Climate change was not a hot topic during this year’s midterm elections. Candidates who’d previously championed climate action walked those positions back this cycle. Abdul El-Sayed supported the Green New Deal when he ran for governor in 2018; he said he wouldn’t defend it now. James Talarico sponsored climate legislation as a state legislator in Texas and once said “fossil fuels are destroying the planet.” In his Senate run, Talarico embraced an “all of the above” energy strategy as part of a platform to protect jobs in the oil and gas industry while encouraging cleaner sources like solar and wind, which already proliferate in the Lonestar State. Looking at these shifts, Axios declared, “Democrats’ blue wave leaves climate behind.”
So are Democrats really done with climate politics? Not exactly. An analysis from the Climate and Community Institute points out that candidates in deep blue districts and swing states alike touted their support for clean energy investment and taking on polluting utilities. While these planks weren’t necessarily central, Republicans didn’t manage to sink campaigns by attacking Democrats’ past or present support for a “Green New Scam,” either. Climate politics may not be dead, then, but their future is going to look very different.
During the first years of the Biden administration, climate change was both a consistent White House talking point and treated primarily as an investment opportunity that would allow the United States to accomplish a range of goals for various factions within the Democratic Party: outcompete China in the twenty-first century’s most important growth industries; bring well-paid, potentially even unionized jobs back to deindustrialized areas, and thus win voters in critical swing states back to Democrats; rehabilitate the country’s global reputation after Trump; and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Debates still rage over how successfully the Inflation Reduction Act—the Biden era’s highest-profile legislative achievement—was at accomplishing these aims. A year after its passage, polls showed that seven in 10 Americans had heard only “a little” or “nothing” about it.
Whatever the next era of climate politics holds, it will likely revolve less around the United States becoming some sort of global climate champion and pledges to reach “net-zero” emissions by some point far off into the future. Given the sheer force of the climate disasters now regularly battering the U.S.—from heat waves to wildfires, floods, and droughts—it should probably also engage with climate change as a force that is actively upending life here rather than as a problem still primarily hurting poorer parts of the world. It is difficult, that is, to imagine an affordability agenda that ignores how soaring energy costs make monthly bills unaffordable in scorching summer heat; how the skyrocketing cost of home insurance is driving up housing costs; or how persistent droughts have driven the U.S. cattle down herd to its lowest levels in 75 years and sent beef prices soaring. Addressing these sorts of climate-induced cost of living concerns might also mean a turning away from treating climate change as a distinct issue, and infusing it into a broader-based economic populism.
Will Lawrence—the Sunrise Movement co-founder who flipped his Michigan House seat last week—told the New York Times this week that climate is one of many “cascading crises” facing the country, on top of wars and rising costs: “Figuring out how to wrap that all up into one neat story is not easy for any of us.” His message, he added, was about security “in the sense of being able to look forward to the future and be secure at night knowing that we and our kids are going to be taken care of, that we’re going to be OK. Climate is as important to that as it’s ever been.”
Such an approach could entail broadening the focus of climate politics beyond the energy sector, where most climate policy and messaging in the U.S. has tended to focus. Although people care quite a lot about how much electricity costs, how those electrons are generated—and how they make their way to homes and businesses—aren’t especially pressing questions for most Americans. Decarbonizing the power sector is both a vital goal and a virtually incomprehensible statement. Fortunately for would-be green populists, some of the same companies that are profiting off of wildly unprofitable data centers are also responsible for rising electricity bills and excess carbon emissions. If greening a utility’s energy mixture doesn’t excite voters, holding its CEOs’ feet to the fire might. Candidates for public utility regulators in Georgia and Arizona focused on expanding renewable energy and reining in utility bosses’ attempts to raise rates for the sake of powering data centers.
The disturbing reality of the climate crisis is that it affects virtually every facet of life. For Democrats who want to help the country navigate a hotter and pricier century, the sheer scope of that crisis can be the grounds for a new climate politics that responds to voters’ concerns with more than abstract pledges.
