The Era of the Climate Hawk Is Over

Fifteen years ago, as the sun was setting on the Obama-era effort to establish a federal emissions cap-and-trade program, David Roberts coined the term “climate hawk” to describe “people who understand climate change and support clean energy but do not share the rest of the ideological and sociocultural commitments that define environmentalism.”

Sometime later, a friend asked me if I consider myself a climate hawk.

It was a reasonable question. I’ve dedicated my career to addressing climate change and I, uh, do not share environmentalism’s other commitments. But I had to say no, I’m not a climate hawk. I saw myself as a climate pragmatist, and continue to do so. We pragmatists consider climate change a real and significant issue, but think it’s best addressed obliquely, by de-centering climate change and elevating more tangible and tractable concerns, such as energy innovation, material abundance, resilience to weather and natural disasters, and conventional pollution reduction. Ambitious climate mitigation is possible. But it is best achieved as a co-benefit of these other endeavors.

It’s fair to say, over a decade later, that the hawks outran us pragmatists. Roberts and his compatriots would succeed in the effort to, in his words, “keep the threat of climate change at the center of the conversation,” not only within the US environmental movement but the Democratic Party as well. In the early years of the Obama administration, environmentalists complained that Obama had chosen to prioritize health care over climate. Yet by the early years of the Biden administration, the White House and Democrats had clearly chosen to prioritize climate change over virtually everything else. Climate hawks’ theory of change had long been that the existential threat of climate change, green industrial policy, and environmental justice would build the lasting Democratic majorities that, in turn, would oversee a rapid energy transition. And with the passage in 2022 of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), most climate hawks were confident that their new era of “green industrial policy” had finally begun.

But with the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that the IRA was not the beginning of something but the end of it. The political, economic, and cultural conditions that allowed for climate hawks’ advances over the last decade simply no longer hold.

The era of the climate hawk is over.

Climate Decadence

Roberts’s definition suffices for what a climate hawk believes. But I should be specific about who, literally, I’m talking about here, because there’s a tendency to elide the distinctions (and similarities) between various factions of the climate movement. There are indeed key differences in tactics between, say, the Sunrise Movement and Evergreen Action, as there are between thought leaders like Naomi Klein and political operatives such as John Podesta. In general, when I use the term “climate hawk,” I’m referring to the wonks and academics and policy entrepreneurs, while I tend to use the term “climate activist” to describe the marchers, demonstrators, divestors, and litigators.

At the same time, there’s less daylight between the hawks and the activists than either camp might have you believe. While the rhetoric and tactics among these different factions within the climate movement vary, they all share the fundamental view that climate change represents an existential threat to human societies, one so great and pressing that it merits prioritization over more quotidian social, economic, and geopolitical concerns. Both the hawks and the activists believe that action appropriate to the scale and urgency of the challenge requires explicitly centering climate change in our politics and our culture.

And for a while now, I’ve thought that this consensus was, more than anything, a reaction to the Decadent Society.

As popularized by the Times’s Ross Douthat, decadence is a general term for the more specific phenomena other theorists have referred to as “the great stagnation” and “the end of history.” A decadent society is one in stasis, lacking significant economic innovation or cultural churn. And while it may not have always felt like it, looking back on the prior decade, you don’t have to squint very hard to notice a certain decadence.

In the years after 2010, there was no Great War, Cold War, nor even much of an obvious Great Powers conflict. The harm done by the Global Financial Crisis was still reverberating, but US policymakers had at least avoided an economic depression, begetting a long period of easy money, low commodity prices, and stagnant energy demand. The Internet was flattening culture, and the emergence of a permanent cosmopolitan Democratic majority appeared inevitable—young people, cultural tastemakers, Silicon Valley leaders, mainstream media, and even the wealthiest quintiles of the electorate were all amalgamating into an indelible modern progressivism, while the Democratic Party’s traditional Black, Latino, and Asian constituencies were taken for granted (even if working class white voters were already trending away from the party).

The climate hawks’ project fit neatly into this decadent atmosphere. Climate change became the great existential threat of the age, displacing war, nuclear brinksmanship, and terror. The policy agenda—subsidies for clean energy and regulations on dirty energy—proved relatively tractable in a time of low interest rates and low energy prices. Annual climate confabs—the Conference of the Parties—provided a backdrop for an apparent international consensus on emissions diplomacy and international aid. Chinese clean tech industrial capacity was widely understood as an asset, not a threat (as were Russian exports of oil and gas to Europe and Asia). Increasingly cheap renewables were fairly easily grafted onto legacy electric grids. Climate activists’ dramatic protest tactics, if not widely admired, at least harmonized with the broader revolts of the public like Occupy Wall Street and the #MeToo Movement.

