Democrats—who mostly aren’t talking about climate change—are continuing to debate whether they should talk about climate change.
The case against climate-centric messaging usually leans on years of fairly consistent polling. Relatively large segments of the population remain concerned about climate change, but prioritize other issues at the ballot box. The point was reiterated earlier this year by the centrist Searchlight Institute, in a report urging advocates and elected officials not to focus on “climate” over more salient topics like affordability and lower energy prices: “While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them.” Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego has similarly argued that talking about climate change turns voters off, so candidates are better off steering clear. “Honestly, it’s just so loaded,” he told Politico recently. “If our goal is to bring down our carbon footprint—try to restrain climate change—we need to win. And focusing on words versus outcomes, I think, is a real good pathway to losing.”
The terms of this debate are confusing. At the most basic level, climate change describes the effect of rising global temperatures caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. In United States politics, however, “climate” has become a stand-in for everything from tax credits for solar panels to hurricanes, the Green New Deal, disaster relief, ending fossil fuel extraction, multilateral processes, fuel efficiency regulations, and federal funding for certain kinds of scientific research—a long, disparate list encompassing both the problems caused by climate change and a variety of solutions for mitigating, adapting to, and dealing with it.
Those advising Democrats to stop talking about climate often point to its prominence during the Biden administration. Democrats, however, have talked relatively little about climate change itself over the last decade. Even the barrage of ambitious climate plans proposed during the party’s presidential primaries in 2020 mostly focused on the promise of an exciting suite of green technologies to create jobs, outcompete China, re-industrialize the Midwest, and reduce emissions. And this was only part of the promise of Biden’s American Jobs Plan, which—thanks in large part to Joe Manchin—became the much smaller and more energy-centric Inflation Reduction Act.
There are historical reasons for why Democrats started talking about climate change in this limited way that are too numerous to get into here. The short version is that by 2018, when Democrats won back the House of Representatives, the “climate” had become a shorthand in Washington for Democrats trying to put some kind of price on carbon aimed at reducing the biggest polluters’ emissions. Many of those attempts failed. In large part, those failures were the result of a full-frontal assault by polluting interests like the Koch Brothers to turn “climate” into a strictly partisan matter, and electorally sanction members of their own party who dared to talk about it. Democrats consequently stopped trying to pass climate policies through Congress for the better part of a decade. When progressive climate groups and Congressional candidates-turned-electeds proposed a Green New Deal, enterprising Democrats flocked to Green New Deal–ish proposals as a vehicle to tap into a genuine global zeitgeist: a widespread desire to mitigate the mounting threat of climate change.
Under Joe Biden, “climate” was broadcast as a means to several ends. Committed climate hawks in the White House pushed for rapid emissions reductions. Progressive economists saw green manufacturing as a jobs and regional development program with significant benefits for supply chain security. Foreign policy hawks treated green industrial policy as a way to “win” against China—which handily dominates supply chains for solar and EVs—and reassert U.S. leadership on an important global issue after four years of losing credibility under Trump.
The Biden administration did plenty of good, quiet work to address the realities of rising temperatures, but its public messaging on climate centered on attempts to inflate green asset values, i.e. use modest public funds to spur on massive private sector investments in wind, solar, electric vehicles, and other lower-carbon technologies. As I wrote about at length last year, that strategy worked pretty well on its own limited terms. Voters mostly didn’t notice, though, and the Trump administration has now dismantled many of those policies, including the clean energy–focused portions of the Inflation Reduction Act.
The so-called “climate hushers” are right about some things: The particular way that party candidates and lawmakers have talked about climate over the last several years clearly hasn’t furnished them with electoral majorities. It doesn’t seem to be a huge factor in the party having lost them, either. Democrats won in an election year where “climate” was a big talking point for candidates, including Biden; they lost an election where they barely mentioned it.
By my lights, part of the confusion in this debate seems to be that climate change isn’t a political issue so much as the context in which politics happens. Whereas virtually every major political issue is on some level affected by the effects of rising temperatures—often dramatically so—“climate” is treated as a niche concern.
Political pollsters accordingly survey voters about climate change alongside a slew of other relatively discrete issues. They don’t typically ask them about capitalism, for instance, and for good reason. Capitalism isn’t a traditional political issue so much as the foundation of—conservatively speaking—most issues that voters care about, from inflation to wages to healthcare costs. Climate change is likewise already shaping everything from housing and insurance markets to migration. That’s because we live in a world where capitalism and climate change are now structural features of existence. In the United States, at least, discussions of structural forces as such tend to be pretty academic.
