The Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Climate Change Ever Again

Climate change has been tragically visible this fall. In the Valencia region of Spain, hundreds are dead or missing after intense flooding last week, with entire houses washed away and people trapped in homes with the corpses of their family members. In late September, Hurricane Helene devastated the American South, also killing hundreds of people, and causing billions of dollars in damage.

Yet even as so many people struggled to rescue their neighbors and put their own lives back together, our presidential election rarely offered a glimmer of any of that trauma. Climate change was largely absent from the rhetoric of both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s campaigns. Although Harris served as vice president under the best climate administration ever—Biden invested significantly in renewable energy and made progress regulating carbon emissions and other kinds of pollution at the agency level—she rarely bragged about that. In fact, she bragged about opening up new lands for fracking instead, and backed away from big climate policy that she had supported as a Democratic primary candidate in 2019: the Green New Deal.

Harris’s failure to campaign aggressively on climate no doubt stemmed from her overreliance on the strange consultant-produced fantasy that Democrats have inexplicably adhered to since 2016: that a coalition of anti-Trump Republicans and Silicon Valley billionaires was going to win over the working-class masses of Michigan and Pennsylvania. It didn’t work, and staying silent on climate change meant that Trump was never put on the spot or forced to explain his strange views, for example that wind power causes cancer. All this was particularly strange given that climate remained a top issue among liberal Democratic voters, the people that Harris would need to turn out in order to win the election. Many experts said this was a huge mistake on her part.

One big problem, for Harris, was that the Biden administration had—under duress, in trying to compromise with Manchin and the Republicans—enacted climate policy that, while it did create jobs, failed to curb inflation. Everyone I know who spent the last few months canvassing in a battleground state repeatedly heard that people hated paying more for basic life necessities. The Democrats, then, were constrained from mentioning their climate policies too much because they didn’t want to remind people of the inflationary pain such policies had caused them and, partly too, the benefits of the IRA were simply wonky and hard to explain. This was probably a mistake, given that people were already thinking about inflation, and polling indicates widespread concern about climate. 

Messaging alone, of course, wouldn’t have fixed the fact that many people have simply had bad experiences in the past four years. Naming your legislation the “Inflation Reduction Act” does not by itself ensure that it will not be inflationary or that you will be seen as a hero for ending inflation. Biden and Congress could have been more attentive to Americans’ cost of living struggles, by funding the investments with much higher taxes on the rich and upper-middle class, as well as by addressing the cost of living in other tangible ways, including real investment in affordable housing, continuing and even increasing the child tax credit, along with ending overseas conflicts like the war in Ukraine, which has vastly complicated supply chains and raised prices all over the world.

Perhaps an equally big problem was a lack of grassroots pressure on the candidates to speak about climate change and explain their plans. With almost no huge street protests, the climate movement hasn’t been a visible mass movement over the past year, probably a combination of lingering pandemic demobilization, young radicals’ (appropriately) shifting attention to Gaza—and the confusing effects of partial success. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act oddly divided the climate movement, with some declaring it a huge victory, to the degree that they didn’t feel the need to pressure Harris, even to say what she would do to protect the IRA and other gains of her administration, or to say how she would go further as a climate president. Yet others dismissed the IRA as a hodgepodge of corporate welfare and focused on Biden’s failure to stop new fossil fuel projects, perhaps even to the point of confusing the public on whether any real progress had occurred. Trump himself, despite being one of the worst environmental presidents in history and the public figure with some of the craziest false statements on the issue, never became a target of climate protest, although groups like the Sunrise movement did campaign against him.

In Spain this week, residents affected by the recent flooding and a Trumpian provincial government’s decision to cut emergency services pelted their king with mud when he visited a flood site a couple days ago. That’s frankly more than we’re doing to hold our governments accountable for the suffering caused by inadequate climate policy. For months, we allowed the consultants, candidates, media, and our fellow citizens to pretend that climate just wasn’t that salient an issue. Now U.S. voters have awarded the party of the biggest climate deniers at least two, and likely all three, elected branches of government. We can’t ever let this happen again.