Is Keeping Quiet on Climate Really Harris’s Only Option?

In her speech accepting the Democratic nomination for president last week, Kamala Harris gave the biggest existential crisis of our lifetimes roughly the same amount of time as a recollection of her parents playing Miles Davis: She mentioned it exactly once. In fact, it didn’t even get its own sentence. “The freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis” (emphasis added) was listed among many other “fundamental freedoms” under threat in the 2024 election.

Media outlets have been noticing this tendency of the Harris campaign—and they’ve also been reporting that this strategy might be fine, actually.

“Harris Goes Light on Climate Policy. Green Leaders Are OK With That,” read a New York Times headline on a story in which Washington Governor Jay Inslee says, “I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.” In other words: Harris needs to win first. Winning, so the wisdom goes, means not alienating swing voters with too much fracking talk. Politico, meanwhile, noted that climate activists who have protested the Biden administration’s drilling record “are pursuing a new strategy with his would-be successor: Get Kamala Harris elected now, ask questions later.”

“Democrats see talking about the environment as a lose-lose proposition,” reported Maxine Joselow for The Washington Post. “If they call for curbing fossil fuel production to fight global warming, they risk alienating voters in Pennsylvania, a pivotal swing state where natural gas powers the economy. But if they tout record U.S. oil production that has helped lower energy costs, they risk angering young voters.” While climate policy polls well, Joselow wrote, “of 28 issues, global warming ranks 19th in importance to registered voters.” The piece concludes with a Philadelphia woman saying to canvassers from the Environmental Voter Project: “The environment is not my top thing … sorry.”

Is it true that Harris needs to keep quiet about climate and environmental policy in order to win? Honestly, who’s to say? Some polls have indeed found that voters are less concerned about the climate now than they were in 2020—a bonkers conclusion given that 2024 is so far the hottest year on record, with experts increasingly abandoning the idea that global warming can be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). But there you have it!

What’s striking, though, is the implicit fatalism of this retreat into conventional wisdom, in an election that has already proven fatalists, and their conventional wisdom, about as spectacularly wrong as they’ve ever been. Harris could still lose in November, to be sure, but a lot of people thought there was zero chance of off-ramping Joe Biden even though he struggled to complete sentences in the first debate, and many others doubted that the party could unite behind someone else.

Several writers at TNR have questioned whether “running scared” on climate and the environment is really the best, or only, option. Kate Aronoff sees parallels between the sidelining of the climate crisis at the convention and the sidelining of pro-Palestinian delegates and activists. “Discussing either the climate crisis or Israel’s war on Gaza in any convincing fashion requires specifics,” she wrote. “Who, exactly, is spewing all of those heat-trapping emissions? And who is taking all those innocent Palestinian lives? More importantly, ending all of that suffering—from global warming and war alike—requires a willingness to challenge the forces responsible for it with more than words. The convention showcased a party that isn’t willing to do any of this.” Whatever the “short-term benefits” of avoiding divisive topics, she added, “continuing to avoid them promises not just to prolong suffering, but invite calamities that there’ll be no turning back from.”

Liza Featherstone points out that there could actually be ways to win more voters while talking about the environment. One of RFK Jr.’s “few appealing causes” she wrote, was “his passion for fighting toxic pollution,” particularly as it affects human health. In the wake of his exit from the 2024 election—and baffling endorsement of Donald Trump, whose record on pollution is not at all in keeping with RFK Jr.’s views—the Harris campaign may have an opportunity, Liza wrote, to pull former RFK voters away from Trump while doing the right thing: “RFK Jr.’s concerns with the toxins in our bodies and environment are crucial and have broad popular resonance. Harris should immediately take them on board.”

In general, it’s always a little hard to tell whether the electorate’s ambivalence about a given issue is about the issue itself, or how it’s been presented to them. There’s little doubt at this point that the Inflation Reduction Act—the Biden administration’s signature piece of climate legislation—is a bust in terms of its campaign usefulness, even if it succeeded in its stated goals. But its limitations as a sales pitch were pretty clear from the get-go. After all, if you want a sound bite–able case for how fighting climate change can quickly and materially improve voters’ lives, a law called the “Inflation Reduction Act” that functions in large part via byzantine tax incentives ain’t it.

The Harris campaign is operating on an unprecedentedly compressed timeline, and maybe it’s too late to come up with a climate messaging strategy that defies conventional wisdom by seeking to persuade voters rather than just mirroring current polling. But clearly there are opportunities for such persuasion. A few elections ago, the idea that 62 percent of likely voters would support legal accountability for oil and gas companies over their role driving climate change—and almost half, per a recent Data for Progress poll, would support prosecuting them for homicide—would have been unthinkable. So yes: The Harris campaign may be right that talking about climate change and the environment would lose them Pennsylvania. But it’s also hard to know what American voters might support if their politicians made a compelling pitch.

Good News/Bad News

On the one hand, countries aren’t making anywhere near enough progress toward their emissions-reductions targets. On the other hand, a new study published in the journal Science claims to have found 63 cases where policies really did work to reduce emissions, Grist’s Kate Yoder reports.

Another recent study in Science does not give as much cause for optimism. Fisheries aren’t being managed sustainably, and fish population numbers have been overestimated, a team of ecologists found. “Among over-fished stocks,” the lead author wrote, “we estimated the number of collapsed stocks was likely 85% larger than currently recognised.”

Stat of the Week
$3 million

That’s how much the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers is paying, Axios reports, for an ad attacking Kamala Harris for her purported “ban on most new gas cars,” targeting voters in the key swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, as well as in Wisconsin, Montana, and Nevada.

What I’m Reading

Two states become first in U.S. to ban use of PFAS in firefighters’ protective gear

Long-lasting PFAS chemicals are often used to make fabrics stain- and water-resistant, and for years they’ve been used in firefighters’ equipment in particular. But they’ve also been linked to a wide variety of serious health problems, and evidence has emerged over time that firefighters may be at particular risk given their consistent exposure to the substances. Last week, Massachusetts joined Connecticut in banning firefighting gear sold in the state from containing PFAS, starting in 2027 (Connecticut’s ban will take effect in 2028). The Guardian’s Tom Perkins reports some of the extraordinary efforts that went into lobbying the state for this legislation:

Diane Cotter, the wife of a Worcester fire department firefighter, Paul Cotter, helped spearhead the Massachusetts effort. Paul developed prostate cancer, which is linked to PFAS exposure, about 10 years ago, when he was 55 years old.

Her crusade started in 2019 when she mentioned her husband had prostate cancer at a lunch with other wives of local firefighters.

“Almost every wife at the table lifted up their head and said: ‘Me too,’” Cotter said, noting that most of the women were only 35 to 55 years old. She described herself as “naive” at the time, armed with “only an expired hairdresser’s license” but willing to take on a then unfriendly firefighter union, state government, chemical industry and turnout gear industry.… She was invited to the bill signing last week, a moment she described as “surreal”.

Read Tom Perkins’s full report in The Guardian.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.