Donald Trump in Las Vegas, September 13, 2024:
Listen to this, very important I think: you haven’t heard the word environment in seven months. You know why? It doesn’t play. It doesn’t play. We want clean air. We want crystal clear water, beautiful water, and we want an unbelievable country, and we want an economy that’s better than it’s ever been before. The environment isn’t playing. They don’t mention it anymore.
On this point Trump and Democratic strategists agree: the environment doesn’t play.
Kamala Harris, who cast the decisive vote in 2022 to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)—the most consequential climate bill in planetary history, providing more than a trillion dollars for investment in climate and renewable energy programs—doesn’t mention climate change in her stump speech. As of this writing the only climate policy she has announced would accelerate warming: her full-throated endorsement of fracking and offshore oil production. At the Democratic National Convention, Harris made a single oblique reference to the subject, tucking it into a list of the “fundamental freedoms at stake” in November (“the freedom to…live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis”). At the presidential debate she did not mention it until the final question prompted her to do so. Even then, instructively, she could not tout the IRA without, in the same sentence, boasting of having increased “domestic gas production to historic levels.”
When three major environmental groups—the Environmental Defense Fund, Climate Power, and the League of Conservation Voters—launched the largest advertising campaign in support of climate policy in presidential history, they made certain that none of the spots mentioned climate change. Tim Walz ignored the issue during his own DNC speech, even though as governor of Minnesota he adopted California’s automobile pollution standards and mandated that Minnesota’s power plants generate electricity entirely with renewable sources by 2040.
Strategists have been forthright about this rationale. “We have to defeat Donald Trump,” Brett Hartl, chief political strategist with the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, told Politico. “We don’t want to sabotage her campaign for no valid reason.”
“To play your role really well,” Jack Pratt, the political director of EDF Action, told Semafor, “sometimes you’re in the background.”
It falls to the campaign’s surrogates to translate this sleight of hand to their constituencies. “Regardless of whether this issue is in the speech,” the DNC’s Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis told The Guardian ahead of the convention, “we know Vice-President Harris is an environmental champion.” Washington governor Jay Inslee told The New York Times that he was “not concerned” by her silence on the issue: “I am totally confident that when she is in a position to effect positive change, she will.” R.L. Miller, president of the Climate Hawks Vote PAC, told Politico, “All the activists need to know is Kamala has pledged to take on Big Oil, details TBD.”
Details
TBD.
This marks a radical shift from the political strategy launched by the Sunrise Movement and other youth-driven groups only six years ago. Furious at the failure to draw broad public support for meaningful action, activists began addressing climate change in moral, emotional terms. “We are angry at the cowardice of our leaders,” they said. “Our lives are at stake.” As Varshini Prakash, Sunrise’s cofounder, put it, “We have grown up our entire lives watching this issue completely sidelined in the political discourse.” The surge in public concern that followed and that helped bring about the IRA, she concluded, was “a direct result of the active energy and the demand from thousands of young people on the front lines of the crisis.”
But in 2024 even the Sunrise Movement has gotten the memo. While urging Harris to campaign openly on climate policy (“She needs to talk about it,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a spokesperson for the group), refusing to endorse her for president, and picketing her Brentwood house (“Harris: What Is Your Climate Plan?”), the group has nevertheless launched an effort to persuade 1.5 million young people to vote for Harris. “We’re going all-out,” said O’Hanlon, to “mobilize our generation to defeat Trump.”
Is the silence on climate, as Trump argues, “very important”? The Harris ticket, the Democratic Party, and environmental groups are betting it’s not. Their confidence is likely informed by the successful passage of the IRA, which, as the Congressional Budget Office predicted, has had a negligible impact on inflation. (At fundraisers, Biden himself boasts that the act “has nothing to do with inflation.”) The IRA did, however, create more than 170,000 clean energy jobs (with another 1.5 million expected in the next decade), and it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by one billion tons and double wind and solar production by 2030, among many other benefits. Perhaps a Harris administration would pass an even more ambitious climate bill, called something like the Reinvest in US Manufacturing Act or, to take the subject of her recent policy speech, the Defend Capitalism Act. If so, the tactic will be vindicated.
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If not, historians might look back to public opinion polls showing a different consequence of this strategy. In April, for instance, Monmouth found that since the passage of the IRA, concern about climate change and support for government action have sharply declined for the first time in at least a decade. The drop was steepest—nearly twenty percentage points—among American adults younger than thirty-four.
The surge of youth-led climate activism six years ago emerged out of frustration that too much faith had been placed in policymakers and not enough in rousing public opinion. The same groups have convinced themselves that the old strategy, which failed for three decades, will work now.
