The Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Climate Change Ever Again

Harris’s failure to campaign aggressively on climate no
doubt stemmed from her overreliance on the strange consultant-produced fantasy
that Democrats have inexplicably adhered to since 2016: that a coalition of
anti-Trump Republicans and Silicon Valley billionaires was going to win over
the working-class masses of Michigan and Pennsylvania. It didn’t work, and staying
silent on climate change meant that Trump was never put on the spot or forced
to explain his strange views, for example that wind power causes cancer. All
this was particularly strange given that climate
remained a top issue among liberal Democratic voters, the people that
Harris would need to turn out in order to win the election. Many experts said
this was a huge
mistake on her part.

One big problem, for Harris, was that the Biden
administration had—under duress, in trying to compromise with Manchin and the
Republicans—enacted climate policy that, while it did create jobs, failed
to curb inflation. Everyone I know who spent the last few months canvassing
in a battleground state repeatedly heard that people hated paying more for
basic life necessities. The Democrats, then, were constrained from mentioning
their climate policies too much because they didn’t want to remind people of
the inflationary pain such policies had caused them and, partly too, the
benefits of the IRA were simply wonky and hard to explain. This was probably a
mistake, given that people were already thinking about inflation, and polling
indicates widespread concern about climate. 

Messaging alone, of course, wouldn’t have fixed the fact
that many people have simply had bad experiences in the past four years. Naming
your legislation the “Inflation Reduction Act” does not by itself ensure that it
will not be inflationary or that you will be seen as a hero for ending
inflation. Biden and Congress could have been more attentive to Americans’ cost
of living struggles, by funding the investments with much higher taxes on the
rich and upper-middle class, as well as by addressing the cost of living in
other tangible ways, including real investment in affordable housing,
continuing and even increasing the child tax credit, along with ending overseas
conflicts like the war in Ukraine, which has vastly complicated supply chains and raised prices all
over the world.