Climate is the problem. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

14 - 18 minutes

Center-left intellectuals like me have two passions in life: complaining about the things that we, personally, find annoying about far-left ideologues and wringing our hands about the electoral fortunes of the Democratic Party.

Sometimes these two things coincide. We tend to live in urban areas, so we worried on a personal level about the spike in crime in 2020-2021 and (correctly) warned of the political risks of embracing soft-on-crime policies. But we are fallible and at times fall prey to the very human tendency to project our picayune concerns onto persuadable voters, while ignoring voter concerns that don’t line up with our own. And while insofar as “woke” politics leads to rising murders, that’s a very real political problem. And my sense is that a lot of people in my broad political space over-index on the idea that voters are worried about “cancel culture” and related matters. Center-left intellectuals, who are going to vote for Joe Biden, are much more worried about things like art museums deciding docent programs are racist, bad diversity training programs, and far-left academics doing bad history than the median voter is.

These things bother us because they are annoying and they impact the places we live and institutions we participate in and care about. But they aren’t very electorally significant because they don’t impact a very large number of people in a concrete way, are especially unlikely to impact the relatively disengaged folks who make up the bulk of the persuadable electorate, and also just don’t have that much to do with partisan politics. Joe Biden isn’t influencing art museums in Portland when they decide what to do with their docents.

Conversely, I think center-left intellectuals tend to downplay the potentially negative electoral impact of the increasing importance of climate change to the Democratic Party’s agenda precisely because it’s a cause that we genuinely care about.

If you read the New York Times regularly (which you should), I think you see clearly that the management, staff, and readership of the Times have significant concerns and internal disagreement about “wokeness,” left-wing campus politics, etc. all while maintaining a broad consensus that climate change is an extremely important problem.

This is a big deal electorally because the Democratic Party actually does act like a political party that believes climate change is an extremely important problem, elevating it to the top of the priority hierarchy for the Biden administration. So it’s completely reasonable for voters to base their voting behavior in part on whether they agree with Democrats’ climate-related policies. And it’s electorally damaging because, frankly, most voters don’t agree with the party’s assessment. They’re not climate denialists who think the problem is fake or that scientists are lying about it. But they just aren’t as interested in it as Joe Biden or the average New York Times reader. And unlike cancel culture, climate and energy policy does impact everyone’s daily life — including the lives of people who don’t pay that much attention to politics.

The 2004 Democratic Party platform said that “we will reduce mercury emissions, smog and acid rain, and will address the challenge of climate change with the seriousness of purpose this great challenge demands,” but also that “we believe coal must continue its important role in a new energy economy, while achieving high environmental standards.” In total, the word “climate” appears three times.

By 2020, it appears 63 times. There is a “climate crisis,” and we learn that “climate change is a global emergency,” that “we must lead the world in taking on the climate crisis” and so on and so forth. The only reference to coal is a promise to “hold fossil fuel companies accountable” for pollution induced by mines that are now closed. Rather than re-affirm the role of fossil fuel production in the economy, the platform vows to “support banning new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters” — something the Biden administration tried to do before losing in court and then wisely adopting a different oil policy.

You could say Democrats changed their tune on climate change because the situation changed.

And maybe, to an extent, that’s true. But when the 2012 platform touted its all-of-the-above energy policy, the scientific facts about greenhouse gas emissions were perfectly clear. The Obama administration just made a calculation about political viablity. If you’d pitched them on promising to end all oil and gas leasing, they would have told you that would cost a lot of votes.

Eight years later, Democrats were just a lot more willing to take political risks for the sake of climate.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But the party ought to be clear-eyed about the consequences of that decision, and I don’t think that everyone is — many Democrats have spent a lot of time over the past two election cycles feeling baffled as to why some people who used to vote for them decided not to vote for them anymore. Well, there’s a reason Obama did what he did! What’s inconvenient, though, is that I’d like to say all the stuff Democrats have done that’s alienated voters are bad far-left ideas. But while there are some bad far-left ideas in the climate space, there are also perfectly good mainstream Democrat ideas that most voters just disagree with.

If you ask people whether they care about climate change, they generally say yes. If you’re a climate advocacy group that wants to make it look like people are deeply concerned about this, you can certainly hire pollsters who will craft questions that get you the answers that you’re after.

But if you probe public opinion even slightly, it’s clear that public support for climate action is a mile wide and an inch deep. For example, IPSOS found that just 25 percent of Americans said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to address climate change. A 2019 Reuters poll asked specifically whether respondents would pay $100 to fight climate change and only a third said yes. Would you be willing to pay $10/month more in electricity bills to fight climate change? Most people say no.

Democrats are, I think, aware of these facts on some level.

They know not to propose a carbon tax or a gasoline tax increase as part of their climate agenda, even though these are good ideas on the merits. And in their messaging, they certainly never mention the idea of sacrifice or that it might be good for Americans to constrain their lifestyles or reduce their energy consumption.

But I think they still don’t take them seriously enough, because when people tell you they don’t want to pay $100 to fight climate change, you can’t just take that as a narrow point about the $100. It means that if you put together a huge climate-focused legislative package and make that the centerpiece of your agenda, your agenda would be centered around solving a problem that most people don’t think is very important. That’s just inherently a kind of danger zone. Not a unique danger zone, of course. Republicans think that cutting rich people’s taxes is very important and the American people — including lots of rank-and-file GOP voters — disagree. But the Republican Party as a whole seems to be aware that this is an embarrassing priority gap and tries really hard to conceal from the public how focused their party is on low taxes for the rich.

