The question is not “if,” but “how.” And it has many answers.
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The sun in New York City obscured by smoke from wildfires in Canada, June 2023. Photo by Gedalya Lubman. Climate change intensified the wind and heat conditions that led to Canada’s worst wildfire season on record, poisoning the air in communities across North America.
Last week, The New York Times published yet another opinion piece arguing that “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” this one by Syracuse University professor Matt Huber. Fox News’ David Marcus quickly declared victory: “New York Times announces the end of the climate change hoax.”
The paper of record has published opinion pieces making variations of this argument approximately every six months since Trump’s election. Arnab Datta of the Institute for Progress got two bites at the same apple, arguing that “Climate Activists Need to Radically Change Their Approach Under Trump” and, in case the implication wasn’t clear enough, “Democrats Have Been At War With Big Oil For Too Long.” Matt Yglesias, with his usual ahistorical mulishness, offered another way of laundering the oil and gas industry’s blood-soaked history: “Obama Supported It. The Left in Canada and Norway Does. Why Don’t Democrats?” Huber’s politics may deviate from those of Datta and Yglesias, but his call to inaction created similar political ripples.
Such “climate hushers,” as Senator Whitehouse called them in a thread about why we actually should not stop talking about the climate, tend to argue that if the climate crisis does not rank among the public’s top priorities, then politicians shouldn’t prioritize solving it.
There are several issues with that sort of popularist thinking. It ignores that there is a climate nexus to nearly every issue, including those that regularly rank highest among people’s political concerns, from the high cost of living to growing economic inequality. As advice for political communication it amounts to professional malpractice, papering over the reality of how issues gain salience with the public, whether by the consciousness-raising work of civil society groups or the astroturfing campaigns of powerful corporations. The advertising industry knows that consistent messaging promotes recognition and top-of-mind awareness among consumers; why should we pretend that isn’t the case in politics?
“When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Senator Whitehouse observed. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.”
Finally, avoiding mention of climate change is a deeply irresponsible approach to a crisis that will affect all of us—inevitably, though unequally—for the rest of our lives. If you primarily understand climate change as the increase of carbon in the atmosphere measured in parts per million, and its fixes as primarily technological and technocratic, then you may assume that climate change is a “luxury” issue that only affluent liberals can afford to care about. (This ignores, of course, impacted communities around the world who can’t afford not to care about it.) Climate change is reshaping the world in thousands of different ways, offering plenty of different entry points into people’s lived experiences.
The far more interesting question is not whether Democrats occupying or campaigning for positions of political power should talk about climate change, but how. There isn’t, and shouldn’t be, one particular answer. A politician looking for how to talk about climate change with their constituents should pay attention to what material conditions constrain the flourishing of the community they represent. A climate story will be in there.
Climate change affects what we eat, where it grows, and what it costs us. Whether our homes are safe and insurable from increasingly frequent and severe disasters. Whether we struggle to breathe from asthma or allergies or wildfire smoke or air pollutants. Whether our families and our neighbors face increased risk of disease and premature death from airborne toxins. The way we get to work. What birds are in the sky. What fish are in the water. What plants can grow where we live, and how quickly those plants are changing. What diseases the insects that bite us carry. Where our electricity comes from and what it costs us. Whether our water supply is stable and clean. What species are disappearing from the world we share, bleaching the vibrancy of the world.
In the spring of 2025, Hammer and Hope published an eloquent conversation between Rhiana Gunn-Wright and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò about how the climate movement could become a more human movement, tapping into our emotional lives and material realities. Gunn-Wright envisioned a climate movement that refocused on the material ways that people understand climate—“air, water, soil, food”—and connected itself to the fight for economic justice.
“Climate justice is very interesting in the sense that it inherently comes in a confrontational package,” she said. “The story is not just about how some communities lack clean air; it’s that they lack clean air because of corporate or right-wing villains. That’s why they’re being denied.”
Trying to avoid a confrontational politics certainly explains some of the climate hushing.
“The Democratic Party remains deeply unpopular,” Huber warns. That is certainly true, but how can the Democrats expect to win back the confidence of voters without demonstrating a fighting spirit? And who better to fight than the corporations—from Big Oil to Big Tech—that the Trump administration is allowing to price-gouge consumers, profit from war, surveillance, and policing, and reshape the American landscape and economy without public input or consent?
There are many viable versions of climate politics, local and national, angry and hopeful; there is no one prescription. But as the pursuit of climate solutions will inevitably come up against powerful interests invested in the status quo, a willingness to confront power is necessary.
Our friends at the Climate and Community Institute recently put out a blueprint for a working class climate agenda: Stop Greed, Build Green. The lesson that they take from the failure of the Inflation Reduction Act to survive right-wing control of the federal government is “not that climate investment is politically toxic, but that climate investment designed around long time horizons and indirect benefits will not survive the political cycle.” They argue that climate policies that quickly and materially improve the lives of working people would change the political equation, pairing “immediate relief to the working class in the form of lower bills, price caps, and easier lives” with “regulating the fossil fuel executives, tech barons, and corporate landlords that extract exorbitant profits at the expense of everyday people.”
Huber writes in his op-ed that it’s “not clear why climate should be at the center” of Democrats’ policy proposals. Perhaps he imagines that prioritizing the planet means deprioritizing people. But the climate crisis is simultaneously an ecological crisis, a cost of living crisis, and a health crisis. Climate policy that tackles multiple problems at once would have not only broader impact, but broader appeal.
As Ben Beachy reflected in Democracy Journal last fall, “People are unlikely to call for more climate investments if they do not see themselves in those investments.” He proposed that the blueprint of future climate policies be created through participatory democratic processes by affected communities themselves. If the grassroots resistance to polluting AI data centers cropping up across the country is any indication, communities want a say…and the window for a confrontational climate justice politics is far from closed.
Want more? Check out some of the pieces that we published or contributed research or thoughts to in the last week:
Pam Bondi’s Perversion of Justice
Map: Trump Has Often Delayed or Denied Disaster Aid
House GOP Helps Wall Street Get Its Way On Investor Ownership Of Housing
Sean Duffy Vacations Amidst Airline Disasters
PCAST is Another Lever of Corporate Influence
Tracking the Environmental Harms of Trump Actions
The Democratic Candidate Closely Tied to Crypto and Big Tech