Climate change could be a winning long-term political issue for the Democrats—but in 2020, it could also threaten the party from inside and out
Elissa Slotkin has learned that climate change is both a national emergency and a political opportunity. As an assistant secretary of defense under President Barack Obama, she helped lead the Pentagon’s first study of how climate change threatens U.S. military bases. Then as a Democratic candidate for Congress in 2018, she attacked her Republican opponent for questioning the scientific consensus on climate change—and that’s one reason she’s now a Democratic member of Congress.
The politics of climate change are changing fast, partly because global heat waves, fires in California and the Amazon, Midwestern floods and increasingly brutal storms keep focusing attention on its nasty consequences, and partly because the Green New Deal has thrust it to the center of the national conversation. Polls suggest climate change has emerged as one of the top two policy priorities for Democratic voters, rivaled only by health care.
Activists often say climate change shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but in the U.S. it still is. Democratic-controlled states like New York, California, Washington, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada and Maine have all passed sweeping bills requiring economy-wide climate neutrality by 2050 or earlier. States where Republicans hold power haven’t passed legislation like that, and the Republican Senate minority in blue Oregon managed to block a similar bill by fleeing the state to avoid a quorum. Sen.
“That’s worth underlining and bolding and italicizing,” says Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale University Program on Climate Communication. The youth-oriented Sunrise Movement was an obscure year-old organization with just 20 chapters when Ocasio-Cortez stopped by its climate sit-in at Pelosi’s office last November. It now has more than 200 active chapters that have held town halls all over the country, building pressure for the Green New Deal, accusing their elders in both parties of consigning their generation to a fossil-fueled dystopia.
In fact, six months after the Green New Deal resolution was unveiled, with far-reaching climate goals but few specific climate policies, its supporters have yet to introduce substantive legislation for achieving those goals. Meanwhile, House Democrats skeptical of the Green New Deal have introduced two alternative green blueprints, both calling for net-zero emissions by 2050, but those are also primarily plans to have a plan, not actual plans.
Trump amped up that skepticism as a candidate, dismissing climate change as a hoax manufactured in China while pledging to restore the coal industry to its former glory. That hasn’t happened during his presidency, but not for lack of trying. His administration has pushed hard to ease rules limiting pollution by coal plants and other fossil-fuel interests, heavy industry, agriculture and other major emitters of greenhouse gases.
In fact, some Democrats are worried that the new GOP rhetoric on climate could help blur partisan distinctions on the issue in 2020, shifting the debate from basic science to complex policy. In an interview before he launched his White House run, Steyer argued that Republicans who acknowledge climate science but call for more study or warn against economically disruptive responses are as committed to inaction as outright deniers.
NoiseCat’s dissatisfaction reflects another challenge for climate politics, the divisions within the Democratic Party. And those divisions have less to do with the substantive details of climate policy than contrasting visions of what the party is about, how the party should behave, and who is going to decide.most Democrats support aggressive investments in wind and solar power, energy efficiency, electric vehicles, public transit, and just about any other proven approach to reducing emissions.
Climate wonks complained publicly that O’Rourke was being punished for echoing the science, and several climate activists grumbled privately that their movement was being hijacked by Sanders fans who cared more about a socialist takeover of the Democratic Party than serious emissions reductions. “Are we in this to do climate, or are we in this to nationalize industry?” one Green New Deal activist asked me.
It’s no coincidence that the Democrats arguing for the political benefits of full-menu progressivism happen to be full-menu progressives. But there is a real strategic argument behind the ideological opportunism, a climate version of the debate among Democrats about whether to target base voters or swing voters, whether persuasion or mobilization is the key to victory in 2020.
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