Contemporary Democrats, by contrast, tend to be loud and proud about their climate focus, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me given what we know about the public’s indifference to this issue.

Given that context, the actual climate policy content of the Inflation Reduction Act is pretty brilliant.

It makes a large difference on emissions, but only requires sacrifice from a narrow base of rich people whose taxes are raised. If you delve deep into the plumbing, there is an opportunity cost in investing that much money on climate goals rather than on other Democratic Party ideas that the public likes more. But IRA does include some very popular and important health provisions that Democrats can emphasize, and most voters don’t delve too deep into the details of policy packages. The process by which the legislative package ultimate came together was contentious and ugly, but the actual results were brilliant and reflect a lot of hard work by a lot of smart people.

That being said, the climate movement keeps trying to push into the danger zone — according to Pew, there is very little support for completely phasing out fossil fuels or for banning gasoline-powered cars.

The larger context for that is while Americans care about the environment, they care about jobs and economic growth more than they care about getting to net zero as quickly as possible.

To be clear, national Democrats have not proposed a ban on internal combustion engine cars.

But a bunch of blue states have, creating a situation that’s somewhat comparable to the GOP’s abortion dilemma. Republicans are unlikely, realistically, to pass a national abortion ban in 2025 if they win the election. But you can see in state government that basically any time Republicans have enough votes to ban abortion, that’s what they do. Republicans have a very sincere belief that abortion should be banned, they try to ban it when they get the chance, and most voters disagree with that idea and keep brushing them back. President Joe Biden isn’t going to ban internal combustion engine cars, but if he were governor of Delaware, he probably would.

And voters really don’t like this stuff.

I’ve heard from professionals that when tested, messages about promoting electric car use have similar impact on Democratic vote share as messages about defunding the police. As is often the case, you can see that in Democrats’ ads, they never talk about EVs, reflecting this message testing. But that doesn’t carry through into their unpaid communications. And that’s true down the line. The trend is clear that over time, more-and-more people will be using electric appliances as the technology (and batteries) improve. But if you’re determined to hit semi-arbitrary climate targets, you need to try to strong-arm consumers to make switches sooner than they want to. And the same people who don’t want to pay $10/month more in electricity bills also don’t want to be made to use new products that they’re not comfortable with or that have even very minor inconvenience costs.

Part of the problem here is that the very people who are inclined to write concern-troll columns about the fate of the Democrats — people like me! — aren’t personally bothered by this stuff.

I live in a transit-rich walkable urban neighborhood. I do my grocery shopping on foot. I have rooftop solar panels. We bought an induction stove. We have a hybrid car that we drive a couple of times a week, and when it dies, we will replace it with an electric car. When our furnace expires, we will replace it with a heat pump. There’s lots of stuff leftists do that annoys me, but pushing me to electrify everything while continuing to decarbonize the grid is not something that personally bothers me at all. If anything, I’m annoyed that progressives aren’t doing more to accelerate decarbonization of the electrical grid by promoting geothermal and nuclear power. I think we need to make it easier to build renewable energy projects.

But, again, it’s not just that the mass public prioritizes economic issues over environmental goals — they prioritize other environmental goals over emissions reduction.

It’s easy to lose sight of this. Identity politics is controversial among upscale Democrats, and we enjoy fighting with each other about it recreationally. But most of that stuff has relatively little impact on most people’s lives, and the party leadership is good at staying away from the worst of the fringes. An idea like “climate change is really important and people should be willing, and even eager, to make noticeable changes in their lives to address it,” is by contrast pretty banal in educated Dem circles, even among annoying centrists like me.

But the voters disagree.

Now here’s the rub: Biden has enacted by far the most consequential climate policies of any president in American history.

And he’s done so while mostly avoiding the political land mines. Some of that is smart decision-making, and some of it the administration sort of backed into despite themselves, but they did it. They landed in the right place. US emissions have fallen to the lowest level in over 30 years, even as oil and gas production have soared to all-time record levels.

I think the upshot of this is clear. Biden and the Democrats should triangulate ruthlessly on energy, brag about their successful all-of-the-above policy, basically never mention climate change, and not enact any new climate-focused policies whatsoever. In exchange, climate change groups should back him extremely aggressively, offering literally zero complaints or criticisms about anything he says or does and not asking for any new initiatives on any front. The climate advocates had the privilege of being the Democratic Party’s favored children during 2021-2022, even though the voters didn’t like that idea, and now it’s time for climate advocates to repay the favor by doing everything possible to beat Trump — which means giving Democrats maximum tactical and strategic flexibility to cater to the public.

But that doesn’t seem to be where the Biden administration is. As best I can tell, they still feel that they need to court climate groups and avoid taking flak from the left.

And it’s certainly not where climate groups are — they’re asking Biden to block new natural gas exports, which would be bad for economic growth and bad for Biden’s national security policies, in exchange for tiny and possibly non-existent climate benefits. I think the White House should tell them all to fuck off. Instead, they seem to be getting a respectful hearing, and I don’t really understand why.

At the end of the day, though, this is a real acid test for priority-setting. There’s a view that climate is such an existential threat that you have to go for broke every time. And there’s also a view that Donald Trump is an existential menace to the country, to the world, and to American democracy. I think the latter view is a lot more plausible than the former, and there’s a real choice to be made here. Part of the fight for democracy has to be a fight to give people the policies they want. On topics like prescription drugs, Democrats don’t need to choose between the ideal of democracy and its practice — the progressive policy is the policy most people want. But on climate, that’s not the case, and it’s important to be clear-eyed and make smart choices.