Election 2024: How Will Climate Change Matter?

Recently, I was invited to speak at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference on a panel entitled “Election 2024: How Will Climate Change Matter?”

You can watch the full panel discussion here, but the short version of my answer to the question posed by panel’s title was “not as much as you might wish.” 

Here’s what I mean:

Given the scope and urgency of the climate crisis, advocates and activists can be forgiven for wishful thinking. But the idea that climate change will be a pivotal issue in the 2024 election is just that: wishful thinking. And to the extent that the issue does influence votes, it could be a wash at best. As we’ve seen in recent years, where people stand on climate change is increasingly determined by partisan affiliation. If you lean left, you probably care about climate and support strong-ish action. If you lean right, you probably think concern about climate is overblown and consider climate activists and their ideas extreme. Given that the country is more or less evenly divided ideologically, the polarization of climate change is a huge problem.

Despite these realities, some climate activists hold to the theory that if Democratic politicians just called for bolder action on climate, they’d win more elections and the people and the planet would be better off.

Here’s a different theory:

1. First of all, if you’re trying to change and win hearts and minds around election time, you’re too late. You have to reach, educate and organize people 365 days a year, year-in and year-out.
2. While un-polarizing climate is a big, hard project, fortunately we can still make progress – by advocating multiple climate solutions without leading on climate. We can (and do) make our case for reducing air pollution from power plants, factories and cars based on saving lives and improving health, even as these actions also reduce climate pollution. We can (and do) make our case for protecting our oldest forests based on preserving wildlife and wild places, even as our success also means more carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. And on and on, through many, if not all, of our clean energy, transportation, conservation and even plastic reduction campaigns.
3. Winning these campaigns requires bipartisan support, which is tougher than ever but more necessary than ever.
4. Winning all of these campaigns still won’t be enough if our society is stuck in the old paradigm. We can’t keep growing our economy in the same old ways, producing and consuming more stuff in the same old ways, without making the planet a hotter, more dangerous and biologically poorer place. Shifting the paradigm is an even heavier lift than building bipartisan support. That’s why our arguments for action need to poke holes in the old paradigm and open the path just a little wider for new ways of organizing our society.

Some might say that climate is too urgent and important to take the long road. I say that climate is too urgent and important to pretend that there are any shortcuts. We need to organize. We need to break through partisan gridlock. And we need to keep chipping away at the paradigm that gave us climate change in the first place.