Buoyed by these largely stable conditions, climate hawks executed a takeover of the institutional environmental movement, confident that in doing so they could ride the predictable wave of the emerging Democratic majority.

Climate activists extracted increasingly aggressive concessions from elected Democrats, and moved the issue closer and closer to the center of progressive politics. From support for fee-and-dividend and a ban on fracking to the Green New Deal and the “climate emergency” declaration to the “no climate no deal” stance of the Build Back Better negotiations and demands to stop exporting liquefied natural gas, activists got Democratic officials to support a variety of policy commitments, some strictly symbolic, some politically doomed, and all generally unpopular outside of partisan progressive constituencies. These became the practical agenda of an environmental movement that expanded massively in size and swagger during the age of the climate hawk, underwritten largely by the new class of software and financial engineering billionaires that displaced the industrial plutocrats of the 20th century at the forefront of both the US economy and philanthropy.

Dissension from within the climate tent was neither welcome nor forthcoming. The useful idiocy of so-called “radical flank effects” justified any amount of avant-garde shenanigans from climate activists, while more staid climate hawks worked behind the scenes on tax credit extension, renewable portfolio standards, social cost of carbon evaluations, and emissions regulations. This insider-outsider dynamic formed the basis of a social compact between the activists and the hawks. The overlapping support systems provided by environmental philanthropy and mainstream media climate coverage were a rising tide that lifted all boats. And the more public attention paid to climate change, the better, both camps agreed.

Well, it’s 2025 now, and decadence is dead. While the 2016 election of Donald Trump could be excused as an aberration, in more recent years, every feature that characterized the climate hawk era has decisively changed. Commodity prices and interest rates are high, not low. Energy demand is growing, not flat. The titans of Silicon Valley are environmentalism’s enemies, not allies. The pandemic weakened both elite and normie trust in government to manage problems, let alone solve them. The West’s dependence on China and Russia is now rightly considered more a vulnerability than an asset. The cosmopolitan international order, which played host to mostly theatrical climate diplomacy, is under threat, and not just from Trump. Much of the Democratic majority that swept Obama into office has defected to the multiracial MAGA coalition. There’s even a new existential threat on the scene with the rise of artificial intelligence.

In short, the terminal boredom at the end of history, which allowed climate hawkery to thrive, is over.

Climate Hawks’ Political Catastrophe

I see a lot of climate hawks soothing themselves these days by over-indexing on MAGA’s narrow electoral victory in the 2024 elections. An almost-convincing story can be spun in which the more-than-transitory-but-still-temporary spike in inflation, combined with black swans like the covid variants and the Afghanistan debacle, propelled Trump to victory. Already we’re witnessing overconfidence from Trump (and Musk), which Democrats can use to claw back their 2024 losses and restart the engine of green industrial policy.

To be sure, there is lots of uncertainty about what the Trump Administration will do and whether the public will approve of it. But the redshift in American politics has been ongoing and is more robust than a single election cycle would indicate. Between 2016, at the dawn of the first Trump era, and 2023, the latest year for which Pew survey data are available, Democrats’ advantage in party identification among Hispanic voters shrank by seven points. Among Black voters it fell by eight points. The Republican advantage among all non-college educated voters meanwhile, which first emerged in 2015 and 2016, had tripled by 2023, from 2 points to 6 points. These trends do not suggest the makings of a lasting Democratic majority capable of sustaining ambitious green industrial policies over decades.

Instead, urban and working class voters are leaving the Democratic coalition in droves, either by switching party affiliations or by being priced out of cities and blue states altogether. California and New York’s losses are Texas’s and Florida’s gains. If anything, climate hawks have contributed to this attrition through a myopic commitment to alienating oil and gas workers, raising the price of fossil fuels, and failing to address the high cost of urban living. The party that subsidizes rooftop solar and EVs for wealthy Americans while vowing to ban fracking and internal combustion engines was always likely to encounter popular resistance.

