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Two years ago this month, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which both his allies and adversaries agree is the most significant climate legislation in the country’s history. Yet despite this accomplishment, the urgency of the crisis, and the consensus within the Democratic Party on the need for aggressive climate action, you would have had to listen carefully to this week’s Democratic National Convention to catch much discussion of the issue.
It’s not that none of the speakers mentioned climate, but “mentioned” is about as far as most of them went. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an original sponsor of the Green New Deal, didn’t mention climate in her DNC speech. Nor did Tim Walz, who has been one of the most aggressive governors in the country on the issue; among other things, he signed a bill requiring utilities to provide 100% clean electricity by 2040. Barack Obama, whose Clean Power Plan so angered his opponents that they set out to destroy the entire U.S. regulatory state, said only that “America can be and must be a force for good, discouraging conflict, fighting disease, promoting human rights, protecting the planet from climate change, defending freedom, brokering peace.”
There were meetings on climate strategy that occurred around the convention, but it wasn’t until the convention’s final night that climate really took the stage, with presentations from Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the youngest member of Congress. In Kamala Harris’ acceptance speech, it received only a single line, in which she said that Americans deserve “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” That was all.
One might conclude (and some certainly have) that as a policy priority, climate has fallen a few rungs down on the Democratic agenda. But to my mind, that wouldn’t be quite correct. There has been an undeniable change in the party’s political calculus at moments like this one, but it needn’t cause those who care about the issue to panic.
Every activist would like their issue to be at the top of the political agenda, but especially in our current state of polarization, that usually means a big fight, with high stakes and the chance of both victory and defeat. At the moment, abortion is the issue Democrats want to elevate into that kind of fight, since they believe it can be used to pull voters from the middle and even the other major party into their camp. Republicans believe the same thing about immigration.
Democrats may not believe climate change has the same kind of power in voters’ minds. But that may not be such a bad thing.
After all, starting a big fight on an issue is only one path to policy change. Another is to place it within a broader agenda, keeping the part of your coalition that cares about it on board and ready to move forward should you win, without generating too much energetic opposition from your opponents. And that’s what climate wound up being at the Democratic convention: not a main course, not even a side dish, but rather an appealing political crouton tossed into a salad full of other policies and priorities.
That’s partially a product of Democrats’ legislative success: The passage of the IRA may have encouraged them to place the climate issue somewhat to the side. Many in the party feel that they got away with passing a sweeping law without the kind of knock-down, drag-out battle we saw around something like the Affordable Care Act, another important bill that squeaked by without a vote to spare. The debate within Congress over the IRA may have been intense — remember all the wrangling over whether Joe Manchin would give his assent? — but most Americans barely noticed. It was too complicated and too fraught with dull procedural details. That’s one reason that today, most voters say they haven’t heard much about the law (and some who claim they have are probably lying). Yet when its provisions are described to them, it garners overwhelming support.
In some ways, the IRA resembles the ACA, which Democrats correctly believed would grow more popular as its effects were felt. In climate as in health care, Democrats don’t have much appetite for another big battle; they’d rather make incremental additions in future legislation that build on what they managed to put into law. And they hope the Republicans who tried to defeat the bills won’t want to take the political risk of unwinding them.
Kamala Harris’ slogan may be “When we fight, we win,” but she doesn’t seem to want too much of a fight on climate. Likewise, environmental groups are pouring millions of dollars into ads supporting her candidacy, but many of them don’t actually focus on climate and mention “clean energy” only in passing. The people producing them have clearly calculated that what’s most important is not having their issue discussed in the campaign, but rather getting an administration that will allow the IRA and other laws with climate provisions such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to continue to unspool, while regulatory agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency keep working on reducing emissions. If those bills do what they’re supposed to, they’ll create their own constituencies and political armor.
And if most of the public takes only occasional notice at campaign time? There’s nothing wrong with that. Campaigns are almost always superficial, and this one isn’t any different. It’s what happens afterward that matters.
