It’s easy to criticize Donald Trump. We say that he’s making a mockery of American politics, that he’s adding hate-fueled fodder to the fire of extremism, and that he represents a growing racist divide in America.

And we’re right. But the same percentage of Americans support Donald Trump as those who believe the moon landing was faked. His name will soon be buried in the sand of history. Just another hate-mongering demagogue who never made it into elected office.

Even though we know that he will never get elected, getting mired down in a debate over personality is easier than facing our actual complex and systemic issues. And Trump’s complete lack of ethics and human decency allow me to brush aside my own moral failings in a warm blanket of liberal self-righteous condemnation.

If you give your dog a treat every time that he barks, what happens? And then whose fault is it when he barks all day long? Yet we continue to give Donald Trump exactly what he wants.

His rise isn’t the result of hate-spewing extremist Republicans — it’s our visceral reaction that is fueling him and his rabid band of supporters. So it’s time to ignore them. The systemic issues that we face are too grave for us to get bogged down in a fight with bigots. We should be discussing policy, not personality.

There were 30,000 diplomats and delegates working hard in Paris to hash out a plan to keep global warming below 2 degrees.

If you are a political junkie, then the United Nations conference on climate change (COP21) was a turning point in human history. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders represented unprecedented coordination toward solving a global issue.

Yet, if you are a climate scientist or live on a low-lying Pacific island, then COP21 is too little, too late after two decades of underwhelming inaction.

And, if you are a Republican politician, then COP21 will lead to the destruction of the U.S. economy. The largest-ever gathering of world leaders represents a left wing plot to take over the government.

While the first two perspectives are correct, the third is not. The GOP is lying.

Yet, congressional Republicans are, once again, threatening to shut down the government in opposition to any climate deal coming out of Paris. In the last Republican debate Marco Rubio said that “we’re not going to destroy our economy (fighting climate change) the way the left-wing government we’re under wants us to.”

In the same debate, Chris Christie said, “We shouldn’t be destroying our economy in order to chase some wild, left-wing idea.” Jeb Bush said he probably would have skipped the Paris climate summit if he were president. And he also made sure to mention that action to avert climate change will “destroy” our economy.

Let me be clear, there is no debate on climate change. The evidence has been incontrovertible for decades. And action to mitigate the effects is not going to destroy our economy.

California has the most ambitious climate regulations in the country, it has the world’s second least carbon-intensive economy, and it has cut per capita emissions by 25 percent since 1990. It has done all of that while increasing its GDP by 37 percent, nearly leading the world in green technology investment (second only to the U.S. as a whole), leading the nation in job creation, and maintaining a balanced budget.

While the rest of the world is bewildered by the fact that America has the only climate-denying political party on the planet, we’re being sidetracked by partisan politics.

Yet, instead of calling them out on it and demanding action on climate change, we’re talking about Trump’s “fake hair.” In the biggest week of climate action in history, “Donald Trump” was generating 100 times more Google searches than “climate change.”

In our infatuation with reality TV and superstars, we spend more time talking about people than we do about policy. Invariably, every climate-denier ends their argument by saying that Al Gore has a big house. But climate change isn’t about Al Gore or Donald Trump. And the fight for a stable climate doesn’t end at the ballot box.

Even if the framework adopted at COP21 is successful, we could see upwards of 250 million climate refugees by the middle of the century. To put that into perspective, our current xenophobic outburst is because President Obama wants to accept just 10,000 Syrian refugees into the U.S.

And, unlike most refugees, we can’t temporarily house those displaced by climate change until the hostilities are over. They’ve lost their ancestral homes; they have nowhere to go back to. And most of them are our neighbors in the Pacific. They won’t be coming ashore in Turkey or Lebanon, but right here in Hawaii. This is our responsibility.

Trump represents a bigotry unparalleled in modern politics. And he allows us to stand clearly on the right side of history as we criticize him. Climate change doesn’t give us that same clear moral line. As Americans we have done more to warm the atmosphere than any other country in the world. It’s that complicity which makes the solutions so difficult to face.

But we need to stop getting sidetracked by demagogues so that we can give more airtime to those who are trying to make the complex and nuanced policy decisions that are necessary for a stable climate.