The Messaging War Over Energy Costs Is Just Beginning

During the August recess, while members of Congress were back home facing their constituents, climate and environmental groups went on the offensive, sending a blitz of ads targeting vulnerable Republicans in their districts. The message was specific, straightforward, and had nothing to do with the warming planet.

“Check your electric bill lately? Rep. Mark Amodei just voted for it to go up,” declared a billboard in Reno, Nevada, sponsored by the advocacy group Climate Power.

“They promised to bring down prices, but instead our congressman, Derrick Van Orden, just voted to make our monthly bills go up,” a YouTube ad told viewers in Wisconsin’s 3rd district. “It removes clean energy from the electric grid, creating a massive rate hike on electricity,” the voiceover says, while the words “VAN ORDEN’S PLAN: ELECTRICITY RATE HIKE” flash on screen. The ad, paid for by Climate Power, the League of Conservation Voters, and House Majority Forward, a progressive campaign group, was shown more than a million times from August 13 to 27, according to Google’s ad transparency center.

Both were part of a larger, $12 million campaign the groups launched over the recess in collaboration with organizations including EDF Action and Climate Emergency Advocates. Similar billboards and digital ads targeted Republicans in more than a dozen other districts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. There were also TV spots, partnerships with Instagram influencers, bus stop posters, and in-person rallies outside district offices — all blaming Republicans in Congress for the increasing cost of food, healthcare, and energy.

Courtesy of Climate Power

As others have observed, including Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin back in March, rising utility rates and the broader cost of living crisis are becoming a political liability for Republicans and President Trump. Clean energy advocates are attempting to capitalize on that, trying to get Americans to connect the dots between their mounting electricity bills and their representatives in Congress who voted to cut support for renewable energy.

Some of this is run-of-the-mill politicking, but it’s not only that. It also represents a strategic shift in how the climate movement talks about the energy transition.

It’s not new for green groups to make the argument that renewable energy can save people money. Relying on “free” wind and sun rather than fuels that are subject to price volatility has always been part of the sell, and the plummeting cost of solar panels and wind turbines have only made that pitch more compelling.

But it is new for the affordability argument to come first — above job creation, economic development, reducing pollution, and, of course, tackling climate change.

For most of the past four years, the climate movement has gone all in on trying to build an association in the American mind between the transition to clean energy and jobs. “When I think of climate change, I think of jobs,” then-candidate Joe Biden said during one of his 2020 campaign speeches.

It made sense at the time, Daniel Aldana Cohen, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. Just two years earlier, the Sunrise Movement had emerged as a political force with a headline-grabbing rally in Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding “green jobs for all.” The group was joined by then-newly elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who soon introduced her framework for a Green New Deal that would offer a “just transition” for fossil fuel workers, ensuring them a place in the new clean energy economy.

The fossil fuel industry had seeded divisions between labor and environmental groups for decades by arguing that regulations kill jobs, and Democrats would have to upend that narrative if they wanted to make progress on climate. But the rationale was also more pressing: Unemployment was skyrocketing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and whoever won the presidency would be responsible for rebuilding the U.S. workforce.

Fast forward to the end of Biden’s first year in office, however, and the unemployment rate had snapped back to pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, inflation was rising fast. Even though the Democrats managed to name their climate bill the “Inflation Reduction Act,” the administration and the climate movement continued talking about it in terms of jobs, jobs, jobs.

Cohen co-directs the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think-tank founded in 2020, and admitted that “from the very start, we would just model every policy with jobs numbers,” partly because modeling the effects of policies on cost of living was a lot more complicated. Now he sees two issues with that approach. For one, it was always going to take time for new manufacturing jobs to materialize — much longer than an election cycle. For another, when unemployment is low, “everybody experiences inflation, but extremely few people experience a good new green job,” Cohen said.