After over a decade of climate activists marching, divesting, suing, deplatforming, shaping mainstream media coverage, throwing paint, and blocking freeways, climate change remains a low priority for American voters. Parallel efforts by climate hawks to convert and mobilize “climate voters” with promises of green jobs and “climate justice”—while proposing to ban internal combustion vehicles, gas hookups and stoves, and overseeing rising electricity and fuel prices—have likewise backfired. Once-reliable standbys of the Democratic coalition—Black, Brown, urban, and working class voters—have swung significantly towards Republicans over the last several election cycles. Even “environmental justice communities” as explicitly defined by the Biden Administration appear to have shifted more heavily towards Trump than did non-environmental justice communities.

And while this near-universal shift towards Republicans in recent years may be partially thermostatic, it is also dramatic. The GOP recently claimed the edge in voters’ party affiliation, a position long held by Democrats, who now face record-low approval ratings. For the first time in decades, the youngest Americans are now more likely to tell pollsters they’re conservative than liberal.

Having hitched their wagon irrevocably to the “permanent Democratic majority” seemingly augered by the rise of the Obama coalition, climate hawks now find themselves a parochial elite, lacking any clear constituency outside of think tanks and universities. The IRA’s particular political economy gambit—that investing in red states and environmental justice communities would substantially expand the climate hawk coalition—demonstrably failed.

The supportive political conditions of the prior decade were fortified by favorable, if misleading, techno-economic conditions. In an era when Modern Monetary Theory was taken seriously on the fringes of mainstream Democratic politics, climate hawks could get away with a policy agenda of generous subsidies for clean energy and regulations for dirty energy. Persistently low interest rates kept the cost of both renewable energy subsidies and renewable projects themselves affordable. Rising wind and solar penetrations during these years were still too low to much affect the cost or reliability of electricity, while natural gas did the heavy decarbonization lifting. Electric heat pumps, induction stoves, and alternative proteins were still technological fascinations, not yet culture war talismans. Elon Musk was widely seen as an environmental champion, and the electric vehicle, in the singular guise of the Tesla, could still function as an aspirational totem for the future despite remaining a play thing for the rich in the present. And in a period of economic stagnation and relative geopolitical detente, climate hawks could claim center stage politically, despite the lack of a real constituency, or a track record of delivering benefits to median voters living outside of energy systems models.

But today—with high interest rates, AI-driven load growth, deepening value deflation for wind and solar, permitting and transmission bottlenecks, consumer skittishness on electric vehicles and electrified home appliances, unstable supply chains for both commodities and finished clean tech products, and halting progress on low-carbon fuels, nuclear, geothermal, hydrogen, and other technologies—the gig is up. Celebrating the high price tag of government spending on capital-intensive infrastructure will prove much less effective under post-inflationary, low-unemployment conditions. The notion that continuously falling prices for wind and solar will lead perpetually to eye-popping job growth, expanding political coalitions, and deep decarbonization has passed its sell-by date.

Climate hawks simultaneously tied their fate to a phantasmic permanent Democratic majority and made demands upon it that hastened its decline. Recent polling indicates that most Americans share neither climate hawks’ interpretation of climate risk nor their preference for rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. Recent social science meanwhile suggests that voters are actually pushed towards Republicans by climate culture wars, not made more supportive of progressive climate policy by “radical flank effects.” And climate hawks’ practical policy agenda, cultivated during the easy-money environment of the Great Stagnation, is a nonstarter at best and a political albatross at worst within today’s higher-rate environment.

If you take this all into account, then Democrats’ best path towards rebuilding a majoritarian politics and actually accelerating decarbonization is not by doubling down on climate hawks’ agenda, but by abandoning it.

Decentering Climate Politics

Going by Roberts’s description, I would argue that the climate hawk framework elevated people’s least favorite parts of environmentalism—the regulations, catastrophism, and moralizing—and downplayed all the popular stuff—the birds and the bees, the clean air and beautiful landscapes, the green jobs and sustainable growth. That stuff might be a co-benefit to climate hawks’ project, but the main event was emissions. And in making this move, climate hawks actually reaffirmed the ideological and sociocultural commitments of environmentalism that they saw themselves as transcending. The climate hawk’s climate, like the environmentalist’s environment, is a closed biophysical system. All economic and technological activity must be constrained within its boundaries.

If any self-styled climate hawks saw themselves as some kind of newer, fresher environmentalist, they must not have paid attention to the father of their ersatz new identity. Roberts, after all, was clear all along that “the point was never to denigrate environmentalists or environmentalism.” What we ended up with, unsurprisingly, was a distinction without a meaningful difference.

