We watched all 7 hours of CNN’s climate town hall so you didn’t have to

What will a future historian in the 22nd century learn about our country, our age, by unearthing video of CNN’s town hall on the climate crisis? She will learn that candidates for our highest office, centuries after the Enlightenment, still had to declare publicly that they believe in science. She will learn that these candidates also believe that climate change is a paramount threat that must be confronted immediately, but in an incremental way. She will learn that the “global war on terror” unleashed 1.2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, that a senator named Cory Booker was a Trekkie and that a businessman named Andrew Yang wanted to dole out “democracy dollars,” and that a cable news network — for all its turbulence and theatrics — devoted a workday’s worth of its programming, on a Wednesday in September, to the issue that shaped her reality.

It was an exercise in perspective, in relativity, in epochal concerns scrunched into a sliver of prime time that seemed to go on forever. It was an “unprecedented” televised discussion about an “existential” threat, but it often collapsed into quips about lightbulbs and cheeseburgers.

When she pulls up the video, it will start like this:

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