During a recent panel hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies, Ben Beachy, who was a special assistant to Biden for climate policy, expressed some regret about the jobs push. “It wasn't addressing one of the biggest economic concerns of most people at that point, which was the rent is too damn high,” he said. But Beachy also defended the strategy, noting that all of the policies addressing cost of living in Biden’s big climate bill, like money for housing, public transit, and childcare, had been stripped out to appease West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin. “So we were left without a strong policy leg to stand on to say, this is going to lower your costs.”

When the moderator asked what message Beachy thinks climate candidates should run on today, Beachy replied, “affordability, affordability, affordability.”

Jesse Lee, a senior advisor at Climate Power who also worked as a senior communications advisor in the Biden White House, echoed Beachy’s account of what went wrong post-IRA. The cost of living crisis makes it almost impossible to talk about anything else now, he told me. “If you don't start off talking about that, you’ve lost people before you’ve even begun,” he said.

Average U.S. electricity rates jumped 10% in just the year from 2021 to 2022, and have continued to rise faster than inflation. All evidence suggests the trend will continue. Utilities have already requested or received approval for approximately $29 billion in rate increases this year, according to the nonprofit PowerLines, compared to roughly $12 billion by this time last year. And these increases likely don’t reflect the expected costs associated with ending tax credits for wind and solar, hobbling wind and solar development, and keeping aging, expensive coal plants online.

In mid-July, Climate Power issued a strategy document advising state and local elected officials how to talk about clean energy based on the group’s polling. A post-election poll found that “more than half of Americans (51%) say the main goal of US energy policies should be to lower energy prices,” and that 85% “believe policymakers should do more to lower energy costs.” A more recent poll found that telling voters that “cutting clean energy means America produces less energy overall, and that means families will pay even more to keep the lights on,” was the most persuasive among a variety of arguments for clean energy.

This tracks with our own Heatmap Pro opinion polling, which found that the top perceived benefit of renewables in the U.S. is “lower utility bills” — though while 75% of Democrats believe that argument, only 56% of Republicans do. An affordability frame also aligns with academic research on clean energy communication strategies, which has found that emphasizing cost savings is a more effective and enduring message than job creation, economic development, or climate change mitigation.

The pivot to affordability isn’t just apparent in district-level campaigns to hold Republicans accountable. Almost every press release I’ve received from the climate group Evergreen Action this month has mentioned “soaring power bills” or “Trump’s energy price hike” in reference to various actions the administration has taken to hamstring renewables. Even clean energy groups, which at first attempted to co-opt Trump’s “energy dominance” frame, can no longer parrot it with a straight face. After Trump issued a stop work order on Orsted’s offshore Revolution Wind project, which is 80% built, the American Clean Power Association accused the administration of “raising alarms about rising energy prices while blocking new supply from reaching the grid.”

Several people I spoke to for this story pointed to the example of Mikie Sherill, the Democrat running for governor in New Jersey, who last week vowed to freeze utility rates for a year if elected. She immediately followed that statement with a promise to “massively expand cheaper, cleaner power generation,” including solar and batteries.

Dan Crawford, the senior vice president of Echo Communications Advisors, a climate-focused strategy firm, declared in a recent newsletter that Democrats should “become the party of cheap electricity.” He mused that we may be at an inflection point “where the old politics of clean-vs.-polluting makes way for a new debate of cheap-vs.-expensive.”

Debate is probably too tame a term — the claim to affordability is becoming a full-on messaging war. Last week, President Trump took to social media to declare that states that get power from wind and solar “are seeing RECORD BREAKING INCREASES IN ELECTRICITY AND ENERGY COSTS,” — a claim that has no basis in reality. The Trump administration is leaning heavily on affordability arguments to justify keeping coal plants open. In defense of canceling Revolution Wind, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox News that “this is part of our drive to make sure we’ve got affordable, reliable energy for every American … These are the highest electric prices in the country coming off of these projects.” On Thursday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright posted a news story about his agency rescinding a loan for an offshore wind transmission project, writing that “taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for projects that raise electricity prices and ultimately don't work.”

