up 2.5%. and so we can t, you can t very well preach to the choir if in fact you can t sing.
welcome back to cnn climate crisis town hall. let s continue with former vice president joe biden. i want to introduce you to barbara. retired business owner from pennsylvania. barbara? good evening, mr. vice president. i live in rural pennsylvania in the bull s eye of the shale. the county i live in is home to 1,600 plus permitted franked cks wells. i ve witnessed the destruction of our beautiful forest and pennsylvania wild. our democratic governor is all in for fracked gas. as president, what can you do to change the direction of the catastrophic climate change policies and future plans at the state level? i just want to point out to the viewers, the shale is a rock
look what is happening in the amazon. the amazon is a natural carbon sink. it absorbs more co 2 in the air from the air than if we took every single automobile off the road in the united states of america. what is going on? nothing. nothing. we re talking about $2 million. we should be organizing the world, demanding the change. that s there are things i have done internationally. we need a diplomat in chief, as well to be able to put this together. that s in my wheelhouse. i ve done that my whole career. i want to introduce you by video to sue mitchell, a retired teacher from grand junction, colorado. this is her question. even though president obama knew of the seriousness of the climate crisis back in 2008, he chose to spend his political capital on health care and then wasn t able to enact the kind of systemic changes needed to
the fact of the matter is back then there was an agreement among everybody that this was not going to end in a military solution. it needed to be a diplomatic solution or a peace solution. the reason president obama couldn t carry it through was because of all the complications associated with it, particularly related to the taliban, not agreeing to a cease-fire, not agreeing to cutting its ties to al qaeda, not wanting to deal with the afghan government. so that s continued. now president trump has carried that through. i think it s important to note that both sides of the aisle agree on a need to end this, on a need to withdraw, but at the end of the day the problem is you have a looming election and a president who has campaigned on withdrawing from afghanistan. his contenders have said we want to get out of the never ending wars but if you withdraw too quickly you re going to have a breeding ground for terrorism again and the reason that matters is because that s what caused us the
dramatic from 54% in january to 34% now. sa sanders support drops from 44% last year to 37%. well read. as if you had not seen it before. i mentioned the fox news poll. something that comes across as you look at sanders popularity, warren s popularity, the incremental way she has risen through the polls. dove tail that. i think you re seeing here two people who the american people were very familiar with. joe biden, but not wearing as well on the campaign trail. joe biden came into this race as this you know u, haloed figure as obama s v.p. every day he s on the trail, that s probably going to get worse. it s just hard to stay popular in this environment. that said, what s strike iing at this, not one red cent has been spent by anybody on a negative advertisement. if either one makes it to the general election, it will. i think the warning sign for