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On the looming climate summit, clean energy stocks, and Hurricane Rafael
Current conditions: A winter storm could bring up to 4 feet of snow to parts of Colorado and New Mexico • At least 89 people are still missing from extreme flooding in Spain • The Mountain Fire in Southern California has consumed 14,000 acres and is zero percent contained.
The world is still reeling from the results of this week’s U.S. presidential election, and everyone is trying to get some idea of what a second Trump term means for policy – both at home and abroad. Perhaps most immediately, Trump’s election is “set to cast a pall over the UN COP29 summit next week,” said the Financial Times. Already many world leaders and business executives have said they will not attend the climate talks in Azerbaijan, where countries will aim to set a new goal for climate finance. “The U.S., as the world’s richest country and key shareholder in international financial institutions, is viewed as crucial to that goal,” the FT added.
Trump has called climate change a hoax, vowed to once again remove the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, and promised to stop U.S. climate finance contributions. He has also promised to “drill, baby, drill.” Yesterday President Biden put new environmental limitations on an oil-and-gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The lease sale was originally required by law in 2017 by Trump himself, and Biden is trying to “narrow” the lease sale without breaking that law, according to The Washington Post. “The election results have made the threat to America's Arctic clear,” Kristen Miller, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, toldReuters. “The fight to save the Arctic Refuge is back, and we are ready for the next four years.”
Another early effect of the decisive election result is that clean energy stocks are down. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange traded fund, whose biggest holdings are the solar panel company First Solar and the Spanish utility and renewables developer Iberdola, is down about 6%. The iShares U.S. Energy ETF, meanwhile, whose largest holdings are Exxon and Chevron, is up over 3%. Some specific publicly traded clean energy stocks have sunk, especially residential solar companies like Sunrun, which is down about 30% compared to Tuesday. “That renewables companies are falling more than fossil energy companies are rising, however, indicates that the market is not expecting a Trump White House to do much to improve oil and gas profitability or production, which has actually increased in the Biden years thanks to the spikes in energy prices following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and continued exploitation of America’s oil and gas resources through hydraulic fracturing,” wrote Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
Hurricane Rafael swept through Cuba yesterday as a Category 3 storm, knocking out the power grid and leaving 10 million people without electricity. Widespread flooding is reported. The island was still recovering from last month’s Hurricane Oscar, which left at least six people dead. The electrical grid – run by oil-fired power plants – has collapsed several times over the last few weeks. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement said yesterday that about 17% of crude oil production and 7% of natural gas output in the Gulf of Mexico was shut down because of Rafael.
It is “virtually certain” that 2024 will be the warmest year on record, according to the European Copernicus Climate Change Service. In October, the global average surface air temperature was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, or nearly 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than pre-industrial averages for that month. This year is also on track to be the first entire calendar year in which temperatures are more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. “This marks a new milestone in global temperature records and should serve as a catalyst to raise ambition for the upcoming climate change conference,” said Copernicus deputy director Dr. Samantha Burgess.
C3S
The world is falling short of its goal to double the rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030, the International Energy Agency said in its new Energy Efficiency 2024 report. Global primary energy intensity – which the IEA explained is a measure of efficiency – will improve by 1% this year, the same as last year. It needs to be increasing by 4% by the end of the decade to meet a goal set at last year’s COP. “Boosting energy efficiency is about getting more from everyday technologies and industrial processes for the same amount of energy input, and means more jobs, healthier cities and a range of other benefits,” the IEA said. “Improving the efficiency of buildings and vehicles, as well as in other areas, is central to clean energy transitions, since it simultaneously improves energy security, lowers energy bills for consumers and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.” The group called for more government action as well as investment in energy efficient technologies.
Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by 30.6% in the 12 months leading up to July, compared to a year earlier. It is now at the lowest levels since 2015.
State-level policies and “unstoppable” momentum for clean energy.
As the realities of Trump’s return to office and the likelihood of a Republican trifecta in Washington began to set in on Wednesday morning, climate and clean energy advocates mostly did not sugarcoat the result or look for a silver lining. But in press releases and interviews, reactions to the news coalesced around two key ways to think about what happens next.