Clean energy proponents aren’t just going up against Trump — the fossil fuel industry has leaned on affordability as a rhetorical strategy for a long time, Joshua Lappen, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Notre Dame studying the energy transition, told me. Lappen, who lives in California, said cost has been at the forefront of conflicts over climate policy in the state for a while. At the moment, it’s driving a fight over oil refinery closures that threaten to drive up gas prices even more. “I took a trip over the weekend and drove through the Central Valley,” Lappen told me, “and there are placards zip-tied to every gas pump at Chevron stations that are highlighting that state climate policy is increasing the cost of gas.”

I asked Lee, of Climate Power, how the climate movement could make a convincing case when clean energy has become so politically charged. He’s not worried about that right now. “I don’t think we necessarily need to win a debate about what’s cheaper,” he said. “All we have to do is say, Hey, we're in favor of more energy, including wind and solar, and it's nuts, nuts to be taking wind and solar and batteries off the table when we have an energy crisis and when utility rates have gone up 10%.”

That may work for now, at least at the national level. Americans tend to blame whoever is in office for the economic pains of the moment, even though presidents have little influence on prices at the pump and it can take years for policy changes to make their way into utility rates.

But there’s a difference between defensively blaming rising energy costs on the administration’s efforts to block renewables, and making a positive case for the energy transition on the same grounds. While there is an argument for the latter, it’s a lot harder to convey.

The factors pushing up energy prices, such as necessary grid modernization and disaster-related costs, likely aren’t going away, whether or not we build offshore wind farms. Meanwhile, the savings that large-scale wind and solar projects offer won’t be experienced as a reduction in rates — they won’t be experienced at all because they’re measured against a counterfactual world where renewables don’t get built. That’s a lot trickier to communicate in a pithy campaign. People may end up blaming the wind farms either way.

This dilemma is a hallmark of the so-called “mid-transition,” Lappen told me. The term was coined by his advisor, the energy engineer and sociologist Emily Grubert, and Sara Hastings-Simon, a public policy professor at the University of Calgary. The two argue that the mid-transition is a period where fossil fuel systems persist alongside the growing clean energy sector.

“Comparisons of the new system to the old system are likely to rest on experience of a world less affected by climate change, such that concerns about lower reliability, higher costs, and other challenges might be perceived as inherent to zero-carbon systems, versus energy systems facing consequences of climate change and long-term underinvestment,” they write.

To Cohen, advocates need to go a lot further than rhetoric to link clean energy with affordability. “We need to rebuild the brand and then rebuild the investment priorities of climate action so that working class communities see and literally touch direct, tangible benefits in their life,” he said. He described a “green economic populism” with much more public investment in helping renters access green technologies that will lower their bills, for example, or in fixing up homes that have deferred maintenance so that they can eventually make energy efficiency improvements.

It’s not about abandoning industrial policy or research and development, Cohen told me, but rather about a shift in emphasis. He pointed to Sherill’s approach. “She's not just saying, oh, clean energy will automatically lower bills if you just unleash it. She's like, I'm going to assertively use the government to guarantee a price freeze, and then I’m going to backfill that with clean energy policies to bring down prices over time.”

To be fair, the IRA did contain policies that would have produced more tangible benefits. The $7 billion Solar for All program would have delivered the benefits of residential solar — i.e. energy bill savings — to low-income households all over the country. The remainder of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, of which Solar for All was a part, was set to make a range of other green home upgrades more accessible to the working class, and the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program would have done the same for low-income housing developments and senior living centers. Electric school bus grants and urban tree-planting programs would have brought cleaner, cooler air to communities.

These were big, ambitious programs that were never going to produce results in the span of two years, and now the Trump administration has made every effort to ensure they never do. Whether they would have paid political dividends eventually, we’ll never know. But a successful energy transition may depend on giving it another shot.