So while environmental issues had always been more popular on the political left, the era of the climate hawk saw this polarization sharpen dramatically. Activists and hawks alike made clear that Republican climate deniers were the canonical enemy, handmaidens of the fossil fuel industries. Anti-Republican animosity was so fierce that the bevy of conservatives who launched climate organizations during the era of the climate hawk did so explicitly by positioning themselves against those crazy climate activists. And this polarization, to be clear, was a feature, not a bug, of the climate hawk project. By combining a policy program of profligate government spending with a message of anxiety and apocalypse, climate hawks succeeded in “raising the salience” of climate change, at least among partisan Democrats. But it came at the cost of making climate policy more polarized and less popular overall.

So here we are, at the end of their era, and the signs are unmistakable. Of course the incoming Trump Administration quickly abandoned any talk of net-zero as well as the government’s commitments to the Paris Agreement. But corporate America is also abdicating net-zero commitments en masse. The taboo on criticizing radical climate activism seems to be breaking down. The effort to convert large swaths of the electorate into “climate voters” has demonstrably failed, and poll respondents increasingly identify a striking gap between Democrats’ values and their own on many issues, including climate change. Even segments of climate philanthropy, the ultimate benefactor of much of climate hawks’ activities over the years, are showing signs of adjusting to the new order of things.

The key question today is whether a critical mass of climate hawks themselves are willing to decenter or deescalate climate politics in service of building a lasting political coalition in support of energy abundance and climate resilience. Doing so, for many, would amount to a tacit acknowledgement that the existential claims of the climate movement have been more tactical than substantive. That may be a bridge too far for many or most committed climate hawks.

For everyone else, some cognitive therapy may be in order. Because it’s not just a dead-end strategy, but a dead-end identity. Climate hawks’ substantive and coalitional propositions can simply no longer be defended.

Frankly, the whole project was always a bit of a farce. Climate hawks’ nominal efforts to differentiate themselves and to move past cap-and-trade were almost entirely performative. Bill McKibben’s clarion call to build a climate movement was just an explicit bankshot strategy to fulfill the lost promise of carbon pricing. Roberts’ obsequious genuflections towards environmentalists presaged the climate movement’s total inability to differentiate itself or prioritize among its various camps. The more recent move beyond carbon pricing may have felt like hard-headed realpolitik, but all the latter-day activist campaigns—from divestment to natural gas bans to liability lawsuits to “climate Superfund” bills—are just thinly veiled efforts to raise the price of fossil fuels. For their grand finale, climate hawks took longstanding bipartisan energy and technology policy and transfigured it into hyperpartisan environmental policy.

Those of us who have worked to construct an actual, coherent post-environmentalism have long seen the path of the climate hawk for what it was: a mirage. Efforts to center emissions and climate change meant de-centering innovation, jobs, and resilience—all things that voters of all stripes demonstrably care much more about. “Raising the salience” of climate change was a chimera—psychically intoxicating but politically dangerous. And draping climate policy in the cloth of “Green New Deal” mass employment or “Build Back Better” post-covid industrial policy ultimately couldn’t disguise the old-fashioned environmentalism underneath.

In the end, Democrats would have been better off if they had simply sustained the climate and energy politics that prevailed at the dawn of the age of the climate hawk. Just consider the relative fortunes of Barack Obama, who prioritized health care and Wall Street regulation over climate change while bragging about domestic oil and gas production, versus Joe Biden, who prioritized climate change above all else while bragging about how much he spent on it. The pace of decarbonization achieved by their respective Administrations was strikingly similar, and while the former remains probably the most popular Democratic politician of the last fifty years, the latter…well, you know.

Fortunately, the path of the pragmatist is still available. But to follow it would mean making some sharp breaks with the way of the climate hawk: elevating deregulatory policy that clears technological and institutional bottlenecks over regulatory policy that asserts ever-more precise control over the energy system; abandoning arbitrary emissions targets and catastrophist rhetoric; and reforging bipartisan cooperation and energy policy development. Climate mitigation can and should be a co-benefit of these pursuits, but not the point of them.

Notably, there is a role for many of climate hawks’ favorite policy instruments on this path, including subsidies, standards, fees, and technology targets. But there is no role for the climate hawk itself. The organizing principle that placed climate change at the heart of politics, and of political identity, must fade away. Reconstituting a political center that can sustain the politics and policies necessary to make progress on climate change over many decades, and across inevitable shifts in political power, requires decentering climate change.

Decadence is dead, and the climate hawk will die with it. What takes its place in the coming years will be determined one step at a time along this new, uncharted path. But the first step for climate hawks, and for Democrats, is to admit that you have a problem.