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The best thing Democrats can do for the climate: Stop talking about it

Climate expert Matt Huber explains why Democrats should focus on other issues.

With a little over five months until the midterm elections, Democrats in Washington and on the campaign trail are trying to show voters they care about cost-of-living issues.

To make that pitch, some parts of the party’s usual message may be going by the wayside. That includes the conversation about combating climate change. Once a pillar of the Democratic agenda, it may now be fading into the background. According to Matt Huber, a professor of geography and the environment at Syracuse University and the author of Climate Change as Class War, Democrats, and the climate, might be better off for it.

Huber, who recently wrote an essay for the New York Times titled “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about why Democratic candidates can and should de-center climate change from their platforms and streamline their campaigns on affordability issues.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What made you want to write this appeal to Democrats to essentially shut up about climate change right now?

I try to argue that it’s the end of a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics where a lot of Democrats were thinking that climate would be this urgent issue that could galvanize this mass majoritarian coalition around green jobs.

What I’ve come to in the last few years is that I’m just not sure that rhetorically centering the climate crisis as the impetus of this kind of politics is actually going to be effective in building that power, building that majority. Most Americans don’t really prioritize this as an urgent issue, and they prioritize other cost-of-living issues much more.

When did fighting climate change become such a core issue for the Democratic Party?

2006, which was 20 years ago, was a big flashpoint where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. And that did coalesce in the zeitgeist with a massive financial crisis a couple of years later.

There was a lot of feeling, just like in the Great Depression, that there had to be this mass jobs program, public investment program, and that........

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