It Might Be Time To Find a New Way to Talk About Climate Action

Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk has made addressing climate change a central priority of his time running Pennsylvania’s third-most populous city. He ran for office in 2021 promising to align all city budgets with sustainability goals and since taking office the following year he has pursued a range of climate initiatives including decarbonizing the city’s transportation sector.

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But when he found himself at the center of the U.S. political scene this fall, as both presidential campaigns homed in on Pennsylvania as a key swing state, climate change didn’t come up at all. “I talk to the [Harris] campaign all the time about messaging to Latinos,” he told me before the election. “We haven’t talked at all about climate. It just doesn’t fit into the equation.”

Indeed, by all accounts, climate change was an afterthought on the campaign trail. As a candidate, President-elect Donald Trump mostly ignored it. When climate change came up during a debate, Vice President Kamala Harris took the opportunity to talk about record U.S. oil drilling.

To many, this is just a result of the political winds in an election year when other issues—including and especially inflation—occupied voters’ minds. But it’s worth pausing to reflect on just how bizarre this dynamic is. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), President Joe Biden’s landmark climate law, stands out as one of his most celebrated accomplishments. It was the result of significant political capital. How can such a major win fail to translate into a positive campaign talking point?

In the wake of the election, a debate has emerged about where Democrats went wrong selling their agenda on the campaign trail—from big moves like Biden’s decision to drop out to seemingly small ones like which podcasts Harris joined. Climate change has been left out of these discussions simply because the issue didn’t come up. “This was not a climate election,” says Pete Maysmith, senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters. “It just was not an issue that broke through in any way, shape or form.”

That may be part of the problem. Thanks in part to the IRA, the developed world is in the seemingly inexorable process of decarbonization. Without an all-but-unimaginable effort to stop the energy transition in the U.S. dead in its tracks, we’re not going back. But more needs to be done in order to avoid some of the worst effects of climate change. And that means, at some point, someone in American political office will need to muster the political capital to do more—and be willing to spend it.

To do any of that, they’ll need to figure out how to talk about climate change.

The question of how to talk about climate change isn’t exactly new. The issue is scientific in nature, and the solutions are inherently wonky. For decades, climate advocates in the U.S. have oscillated between communications approaches. Some pushed individual action as a way to educate people; others tried to terrify people into action with the worst-case scenarios.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, climate policy efforts got a new framing. Then-President Barack Obama had failed to pass a climate law, in part because the highly technical program lacked popular understanding and support. And leading voices inside and outside of the climate space—from Washington Gov. Jay Inslee to political analyst Van Jones—began touting jobs as a key framing to get Americans onboard with climate policy.

The framing percolated for more than a decade before Joe Biden took up the messaging as a presidential candidate. He promised to spend big on advancing clean industry and borrowed a line from Inslee, saying “when I think climate change, I think about jobs.” In office, once the IRA became law, the administration often touted the numbers of factories announced and the jobs that would be created.

But the world changed dramatically in the nearly two years between Biden’s election and the passage of the IRA. Inflation eclipsed job creation as the top economic concern. (Despite the law’s clever name, no one really made a full-throated case that the law would bring down inflation). Top administration officials made persistent efforts to tout the investments happening as a result of the IRA and other federal spending programs, fanning across the country for groundbreakings and ribbon cuttings.

But those efforts often struggled to break through the noise. And the benefits—jobs in new industries and new infrastructure in communities, many of them Republican leaning—remained distant to many people. The vast majority of Americans—71%, according to a Washington Post poll from last year—knew little to nothing of the law.

In a way, this dynamic has made the IRA more durable. Few people are out in the streets demanding its repeal, and early Republican efforts to squash it have hit roadblock after roadblock. Indeed, polling shows that Americans like investments in renewable energy and U.S. clean technology manufacturing. “The individual elements of the investment-led climate strategy have all remained quite popular,” says John Podesta, who currently leads IRA implementation at the White House. “People want cleaner air, they want cleaner water, they want clean power, they want sustainability, they value jobs.”

But good polling for individual components isn’t enough to make a broader climate agenda a political winner. And it’s not a great basis for doing more on climate, either. At a fireside chat discussion last week, I asked Ali Zaidi, Biden’s National Climate Advisor, if there’s anything he wishes he had done differently in his role. He answered quickly: “If we figured out a way to help people understand those jobs were coming… we would have bought ourselves the political capital to keep going bigger, as opposed to having a conversation about whether it will fall back or not.”

The resulting situation we’re in is truly bizarre. We’ve begun to feel the effects of climate change in communities across the country with hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts harming American lives and livelihoods. At the same time, the decarbonization agenda has driven investment and created jobs. Despite this moment, on the surface it seems that selling climate policy should be easier than ever. And yet, the U.S. climate movement is without a central animating message. 

The jobs message persists for many climate advocates. Others take aim at the fossil fuel industry. Others still talk about the economic effects of climate damage. Truly, there are myriad approaches, each with its own supporters and detractors. In a way, this is a good thing. The media landscape is fractured. And different messages will land with different audiences. 

But, if the U.S. is going to attempt to double down on climate change at some point in the future, sooner or later someone will need to figure out what message works nationally. “We always want to understand where the voters are and communicate in a way that resonates with them, that they can hear,” says Maysmith. With electricity demand on the rise due to data center usage, Maysmith says he sees potential to speak to the public in the near future about the cost savings opportunity that comes from clean energy.

There’s also a legitimate debate to be had about how much to highlight climate policy at a time when American minds are clearly elsewhere. But forcing a conversation about climate policy may not necessarily be a bad thing. The ballot in Washington this year included a provision to repeal the state’s Climate Commitment Act, which places a price on carbon emissions in the state and uses the revenue to fund projects in local communities. Voters overwhelmingly voted to keep the law after both sides ran an expensive campaign around it. 

Governor Jay Inslee credits the ballot measure for “creating a dialogue in the state” that gave supporters the opportunity to sing the praises of the law. “We put a little sticker on wherever we spend the money,” he said. “It says ‘Brought to you by the Climate Commitment Act.’”

Perhaps the IRA needs a sticker of its own. And rather than shying away from climate for fear it will turn away voters, maybe it’s time to lean in harder. But to do that successfully would require recognition that the old ways have delivered only mixed results and that new ways of talking about climate are needed.

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