It’s instructive, actually, to compare discussions of climate change and capitalism. Putting aside any deeper connections between the two, the analogy offers a different way for politicians to treat “climate.” Socialist politicians—who are typically anti-capitalists—tend to start from first principles. They don’t ask voters to support them because they are socialists; they don’t ask them to believe in socialism or oppose capitalism. Successful socialist politicians, such as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani and Seattle mayor Katie Wilson, stick to issues that people in their districts care about, like making life more affordable and expanding public services. There are of course other socialists who debate whether this approach represents a betrayal of socialist values. But a key factor in the relative success of socialist politicians over the last decade has been a willingness to speak concretely and with conviction about their plans for improving the lives of ordinary people. Importantly, they also don’t shy away from the label. Mamdani ran and won with the enthusiastic backing of New York City’s chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “I will govern as a democratic socialist,” he said proudly in his inaugural address. “Call it Pothole Politics. Call it Sewer Socialism,” he wrote this week on social media, announcing that his administration had closed an inherited $12 billion budget deficit. “It’s government that delivers for the people who make this city run.”
To govern according to their principles, socialist electeds find common cause with non-socialists who support things like taxing the rich and bolstering collective bargaining rights. One needn’t identify as a socialist to support the things that socialists do. Figures across the political spectrum frequently voice their disagreements with the worst excesses of capitalism, like extreme wealth inequality, wage theft, and insider trading.
Republicans have their own version of this. Even though a majority of voters in the U.S. (54 percent) hold positive views of capitalism, successful right-wing candidates by and large do not campaign explicitly as capitalists. Some might flout their credentials as successful businessmen or their commitment to “free market principles,” but capitalism itself remains a somewhat abstract concept for people who haven’t spent their careers writing about its merits. Republicans are frequently eager to draw attention away from their fringe-y, extreme capitalist economic views and toward so-called cultural issues precisely because things like giving tax cuts to the rich are so unpopular; 64 percent of registered voters disapprove of how Trump is handling taxes. Democrats wary of being accused of being socialists may well be more likely to self-identify as capitalists than their opponents. Days before the 2024 election, Kamala Harris took the time to assure voters, “I am a capitalist. I am a pragmatic capitalist.”
So should Democrats campaign on climate change? They arguably shouldn’t make canvassers knocking doors ask prospective voters if they believe in climate change. Advertising oneself as primarily a “climate candidate” probably isn’t a great strategy. “Fight climate change” is as intangible a message as “fight capitalism.” Although, as an eco-socialist, I agree with the need to do both, I also don’t think those slogans are especially helpful for building the durable, hegemonic majorities necessary to accomplish those goals.
Avoiding that kind of rhetoric is very different than being cowed by the right into pretending that climate change doesn’t exist. The reality of the climate crisis is that it’s strengthening the deadly heat waves, storms, and fires that are saddling people across the country with higher electricity bills and insurance premiums. The Iran war has been a sobering reminder that the fossil fuel economy isn’t a great deal, either. Contra Trump, so-called “energy independence” hasn’t freed drivers from having to pay higher prices at the pump. Showering coal, oil, and gas CEOs with even more giveaways won’t make your commute less expensive anytime soon, or stop automakers from charging exorbitant fees at the dealership for useless features.
You don’t need to know a great deal about atmospheric science to understand that summers are getting hotter, and—if you live somewhere like New Orleans—that the seas are rising. A few years ago, a friend in the Bay Area recounted sitting with her newborn in the bathtub to keep cool as temperatures reached into the 100s—highs that have been so rare there that many homes don’t have air conditioning. Going outside wasn’t an option because nearby wildfires were making the air dangerous to breathe. Leaders should help accurately interpret these phenomena rather than pretend they’re tragic isolated incidents. The right’s alternative is something we might call the climate politics of fools: blaming the deadly and disorienting effects of climate change on Jewish Space Lasers while defunding FEMA, and then, when utility bill soar in a heat wave, scapegoating solar panels and wind turbines.
Populist policies to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis are thankfully pretty popular. They’re also too big—and too threatening to elites—to be quietly enacted by politicians claiming their only concerns are affordability and lower energy prices. Keeping people safe in a climate-changed world means fighting with Republicans and the monied interests that pay the GOP to defend their interests: a blank check to extract fossil fuels and accumulate wealth indefinitely. Denying the realities of a warming planet by keeping certain words out of your mouth won’t make them look the other way.
