Time to Hear the Candidates for Governor Talk About Climate Change

It’s not too late to hear the candidates for governor talk about climate change at back-to-back public events this week.

Maryland Matters is a co-sponsor of in-person forums on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings and that will also be live-streamed.

The forums will take place at the University of Maryland College Park on Tuesday evening and at Goucher College in Towson on Wednesday evening. The public is welcome to attend the events in person, though seating is limited and members of the audience will be asked to show that they are fully vaccinated.

Click here to read more from our Climate Calling series.

Due to participate in both events: Democrats Jon Baron, Doug Gansler, Ashwani Jain, John King, Laura Neuman and Jerome Segal, Republican Robin Ficker and Libertarian David Lashar. Democrats Wes Moore and Tom Perez have committed to attending the Tuesday forum in College Park, and Democrat Peter Franchot will attend the Wednesday event at Goucher College.

The first climate forum is from 7-8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 8 at the Riggs Alumni Center at the University of Maryland at College Park.

The second is a night later, Wednesday, March 9, from 7-8:30 p.m. at the Ungar Athenaeum at Goucher College.

Republicans Dan Cox and Kelly Schulz have declined invitations to participate. Democrat Rushern Baker initially confirmed he would be at both events but now is not attending.

Maryland Matters’ co-sponsors for both events are the Maryland League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, the Sierra Club Maryland chapter, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Ed Hatcher and Angie Cannon. The College Park forum is also being sponsored by the Prince George’s County NAACP and the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative. The Goucher event is being co-sponsored by the Baltimore County NAACP branch.

Maryland Matters Founding Editor Josh Kurtz will be a panelist at both events, asking the candidates questions.

For the College Park event, he will be joined as a questioner on the panel by Dr. Tonya Harrison-Edwards, legislative affairs chair for the NAACP Prince George’s County Branch, and Rona Kobell, an environmental journalist who is co-director of the Environmental Justice Journalism Initiative.

At Goucher, Kurtz will be joined on the panel by Staci Hartwell of the NAACP Maryland State Conference, Sheilah Kast, host of WYPR’s “On the Record,” and Stella Krajick, a Goucher College political science and environmental studies student.

Click here if you are interested in learning more about these events.

The forums will be live-streamed on the Facebook pages of the Maryland LCV Education Fund, the Maryland Sierra Club and NAACP Maryland State Conference. If you are interested in watching the College Park forum on Facebook Live, click here. If you are interested in watching the Goucher forum on Facebook Live, click here.

The Maryland LCV is also sponsoring watch parties at a handful of college campuses in the state. For more information, click here.

And be on the look-out for post-forum coverage in Maryland Matters.

Maryland Matters’ participation in this event is part of the “Climate Calling” project we launched last year — and another sign of our commitment to illuminating major issues in Maryland and holding political leaders to account. As part of that project, we ran interviews last fall with the nine Democratic candidates for governor who were then in the race.

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