Let’s Talk About the Climate
Climate conversation has gone quiet in the US — at least at the national level. It’s THE topic of our times. Who’s avoiding it and why?
Things that “everybody” knows are things that need to be questioned. Everybody used to know that the one safe topic to bring up when you wanted to avoid controversy was the weather. Now everybody knows that the climate is too controversial to talk about. Really? Or could it be that a particular narrow cohort of US politicians and opinion leaders is avoiding the topic because climate chaos undermines the increasingly wobbly structure of their world as they assume — and want — it to be?
Opinions on the Climate
Polls repeatedly show that to accept that climate change exists and that burning fossil fuels is the biggest cause. People are also broadly supportive of using more solar and wind power. Interestingly, dropped over the course of the Biden presidency, but a solid 64% of Republicans still favor building more solar and 59% support wind-power expansion.
Investment in solar, onshore wind, and batteries boomed in Republican states in 2024, even as support for renewables supposedly declined among the voters who went on to elect Donald Trump to the US presidency. The deeply Republican state of combined solar, wind, and battery capacity than California, which has slipped to second-place in renewable power generation.
Nonetheless, politicians who supposedly see climate change as an “existential crisis” for humanity don’t want to talk about it. If Kamala Harris mentioned the threat of climate change once in her brief time on the campaign trail, I missed it. And the liberal media tends to keep such skimpy climate coverage as they provide separate from standard reporting on weather and weather-related disasters such as floods and wildfires.
The standard explanation — or perhaps excuse is a more appropriate word — for this is their apparently firm conviction that people don’t want to hear about the climate. It’s too depressing. Talking about the climate runs the risk of losing votes and certainly doesn’t gain votes. Climate change means sacrificing something, everyone says, and nobody wants to sacrifice anything. The presumption seems to be that this maxim holds even if the future of humanity is at stake.
Carter and the Climate
The last time a US leader suggested that Americans make sacrifices for the climate was in 1977 when Jimmy Carter wore a sweater and called on people to turn down their thermostats in winter. Look what happened to him. Everybody knows that cost him re-election. Or so the story goes.
Actually, it’s not at all clear that talking about the importance of energy independence and the possible role of solar power in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis hurt Carter. His real problem was having American diplomats held hostage by the revolutionary Islamic government that overthrew “our friend” the Shah under Carter’s watch. And the same combination of inflation and — under Carter-appointed Fed chair Paul Volcker — that one-term President Joe Biden faced last year.
But never mind. The “sweater speech” and its alleged role in Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan has become part of American political mythology. Everybody knows it.
Polls support the Democrats’ latter-day hesitance to talk about the climate by showing that, while people accept the existence of climate change, it’s not a high priority for most Americans compared to, say, the economy and inflation, or immigration and border control, or all those risks to democracy running around out there. You know. The issues at the top of newspapers, news feeds, and news broadcasts day in and day out.
Climate (Not) in the News
But what would people’s priority concerns be if every weather forecast and every report about Louisiana kids playing happily in the deepest snow since 1960, or 1895, or some other distant point were to include a prominent mention that such weather events are likely to recur repeatedly in the future because high greenhouse gas accumulations have weakened the belt, known as the polar vortex, that usually holds that cold air in place around the Arctic? If every newscast or article on California fires noted that climate destabilization resulting from fossil fuel emissions made the winds and weather that caused those fires more common?
People vaguely know these things, as the polls show. But climate change is scary, genuinely scary, and easy to force out of our minds if the information that comes our way drums on about how these are “once in a lifetime events” — as confirmed in historic records but strongly contradicted in projections for the future. The new form of non-denying denial of a climate crisis is to treat all the chaotic events we experience as unusual but, at the same time, part of the way it’s always been.
“We Floridians (or substitute Californians, or Vermonters) are tough. We get this kind of wild weather all the time. We know how to handle it,” is the standard kind of macho reaction you hear from state, city, and even federal officials.
Wen Stephenson of not just the “ecofascist” lies of Trump and his ilk but of “the hapless, incoherent liberal center that downplays the climate emergency while offering no remotely commensurate plan for combating either fascism or climate breakdown.” The headline of his article tells the story that we ought to hear all the time until people finally grasp its importance: “In Our New Climate Reality, There Is No Getting Back to Normal.”
Another thing that polls tend to confirm is that the issues the public cares most about are the issues politicians talk about most. But does what voters ask politicians about on the campaign trail and act on in their daily lives determine what politicians talk about? Or do people give priority in their brief encounters with politicians to the issues they constantly hear and read about from those politicians — and on the media and social media? What’s cause and what’s effect here?
If my community in Maine and others around are representative, people do want to talk about the climate threats they face. They want to learn more about what they can do both to manage the impacts of increasingly wild weather and to reduce their personal and household emissions to help prevent it all from getting even worse.
There’s a lot of equivocation. One minute they accept that humanity is facing an enormous threat and the next they’re saying how nice it is that the weather is so warm in February. But why wouldn’t there be uncertainty and equivocation in such an unprecedented situation? Particularly given that their national leaders either ignore the issue, or pretend that it’s more important for the US to drill more oil wells and stifle Chinese economic “aggression” than to act as quickly as possible to reduce carbon and methane emissions.
My hope is that Americans will step up even if their leaders don’t. As I’ve said before, nobody is going to come and save us. We have to save ourselves.