Like last time Trump was elected, the onus will now fall on state and local leaders to make progress on climate change in spite of — and likely in direct conflict with — shifting federal priorities. Working to their advantage, though, much more so than last time, is global political and economic momentum behind the growth of clean energy.
“No matter what Trump may say, the shift to clean energy is unstoppable,” former White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy said in a statement.
“This is a dark day, but despite this election result, momentum is on our side,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous wrote. “The transition away from dirty fossil fuels to affordable clean energy is already underway.”
“States are the critical last line of defense on climate,” said Caroline Spears, the executive director of Climate Cabinet, a group that campaigns for local climate leaders, during a press call on Wednesday. “I used to work in the solar industry under the Trump administration. We still built solar and it was on the back of great state policy.”
Reached by phone on Wednesday, the climate policy strategist Sam Ricketts offered a blunt assessment of where things stand. “First things first, this outcome sucks,” he said. He worried aloud about what another four years of Trump would mean for his kids and the planet they inherit. But Ricketts has also been here before. During Trump’s first term, he worked for the “climate governor,” Washington’s Jay Inslee, and helped further state and local climate policy around the country for the Democratic Governors Association. “For me, it is a familiar song,” he said.
Ricketts believes the transition to clean energy has become inevitable. But he offered other reasons states may be in a better position to make progress over the next four years than they were last time. There are now 23 states with Democratic governors and at least 15 with Democratic trifectas — compare that to 2017, when there were just 16 Democratic governors and seven trifectas. Additionally, Democrats won key seats in the state houses of Wisconsin and North Carolina that will break up previous Republican supermajorities and give the Democratic governors in those states more opportunity to make progress.
Spears also highlighted these victories during the Climate Cabinet press call, adding that they help illustrate that the election was not a referendum on climate policy. “We have examples of candidates who ran forward on climate, they ran forward on clean energy, and they still won last night in some tough toss-up districts,” she said.
Ricketts also pointed to signs that climate policy itself is popular. In Washington, a ballot measure that would have repealed the state’s emissions cap-and-invest policy failed. “The vote returns aren’t all in, but that initiative has been obliterated at the ballot box by voters in Washington State who want to continue that state’s climate progress,” he said.
But the enduring popularity of climate policy in Democratic states is not a given. Though the measure to overturn Washington’s cap-and-invest law was defeated, another measure that would revoke the state’s nation-leading policies to regulate the use of natural gas in buildings hangs in the balance. If it passes, it will not only undo existing policies but also hamstring state and local policymakers from discouraging natural gas in the future. In Berkeley, California, the birthplace of the movement to ban gas in buildings, a last-ditch effort to preserve that policy through a tax on natural gas was rejected by voters.
Meanwhile, two counties in Oregon overwhelmingly voted in favor of a nonbinding ballot measure opposing offshore wind development. And while 2024 brought many examples of climate policy progress at the state level, there were also some signs of states pulling back due to concerns about cost, exemplified by New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s major reversal on congestion pricing in New York City.
The oft-repeated hypothesis that Republican governors and legislators might defend President Biden’s climate policies because of the investments flowing to red states is also about to be put to the test. “I think that's going to be a huge issue and question,” Barry Rabe, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, told me. “You know, not only can Democrats close ranks to oppose any changes, but is there any kind of cross-party Republican base of support?”
Josh Freed, the senior vice president for the climate and clean energy program at Third Way, warned that the climate community has a lot of work to do to build more public support for clean energy. He pointed to the rise of right-wing populism around the world, driven in part by the perception that the transition away from fossil fuels is hurting real people at the expense of corporate and political interests.
“We’ve seen, in many places, a backlash against adopting electric vehicles,” he told me. “We’ve seen, at the local county level, opposition to siting of renewables. People perceive a push for eliminating natural gas from cooking or from home heating as an infringement on their choice and as something that’s going to raise costs, and we have to take that seriously.”
One place Freed sees potential for continued progress is in corporate action. A lot of the momentum on clean energy is coming from the private sector, he said, naming companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google that have invested considerable funds in decarbonization. He doesn’t see that changing.
