This Isn’t the Same Kind of Climate Election

Democrats are gathering in Chicago this week for their quadrennial convention and to celebrate Kamala Harris’s nomination for president. This year’s convention will look different from 2020’s for many reasons — but one of them is that we’re likely to hear far less about climate change. Unlike in 2020, when President Joe Biden described global warming as one of “four overlapping crises” confronting the country, Harris has been more subtle when discussing it.

So … is that a problem? Should we be freaked out? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse discuss the modern electoral politics of climate change. We talk about whether the electorate’s interest in climate issues has faded, how the Inflation Reduction Act could affect voting, and why a “quiet on climate” strategy might be okay. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.

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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Jesse Jenkins: The other thing that I think is really fascinating — and I've felt like this is a case that a political scientist could certainly have more to say about — but it feels like this is a case that the focus on climate in the 117th Congress, the Congress that passed the infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, was, I think, largely elite-driven. Like inside-the-Beltway priority-setting, not so much a general response to polling, even though you're right, there was an energy crisis that actually happened towards the tail end of that legislative debate.

And the original agenda was the Build Back Better agenda from the Biden administration, which is really trying to center these investments in new economies, new industries — including clean energy — as part of a broader post-COVID economic recovery.

What was fascinating to me is that, you know, the Build Back Better Act was really a cost of living-focused bill. It had a huge amount of programs focused on the cost of childcare, on elder care, on healthcare. And all of that got stripped out as the bill moved on and eventually became the Inflation Reduction Act, which primarily centered around climate and clean energy investment with a small residual piece around prescription drugs and extending Affordable Care Act subsidies for lower middle class folks that rely on the insurance exchanges. Most of the stuff that would now, I think, be hugely popular in this electoral cycle because it much more centrally spoke to the concerns about cost of living got pulled out at the behest of folks like Joe Manchin, who wanted to strip the bill down and not focus on expanding social programs.

So it's kind of an interesting dynamic. If I were to look at polls and use those polls to have predicted which pieces would fall out of the bill as the Build Back Better Act moved through the hand to hand combat of congressional passage, I would have expected it would have been climate because it's always low on the priority list when you look at polling, but it was actually the exact opposite.

I think there was a sense in the halls of Congress that climate was the one thing you couldn't jettison because that was their one chance to take a shot at it. And they didn't know when they would get another shot.

Robinson Meyer: I want to moderate that — or I want to disagree slightly on a few things. I totally agree, first of all, that climate acted in the IRA negotiations primarily as an elite-driven issue. And I think that is often ignored in conversations about the IRA, and I think it is actually quite important to hit home that point because it should lead to better decision-making in the future — both as people who want to see the federal government continue to push on decarbonization and also people interested in political actors making smart choices and decisions around decarbonization.

It is true that a lot of that so-called care-focused policy in the IRA, I think it fell out for two reasons. The first is that Democrats thought that they were going to be able to get a better deal from Manchin. Manchin agreed to terms in October 2021, he agreed to a set of terms that Democrats kind of then just blew past. They thought that basically by bullying him, by ignoring his demands, he was going to give way and allow a larger bill, and he ultimately did not.

But No. 2, I guess I would add that the other place where the care economy stuff got really hit was that some of the policy design seemed pretty bad. There were white papers that came out or blog posts that came out during the October 2021 to March 2022 period that suggested that there were going to be real unintended consequences, especially around the childcare policy, that had not been seriously looked at. And while I don't think those blog posts or analysis played a decisive role, I do think that — I remember Matt Bruenig wrote a big piece here — I do think that that led to Democrats being more willing to jettison the policy because they felt like that policy had emerged from kind of a morass of foundation-funded nonprofits and maybe hadn't gotten the close inspection that it needed —

Jenkins: It wasn't quite ready for …

Meyer: It wasn't quite ready for primetime, and in a different way than the energy tax credits in the IRA were ready for primetime — because to some degree, they were a giant expansion on policy that Congress had already done for a while, right? And obviously there were new tax credits, too. But there was an existing economic record that Congress could subsidize clean via the tax code and not create massive, massive unintended, distortionary effects in the economy that did not exist for, say, childcare.

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.

As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.

Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.