Trump Has Created a Climate Opportunity

In the second Trump administration, Democrats have been backing away from climate change messaging. Joe Biden apparently got no credit for the Inflation Reduction Act, his marquee climate policy bill, and Trump has since unceremoniously disposed of it.

The Searchlight Institute, a centrist think tank, presented polling last September indicating that while most Americans think climate change is a problem, they don’t think it’s a major one. Therefore, the first step to solving climate change is “don’t say climate change.” Luckily, as Matt Huber points out at The New York Times, tremendous progress in renewable energy means one can accomplish a lot, emissions-wise, without mentioning climate change at all. The “heart of any affordability agenda—housing, energy, transportation—overlaps with the sectors we must decarbonize,” he writes. “When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”

When it comes to actual politicians running for office this year, perhaps that is a sensible strategy. But in terms of the rest of the broad Democratic coalition, it is not.

It’s not hard to see why climate policy polls poorly: People have been comprehensively misled about it. On one hand, climate activism emerged from the environmental movement, which tends to present measures to protect the environment as posing an inherent trade-off with jobs and growth. If we create some new national park, for instance, then that land won’t be available for aluminum smelters or data centers. (In reality, it is usually not this simple, but that’s the stereotype.)

On the other hand, and much more importantly, right-wing media—heavily funded by fossil fuel interests—has been lying about climate change for decades. They lied for years that it wasn’t happening, then they lied for years that it was “paused,” and now that the problem is undeniably happening all around us, they lie that we can’t do anything about it.

The result is that for the median voter, climate change is seen as a problem but one that will be burdensome to solve. It will mean higher gas and electricity prices, having to buy an expensive electric car, spending tax dollars on infrastructure upgrades, and so on. When times are tough, climate slips down the priority list.

This way of thinking, of course, is not remotely true. Climate change is going to wreck the environment and the economy—indeed, it is already happening. The home insurance markets in Florida and California are in death spirals. Increasingly severe heat waves are killing people and straining the electric grid all across the country. Flooding strikes in more places, and more severely. The same is true of drought. The Colorado River Basin just suffered its driest winter in hundreds of years. The water level on the Colorado’s Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the country, might sink below its power inlet tubes this summer, and it will almost certainly have to be decommissioned within the next decade.

Conversely, it is now beyond any question that the 21st-century economy will be driven by renewable energy. It is the cheapest form of energy in history, and whoever can figure out how to power their whole economy with it will reap a tremendous harvest of prosperity and health, as the pollution from filth-spewing fossil energy gradually clears.

In a weird stroke of good fortune, Trump’s lunatic misrule provides a perfect context to press the correct argument about climate change: that doing so will help every part of America, from the environment to the economy writ large to Jeffrey Q. Consumer, struggling to pay his bills. Thanks to Trump’s war on Iran having closed the Strait of Hormuz, gas prices are shooting through the roof, followed quickly by food and electricity prices. And thanks to his repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, China has cemented a massive lead in the technology and industry of the future. They almost can’t believe their luck; a Chinese university recently published a stock-take of his policies in 2025 entitled “Thank Trump.”

It is true that you don’t have to talk about climate change specifically to justify a major climate package. Renewable energy is being deployed at scale, even in the U.S., and EVs are less expensive to run over time because of cheaper fueling and few maintenance requirements. Indeed, in a rapidly growing fraction of the world, EVs are cheaper to purchase up front, too. China is showing how to decarbonize trucking.

But decarbonizing electricity production and transport is not enough. We also need to decarbonize industry and agriculture, and strategies for doing so are not all ready for deployment, particularly in the latter category. As I wrote back during the 2024 campaign, Joe Biden got us maybe halfway where we needed to be with the IRA. Now we don’t even have that foundation to build on.

In short, an immense package of investment and research will be needed to reach the (literally) sunlit uplands where fossil fuels are not needed for anything, aside from maybe chemical production. Given the macroeconomic conditions likely to prevail in 2029—which might be a severe case of stagflation at the rate we’re going, if not a debt crisis—it will most probably be quite painful and disruptive. The American people must be convinced the price is worth it.

That brings me to my most fundamental disagreement with this style of politics: Muzzling yourself because certain topics momentarily don’t poll well is strategically shortsighted and against basic small-d democratic values. As Steve Randy Waldman argues, any democratic system is premised on the idea that politicians and political parties will make honest arguments about what they think should happen. That’s how voters can trust that their choice in an election will be a meaningful one and thereby come to understand the effect of what voting for particular parties will do, which doesn’t happen when parties yank their policies back and forth based on what (invariably biased) polls happen to come in with. “When political parties reshape themselves on the basis of polling, it renders the whole process nonsensical, a kind of infinite regress,” he writes. “It deprives the public of meaningful choice in the name of giving it what it wants.”

More concretely, consider the Gallup poll of approval of interracial marriage. Back in 1954, it came in at just 4 percent. By 2021, that had risen to 94 percent. Why the change? Because generations of ordinary people, activists, and even some politicians—knowing full well they were charging headlong into a storm of public condemnation—argued that in a free country, people ought to be allowed to marry whoever they damn well want.

If civil rights activists had thought like today’s poll-sniffing political consultants, they would have carefully avoided any such hideously unpopular ideas. They would have yelled at Richard and Mildred Loving to avoid raising the dreaded salience of the issue by appealing their conviction for violating Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law to the Supreme Court, no matter how eerily apropos their surname might be. “What are you trying to do, elect more Dixiecrats?” consultants would have bellowed. And interracial marriage might still be illegal to this day.