A counterpoint, raised by Rabe, is those companies’ contribution to increasing demand for electricity — which has simultaneously raised interest in financing clean energy projects and expanding natural gas plants.
As I was wrapping up my call with Ricketts, he acknowledged that state and local action was no substitute for federal leadership in tackling climate change. But he also emphasized that these are the levers we have right now. Before signing off, he paraphrased something the writer Rebecca Solnit posted on social media in the wee hours of the morning after the electoral college was called. It’s a motto that I imagine will become something of a rallying cry for the climate movement over the next four years. “We can’t save everything, but we can save some things, and those things are worth saving,” Ricketts said.
Rob and Jesse talk about what comes next in the shift to clean energy.
Last night, Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House. He campaigned on an aggressively pro-fossil -fuel agenda, promising to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s landmark 2022 climate law, and roll back Environmental Protection Agency rules governing power plant and car and truck pollution.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Jesse and Rob pick through the results of the election and try to figure out where climate advocates go from here. What will Trump 2.0 mean for the federal government’s climate policy? Did climate policies notch any wins at the state level on Tuesday night? And where should decarbonization advocates focus their energy in the months and years to come? 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: You know the real question, I guess — and I just, I don’t have a ton of optimism here — is if there can be some kind of bipartisan support for the idea that changing the way we permit transmission lines is good for economic growth. It’s good for resilience. It’s good for meeting demand from data centers and factories and other things that we need going forward. Whether that case can be made in a different, entirely different political context is to be seen, but it certainly will not move forward in the same context as the [Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024] negotiations.
Robinson Meyer: And I think there’s a broad question here about what the Trump administration looks like in terms of its energy agenda. We know the environmental agenda will be highly deregulatory and interested in recarbonizing the economy, so to speak, or at least slowing down decarbonization — very oil- and gas-friendly.
I think on the energy agenda, we can expect oil and gas friendliness as well, obviously. But I do think, in terms of who will be appointed to lead or nominated to lead the Department of Energy, I think there’s a range of whether you would see a nominee who is aggressively focused on only doing things to support oil and gas, or a nominee who takes a more Catholic approach and is interested in all forms of energy development.
And I don’t, I don’t mean to be … I don’t think that’s obvious. I just think that’s like a … you kind of can see threads of that across the Republican Party. You can see some politicians who are interested only, really, in helping fossil fuels. You can see some politicians who are very excited, say, about geothermal, who are excited about shoring up the grid, right? Who are excited about carbon capture.
And I think the question of who winds up taking control of the energy portfolio in a future Trump administration means … One thing that was true of the first Trump administration that I don’t expect to go away this time is that the Trump policymaking process is extremely chaotic, right? He’s surrounded by different actors. There’s a lot of informal delegation. Things happen, and he’s kind of involved in it, but sometimes he’s not involved in it. He likes having this team of rivals who are constantly jockeying for position. In some ways it’s a very imperial-type system, and I think that will continue.
One topic I’ve been paying a lot of attention to, for instance, is nuclear. The first Trump administration said a lot of nice things about nuclear, and they passed some affirmatively supportive policy for the advanced nuclear industry, and they did some nice things for small modular reactors. I think if you look at this administration, it’s actually a little bit more of a mixed bag for nuclear.
RFK, who we know is going to be an important figure in the administration, at least at the beginning, is one of the biggest anti nuclear advocates there is. And his big, crowning achievement, one of his big crowning achievements was helping to shut down Indian Point, the large nuclear reactor in New York state. JD Vance, Vice President-elect JD Vance, has said that shutting down nuclear reactors is one of the dumbest things that we can do and seems to be quite pro, we should be producing more nuclear.
Jenkins: On the other hand, Tucker Carlson was on, uh …
Meyer: … suggested it was demonic, yeah.
Jenkins: Exactly, and no one understands how nuclear technology works or where it came from.
Meyer: And Donald Trump has kind of said both things. It’s just super uncertain and … it’s super uncertain.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.