Democrats’ New Affordability Message Is Complicating Climate Policy

Democrats have embraced a new theory of how to win: run on affordability and cost-of-living concerns while hammering Donald Trump for failing to bring down inflation.

There’s only one problem: their own climate policies.

In state after state, governors and lawmakers are considering pulling back from their climate commitments — or have already reneged on them outright — out of a concern for the high costs that they could soon impose on voters. Democrats have justified the retreat by citing a new regime of sharper inflation, reduced federal support, and a need to deliver cheap energy of all kinds.

“We need to govern in reality,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul, for instance, said in a recent statement defending her approval of new natural gas infrastructure. “We are facing war against clean energy from Washington Republicans.”

Leaders in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and California have all sounded similar notes while making or considering changes to their own states’ policies.

“The trend toward a different approach to energy policy that puts costs and pragmatism first is very real,” Josh Freed, the senior vice president for climate and energy programs at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me.

“Affordability is the entry ticket for any other policy goal that politicians have,” he continued. “It particularly makes sense on climate and clean energy because we’ve all been talking for years about the need to electrify. If electricity is expensive, then electrification is simply not going to happen.”

The challenge is an old one for climate policy. Climate change — fueled by fossil fuel pollution — will ultimately raise costs through heat waves, extreme weather impacts, and a depleted natural world. But voters don’t go to the polls for lower costs in 2075. They want a cheaper cost of living now.

Democrats have more tools in this fight than ever before, with wind, solar, and batteries often much cheaper than other forms of generation. But to fully realize those cost savings — and to decarbonize the grid faster than utilities or power markets would otherwise go — politicians must push for politically or financially costly policies that speed up the transition, sometimes putting long-term climate goals ahead of near-term affordability concerns.

“We’ve been talking about affordability as the entry point and not the end of the story. It’s important to meet consumers and voters and elected officials where they are,” Justin Balik, the vice president for state policy at Evergreen Action, a climate-focused think tank and advocacy group, told me.

“We can make the argument — because the data is on our side — that clean energy is still cheaper and is a big part of lowering costs.”

Part of what’s driving this shift among Democrats on climate policy is economics. The Trump administration’s war on clean energy has made it more difficult to build clean energy than some state-level policies once envisioned. Many emissions reduction targets passed during the late 2010s or early 2020s — like New York’s, which requires the state to reduce emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2030 and 85% by 2050 — assumed much faster clean electricity buildouts than have happened in practice. The president’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will end wind and solar tax credits next year, driving up project costs in some cases by 40% more than once projected.

The president’s war on wind power, in particular, has hit particularly hard in Northeastern states, where grid managers once counted on thousands of megawatts of new offshore wind farms to supply power in the afternoon and evenings while meeting the states’ climate goals. The Trump administration has succeeded in cancelling virtually all of the Northeast’s offshore wind projects outside New York.

But economics do not explain all of the shifts. Democrats seem to believe the president’s war on clean energy has created a fresh rhetorical opening for them: They can now cast themselves as champions of cheap energy in all forms. Some have even revived the old Obama-era “all of the above” slogan for this new era.

“We have an energy crisis. Electricity prices for homeowners and businesses have gone up over 20% in New Jersey. The only answer is all of the above,” Representative Frank Pallone, the ranking member of the House energy committee, told Politico in September.

Even politicians who once championed climate change have downplayed it in recent speeches. New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who once described himself as a “proud ecosocialist,” barely mentioned climate change during his general election campaign for mayor.

Hochul’s recent moves illustrate the shift. Over the past year, she has delayed implementing New York’s cap-and-invest law, which seeks to reduce statewide carbon emissions 40% by 2030. She also paused the state’s ban on gas stoves and furnaces in new homes and low-rise buildings, which is due to go into effect next year. (A state court has ordered her to implement the cap-and-invest law by February.)

This month, Hochul approved two new natural gas pipelines as part of a rumored deal with the Trump administration to salvage New York’s wind farms. She defended the decision by appealing to — you guessed it — affordability.

“We have adopted an all-of-the-above approach that includes a continued commitment to renewables and nuclear power to ensure grid reliability and affordability,” she said in a statement.

New York’s neighbors have gone down similar paths. In Pennsylvania, Governor Josh Shapiro struck a budget compromise with Republican lawmakers that will remove the state from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, a compact of Northeastern states to cap carbon pollution from power plants and invest the resulting revenue.

Shapiro blamed Republicans, who he said have “used RGGI as an excuse to stall substantive conversations about energy,” but said he was focused on — yes, again— “cutting costs.”

“I’m going to be aggressive about pushing for policies that create more jobs in the energy sector, bring more clean energy onto the grid, and reduce the cost of energy for Pennsylvanians,” he said before signing the budget deal.

California has also reworked its own climate policy in response to cost-of-living concerns. Earlier this year, it passed an energy package that re-upped its cap-and-trade program while allowing new oil extraction in south-central Kern County. The legislation was partly driven by a fear that local refineries would shutter — and gas prices could soar — without more crude production.

Massachusetts could soon join the pullback. Earlier this month, the state’s House of Representatives fast-tracked a bill that included a provision nullifying a legal mandate to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, as compared to 1990 levels.

While the bill preserved the state’s longer-term goal to cut emissions by 80% by 2050, it rendered the 2030 mandate “advisory in nature and unenforceable.”

“The number one goal is to save money and adjust to the reality with clean energy,” Representative Mark Cusack, co-chair of the energy and utilities committee and the bill’s sponsor, told the local Commonwealth Beacon. He said the Trump administration’s “assault” on clean energy made the pullback necessary. “We want to get there, but if we’re going to miss our mandates and it’s not the fault of ours, it’s incumbent on us not to get sued and not have the ratepayers be on the hook,” he said.

Cusack’s bill also included measures to transform the state’s Mass Save program — which helps households and businesses to switch to electrified heating and appliances — by dropping the program’s climate mandate and its ban on buying efficient natural gas appliances.

On Monday, lawmakers removed the mandate provision from the bill but preserved its other reforms. While the bill is no longer fast tracked, they could choose to revisit the legislation as soon as next year.

New Jersey may also revisit its own climate commitments. Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill swept to victory this month in part by promising to freeze state utility rates. She could do that in part by lifting or suspending certain “social benefit charges” now placed on state power bills.

In the long term, though, Sherrill will have to pursue other policies to lower rates. Researchers at Evergreen Action and the National Resources Defense Council have argued that changing the state’s electricity policies could lower carbon emissions while saving ratepayers more than $400 a year by 2030.

Balik described the proposal as a “three-legged stool” of immediate rate relief, medium-term clean energy deployment, and long-term utility business model reform. He also mourned that other states have not used revenue from their climate programs to pay for climate programs.

“There’s a danger of looking at cost concerns a little myopically,” he said. “Cap and invest [in New York] was paused for the stated reason that it’s not helpful with cost, but you could use cap-and-invest revenues to pay for things on the rate base now.”