America Isn’t Sweating Climate Change - The Atlantic
Summer has begun—which is to say, wildfires in the West are chasing residents from their homes, the snowpack has dwindled to near-record lows in several states, drought is spreading, and temperatures are regularly exploring new heights. Yet America does not seem to be sweating climate change. You could call it “climate hushing,” as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others do, or a “worry gap,” as one study has. Whatever you call it, America’s interest in talking about climate change is at an ebb.
Certainly, the Trump administration has made a point of disregarding climate change. Yet when President Trump made similar moves in his first term, he was met with a surge of resistance. Environmentalists and Democratic politicians formed their own climate alliances and pushed through state and local laws designed to take carbon out of the American economies. At the time, Jay Inslee, then the Washington governor, said, “We governors are going to step into this cockpit and fly the plane.”
These days, Democrats and even climate activists are acting as if fighting to slow global warming, let alone campaigning on it, is passé. As gas prices soared during the Iran war, blue-state governors have given fossil fuels another look, pushing the message of affordability, debating new gas pipelines, and putting off, in some cases, commitments to cut emissions. California’s frontrunner for governor, Xavier Becerra, who took campaign donations from oil companies, has not committed to phasing out gas cars as the state has planned; New York Governor Kathy Hochul rolled back the state’s landmark 2019 climate law. Congressional Democrats, who need to win seats during the midterms, are focused on economic issues. “Look at the Senate map,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, told me. “I mean, Alaska, Texas, Iowa. These are not places where anyone with brain cells would say: Run on blocking fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis.”
Many of the climate activists who came of age during Trump’s first term have since broadened their portfolio. The most famous one, Greta Thunberg, posts about Gaza and ICE raids alongside her critiques of the fossil-fuel industry; the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led group that championed the Green New Deal, has pivoted to defeating authoritarianism as a prerequisite for passing climate legislation, Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director, told me. Her organization was still hopeful, she said, early in the second Trump administration, that they could mobilize support among Republicans to save some of the funding for renewable energy and climate-related projects. But they quickly saw that wouldn’t happen. The Trump administration has pushed to expand oil drilling, including in sensitive Alaskan wilderness and California coastal waters; to block offshore wind farms; to stop regulating greenhouse-gas pollution, an effort EPA administrator Lee Zeldin described last year as “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion.”
While Democrats and environmentalists have challenged such actions in court, the public hasn’t made much noise about them, and some advocates fear that these kinds of rollbacks could be gathering their own quiet momentum, even in Democratic strongholds, Jon Binder, the executive director of the Model Climate Laws Initiative at Columbia University, told me.
Some environmentalists are more optimistic that the ever-improving economics of clean energy can keep tamping down emissions. They see the need to expand the electricity grid—if mainly to feed the hyper-scale data centers—as an opportunity to add wind and solar energy. And yet, the people who think most about climate seem immobilized. “It’s the responsibility of the environmental community to elucidate what’s going on,” Kathryn Phillips, a longtime California environmental advocate, told me. “But somehow they’re stuck.”
The people still trying to make noise about climate worry that this phase of “climate hushing” doesn’t actually reflect what Americans want. Voters care deeply about the growing risks of floods and wildfires, Whitehouse told me, and about the rising cost of homeowner’s insurance and the threat that poses to the wider economy. But how politicians talk about these issues matters, he said: You’re getting screwed, and your bills are going up because of the fossil-fuel industry is a “much more powerful and salient argument” than setting future climate targets without a way to get to them.
Voters in Rhode Island, where Whitehouse is from, are not exactly on the same page about these questions as voters in, say, Texas, but he may be right that Americans want something more from their leaders on this issue. Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at Yale University, which has long polled Americans about the climate, told me that a majority of people do want their politicians to take...