With more than five months to go before the midterm elections, Democrats in Washington and on the campaign trail are trying to show voters they care about cost of living issues.
To do this, some parts of the standard party message may be falling apart. That includes talks about fighting climate change. Once a pillar of the Democratic agenda, it may now be fading into the background. According to Matt Huber, professor of geography and environment at Syracuse University and author of Climate Change as a Dangerous WarDemocrats, and the weather, may be better for it.
Huber, who recently wrote an essay for the New York Times called “Democrats Shouldn’t Campaign on Climate Change Anymore,” he spoke to Today, It’s Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram on why Democratic candidates can and should leave climate change out of their platforms and streamline their campaigns around affordability issues.
The following is part of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s a lot more in the full podcast, so take a listen Today, It’s Explained wherever you find podcasts, incl Apple Podcasts, Pandoraand Spotify.
What made you want to write this appeal to Democrats to shut up about climate change right now?
I’m trying to argue that it’s the end of a 20-year period in Democratic Party politics where many Democrats were thinking that climate would be this urgent issue that could catalyze this coalition of people who have strong beliefs around green jobs.
What I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that I’m not sure that focusing on the climate crisis as the impetus for this kind of politics is going to be effective in building that momentum, building the majority. Many Americans do not prioritize this as a matter of urgency, and prioritize other cost-of-living issues.
When did the fight against climate change become a core issue for the Democratic Party?
2006, which was 20 years ago, was a big flashpoint where Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released. And that merged into the zeitgeist with the great financial crisis a few years later.
There was a lot of feeling, like in the Great Depression, that there had to be this high-employment program, a public investment program, and that climate change provided the urgency and impetus to consider that type of major investment program and it could create jobs and appeal to these more economic problems.
When the Green New Deal was a big deal, promoted by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, I think they were also thinking that it would actually be better politics in the context of a major economic crisis like the original New Deal was.
“In order to win and campaign, they realize that talking about climate change is not going to inspire and motivate people to support them.”
Unfortunately for them, I don’t think we’ve had that kind of conflict since New Green Deal politics began. We had a recession, but it was this Covid recession that was the weird kind of recession and not the kind of crisis that required this big jobs program.
The label, “Green New Deal,” became distinctive. And it was a strategy to do that, obviously. Do you think such a message thing is silly now?
I am very sad (about it). I was a big Stan of the Green New Deal, if I may use that term. I really liked this broad vision and positive vision. I think a lot of climate politics can be really bad.
It went wrong, though. I think when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced the House resolution on the Green New Deal in 2019, she went around this media and released this FAQ document – or her office released this amazing FAQ document – and kind of the media about the Green New Deal. And in that document there was a stream of conscious language about how we are not quite ready to ban cows and birds.
Of course, as you’d expect, the language was picked up by the Fox News culture war machine and immediately the Green New Deal became “We’re going to ban hamburgers. We’re going to ban air travel.”
What was supposed to be this broad partisan politics that could appeal to working class people became another kind of culture war issue, unfortunately.
Biden clearly realizes that he cannot use this marketing of the Green New Deal to get this kind of legislation through Congress. But he gets this kind of legislation through Congress, strangely called the Anti-Inflation Act.
Here we are in 2026 and nobody ever talked about the (IRA), even though when they did, they said it was the most important environmental law in American history. How did that happen?
In many ways Anti-Inflation Act it was based on this Green New Deal idea that jobs and investment in the green economy would bring material benefits and help win back some of these working class voters who have been moving to Trumpism.
Of course, most of these investments were very long-term. A style of policy making that has been popular for some time in the Democratic Party is to encourage this investment through tax credits, which means that you encourage the private sector to do most of the construction of these projects. I mention a read in a piece that found, basically, when you examine the community where this investment is going, they really did not identify it with the political project that comes from Biden. They only associated with the private company that invests.
Meanwhile, inflation is hitting the working class hard and the cost of living is rising as the number one issue voters care about. The Biden administration was saying that the economy was doing very well. If you look at unemployment, if you look at the GDP numbers, everything is going well. And so you had no answer to the basic cost-of-living issues that played a major role in the 2024 election.
Of course, with Trump in office, they have repealed a good portion of that law. Emissions in 2025 in the United States went up, which is very sad. It was a true disaster on several fronts.
You write on yours opinion piece in the Times about how we’re already seeing Democrats move away from climate change. Where exactly do you see it?
You can see a lot of working class candidates who are union members who are fighting for this progressive agenda of taxing the rich, public investment, Medicare-for-All. But they keep themselves open due to the weather issue. And if they talk about climate change, they link it directly to cost-of-living issues like energy affordability. In order to win and campaign, they realize that talking about climate change will not inspire and motivate people to support them.
I admired a man named Sam Forstag in Montana. And he’s a smoke jumper – someone who parachutes from airplanes to fight wildfires in the west. Because he’s a government employee, he’s a union member as well, and he’s fighting for this kind of workers’ agenda. Bernie Sanders and the AOC have endorsed him. I praise the steel worker in Oklahoma. Flight attendant in Minnesota. Some of their sites don’t mention climate change at all, and if they do, it’s very brief and links to energy affordability jobs, things like this.
That is a real change. These are exactly the kinds of candidates that I would have said five or six years ago would have been the main emissaries of this kind of Green New Deal message of unions, labor, blue-collar workers who are going to create a kind of energy transition. These would be the kind of workers that would be front and center, but they’re not, and I think that explains it.
One thing I mention in the piece is Zohran Mamdaniwho ran a very successful campaign. But there have been reports showing that he talked little about climate change in his campaign. And that’s after he became a climate activist in the Democratic Socialist Party of America and ran on climate change and public power in his congressional campaign in 2020. The whole message of affordability, I think, came out of his campaign and people realizing that’s a way to build mass unity. And that is the way to win.
As someone who has written books, who has done research, who is a university professor who talks about these issues, how much does it dishearten you that this is where we are, that you have to write an opinion piece in the New York Times that tells politicians that they need a climate Trojan on their platforms?
It doesn’t disappoint at all. It really emphasizes that Climate Change as a Dangerous War the book was arguing, which is that the climate challenge is a question of power.
I mentioned in a book four years ago that it’s easy that the sectors we need to decarbonize are energy, transportation, things like housing. These are month-end issues for working class people. So if we can create a decarbonisation agenda around those sectors, we can link the climate to those labor needs.
Since this book, I have had little faith that shouting about the climate crisis as this potential threat will be the main thrust of that kind of politics. Why not just focus on those material needs directly? Once you build power, you think about how to make that investment and build towards decarbonisation.
