Democrats Have to Choose: The Abundance Movement or the Climate Movement

Are Democrats finally embracing a saner, dare I say quieter climate politics?

Last week, journalists at the Times, the Post, and other outlets observed a conspicuous absence of climate rhetoric at the DNC, noting insightfully that Democrats must have realized how little voters really care about climate change. But it’s not just that climate change is a low-salience issue for the American public. It’s that the climate policies that prevailed in the 2010s are ill-suited to the post-pandemic and post-inflation circumstances that are defining the 2020s.

As the Washington Post editorialized last week, citing work by my colleagues and myself, “doomerism overstates how much President Joe Biden has accomplished — or a President Kamala Harris would accomplish — on cutting emissions, absent a change in approach.” As our research revealed, although 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act represented real progress, it will mostly keep the American economy decarbonizing at about the same pace it’s been on for the last 30 years. As we showed, much of this stasis owes to regulatory barriers to technology and infrastructure development needed to build a low-carbon economy—barriers that the climate movement is now working furiously to protect.

The emerging abundance movement, by contrast, is uniquely set up to tackle challenges posed by a lack of technological readiness, permitting and other regulatory barriers, and environmental NIMBYism. Vice President Harris, former President Obama, and other leading Democrats leaned distinctly towards Team Abundance at the DNC, arguing, for instance, that “we need to build more units and clear away some of the outdated laws and regulations that made it harder to build homes.” The question is, will Democrats follow through on last week’s message and strategic discipline, and take on the environmentalist special interests obstructing their “new way forward?”

—

Catastrophist activists’ totalizing control of the climate agenda was always a bit awkward in evidence-based, representative politics. No serious person believes that we have 12—er, make that 6—years to solve climate change, and no elected politician on Earth is willing to entertain the degrowthers that argue we do.

And yet, the last decade or so offered somewhat fertile ground for these advocates within the Democratic Party. In the long recovery from the Great Recession, stewing in the successive crises of the Trump Administration and the covid pandemic, Democrats turned anxiety politics up to eleven. Climate catastrophism fit comfortably into a milieu otherwise agitated by the death of democracy, the silencing of scientists, and the multiple cultural reckonings broadly understood as the #MeToo movement and post-Ferguson racial advocacy. Climate politics reached a fever pitch, arguably, in 2018, when the Guardian misinterpreted IPCC research with the headline “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe,” a spurious meme that nevertheless got picked up by Democratic politicians. Climate change, although briefly, served as the lodestone for the entire Democratic policy agenda. Activists freighted the “Green New Deal” with everything from clean energy investment to universal health and family care to jobs and basic income guarantees.

But if the 2024 DNC is any indication, the days of climate catastrophism are fading away.

Flags and friendly faces replaced the fire and brimstone prominent at the 2020 election. Neither implicit nor explicit emissions goals came up much during the dozens of Convention speeches, and the Green New Deal wasn’t mentioned at all. Kamala Harris, once a sponsor of the Green New Deal Resolution in the Senate, mentioned the “climate crisis” only once in passing during her forty-minute speech. The whole slate of speakers stayed consistently on message, emphasizing “freedom and joy,” a far cry from the catastrophe and crisis that have animated progressive climate activists for years.

Some prominent activists, though, continued to insist that, to be serious about climate action, “we need to talk about it.” But do we?

Most of what we call climate policy today takes the form of clean energy incentives created in the era before we talked much about climate change at all, in vehicles like the Energy Policy Acts of 1992 and 2006 and the Recovery Act of 2009. The Inflation Reduction Act was mostly an extension and expansion of these pre-existing policies. To the extent that maximalist activism played a role in passing the IRA, it was in making it smaller, not bigger.

The popped bubble of climate activism appears to have led even many environmental leaders towards a more low-key form of politics. “Nobody’s worried about how many times [Harris] talks about climate change,” NRDC’s Gina McCarthy told the New York Times’ Lisa Friedman last week.

It’s likely that Harris, McCarthy, and the rest of the Democratic party are finally internalizing what opinion polls have revealed for years: voters just don’t care that much about climate change. Those that do are overwhelmingly politically active and liberal, exactly the kind of voter that Democrats shouldn’t spend a lot of time or money on. As Maxine Joselow put it last week, “with most voters ranking other issues as more important, and with Democrats wanting to paint a rosy picture of the future, party leaders appear to have calculated that climate silence is the safest strategy.”

They may not acknowledge it, but if it sticks, this is a remarkable shift for Democrats. For years climate activists got the Party’s attention with a strategy of “validating climate anxiety” (read: cultivating depression in kids) in order to “mobilize climate action” (read: raise money for climate advocacy organizations). But that strategy is displaying the unmistakable signs of a negative feedback loop. Climate protests are increasingly unpopular even among climate advocates. Democratic electeds are talking less about the issue, not more. And on policy, climate advocates have gone from claiming credit for popular Democratic legislative victories to obstructing the obvious and pragmatic regulatory reforms needed for sustained progress on energy and emissions. Something had to give.

If they’re smart, climate advocates will follow Harris and McCarthy’s lead by indulging in a little #ClimateSilence of their own, at least until they reorient around the changed circumstances of American political reality.

–

As I wrote earlier this year, it was easier to argue that climate change represents a first-order, existential priority before the pandemic. Today, there are simply too many other more salient crises for climate change to get much air time. Covid gave way to a nation-wide bump in crime and inflation, which gave way to horrifying conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and beyond. Autocrats like Xi, Putin, and the Iranian Ayatollah have become emboldened in recent years. There’s even a new X-risk on the scene: artificial intelligence may or may not threaten the survival of the human species, but it is certainly crowding out parallel existential climate anxieties.

When the DNC wasn’t singing from the joy and freedom hymnal, these concerns—Gaza, Ukraine, China, crime, and even AI–occupied a much greater share of the agenda than climate change did. Even the vanguard of the progressive movement showed up to protest over Gaza, not climate.

Despite understandable division and even rancor among Democrats, these are signs of a healthy political party, one for which different issue publics negotiate for attention and in which, ultimately, an attempt at issue prioritization is made. Climate change, far from the “ultimate threat to humanity” as President Biden called it recently, is in fact one of many threats and opportunities facing humanity and the American people. Confronting it effectively requires doing politics, not superseding them.

This in no way requires giving up on further climate policy. To the contrary, there is a popular groundswell for certain decarbonization policies that, unlike the Green New Deal or Build Back Better, can still attract bipartisan political support, surely a high-value asset over the coming years and decades. Near-critical masses of both parties support various reforms to the nation’s technology licensing and permitting regulations, along with widespread support for specific technologies like advanced nuclear reactors and deep-earth geothermal drilling. Like the nuclear-focused ADVANCE Act that passed in the Senate this summer with almost unheard-of levels of bipartisan support, many of these policies have yet to be claimed by either side in the broader culture war.

With covid-era Congressional profligacy solidly in the rear-view, the climate movement’s hopes for another Inflation Reduction Act are, almost certainly, doomed. The key climate policy gap no longer comes from a lack of subsidies for low-carbon technologies, but from a lack of functional technology innovation, licensing, permitting, and state capacity capable of building a low-carbon economy.

Indeed, the climate action of tomorrow fits much more comfortably in the expansive, ambitious vision of the abundance movement than in the contrived, zero-sum doomers-vs-deniers contest preferred by the environmentalist movement. Those torn between the two camps will, eventually, have to pick a side.