Here’s How Democrats Should Talk About Climate Change

Rather than treating it like a niche issue, candidates should offer concrete policies that assume global warming is the context in which all politics happens.

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........

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