Maybe “climate” is the problem
Dancing with ourselves
Jeffrey Denny
The Earth is roasting. Human existence hangs in the balance. Researchers blame climate fear for the epidemic of youth anxiety.
Yet climate barely registered in the horrifying 2024 Trump election sweep of our entire government, even among the youth vote.
Given Trump’s “drill baby drill” pledge and sneering at global warming as a “hoax,” it’s not unfair to regard his reelection as a repudiation of the climate movement. “Donald the Denier” was a great slam. But most voters, 45 states, and 312 out of 538 electors who went for Trump at some level are climate deniers too.
This is despite the thunderous sturm und drang from our Climate Change Industrial Complex of progressive advocates, activists, academics, researchers, nonprofits, CSR and ESG green-washing execs (even at oil companies), and progressive PR consultants galore. Who are now forced to reposition their climate mission, vision, values, and branding.
What’s happening here? Four theories:
1. Climate lost America
Not just Republicans, who we dismiss as too stupid, misguided, shortsighted, money-grubbing, or addled by Trump, Fox, and fossil industry propaganda. It’s no surprise that, per Pew Research, 75% of Republican adults “say they’ve felt suspicious of the groups pushing for action on climate change.”
But 51% of all adults side-eyed the groups. (The same popular vote margin Trump won, enough to steer the nation.)
2. Youth lost climate
We’ve been schooled by youth-driven climate protests, nonprofits, and their head-patting media that says the new gens, especially the collegiate anti-capitalist, care more about the planet they’re inheriting than their parents, who ruined the earth as they grubbed for money to fund their kids’ college.
But the 2024 election results suggest that youth, like their elders, still fail to prioritize climate. Per the respected Tufts Tisch College tally, climate was the 18–29 vote’s fifth priority behind economy and jobs, abortion, immigration, and healthcare, and just above crime, guns, racism, and foreign policy, likely including Gaza. Only 8% voted for climate, as 7% of all Americans did.
3. Climate Dems are conflicted
Never mind how our EVs depend on fossil fuels. Or how our “road diets” to discourage driving hurt working-class commuters who need to drive from cheaper suburbs to tend our urban homes and communities. While we appropriate Marie Antoinette by saying, “let them bike, walk, or work from home like we do.”
And forget our megatons of CO2 emissions from flying to the COP29 meeting in Baku. Or this year to COP30 in Brazil, the UN Oceans Conference in Nice, France, the Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, or to posh U.S. resort towns like Aspen hosting climate confabs to protect our pristine playgrounds.
Also, ignore that selflessly having kids is the #1 way to destroy the planet we bequeath to them.
Here in my 95% white, wealthy Democratic ward in our historically Black city, residents are warring with an elite, exclusive $60,000/year private high school that proudly brands green, even as parents or their nannies drive their kids a few blocks to school despite our exceptionally transit-rich semi-urban community. Or the kids drive and park illegally.
Every morning and afternoon, the streets around our wealth of top private academies here are gridlocked with $100,000 gas-powered low-MPG Range Rovers and BMW, Mercedes, and Audi SUVs. While our $100,000 formerly virtue-signaling Tesla Model Xs aren’t so much anymore.
4. “Climate” is an insider buzzword
Democrats are notoriously terrible at branding to capture public hearts and minds because we’re too conceptually overthinking smarty-pants.
We believe scary labels like oligarch, billionaire, fascist, democracy in danger, and crises, from Constitutional to climate, will flock Americans to our protective roost.
We think it’s stupid when Trump brands, “Make America Great Again,” “One Big Beautiful Bill,” “radical left lunatics,” and “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.” We wonder why this shit works.
So I wish Rahm Emanuel were running the Democratic Party. He’s willing to call out the hothouse PhD pointy-head, too-clever-by-half, ten-dollar words we patois at our policy conferences. But are so tone deaf to most Americans that they freely choose to suffer more and worse Trump.
Emanuel wants to simplify our case against the Trumpublicans with three simple C’s that speak volumes: corruption, chaos, and cruelty. Agree or not, these words say more to people than our alien Brainiac terminology.
Joe Biden’s farewell speech warning about the Trump oligarchy touched off “a surge of searches for ‘oligarchy meaning’ and ‘oligarchy definition,’ Google search analytics show,” Gizmodo reported. “Of the top five states where searches for the term were highest, three of them (Nebraska, Iowa, and Wyoming) were states that went for Trump during the election.”
Ironically, Biden “warned of the growing dominance of a small, monied elite,” as Gizmodo put it. This could also describe libs who say “oligarch.”
To me, the more hifalutin’ buzzwords we toss around, talking over the heads of most Americans, thinking they’re stupid if they don’t understand, the more we lose people we need to influence. Americans are ornery that way.
Which takes us back to our incessant references to “climate.”
And related jargon such as “global warming,” “CO2 equivalent,” “greenhouse effect,” “anthropogenic,” “carbon footprint,” “carbon neutral,” “net zero,” “renewable energy,” “biodiversity,” and “climate justice.” Toss these around the Southern Thanksgiving table and watch the relatives flee for Fox.
How about making climate real? Like talking out plain old “air pollution”? Speaking to parents with asthmatic kids and elders with COPD or respiratory problems? Or talk about deadly storms, fires, floods, heatwaves, and natural disasters wiping out homes, equity, belongings, and neighborhoods? Or about the cost of utility bills and gasoline? Like it or not, nearly 90% of Americans depend on gas-powered cars, so demonizing fossil fuel might be guilt-tripping them.
Consider this: Deep inside the Trump Big Beautiful budget-tax bill, as much as Democrats hate it, is a renewal of the Biden 45X tax credit for advanced manufacturing (albeit with new limits, including on wind power tech).
45X is backed by climate nonbinary bedfellows of Republicans and Democrats, and climate activists and deniers. Why? It fuels advanced battery technology, DC-to-AC power inverters, and critical minerals used in solar power, as well as many other industrial and military technologies, such as drones and battlefield communications.
What drove this rare bipartisan tax break through the House, as many other climate measures struggled and died? Not preaching the climate gospel.
Instead, supporters — even green industries — pitched the new American manufacturing green shoots in the dying Rust Belt, new good-paying jobs, public-private investment in advanced technology (like how America invented computers, microchips, the internet, and AI), cheaper, more reliable energy and battery backups, and a renewed American industrial policy.
This is wine from Biden’s Green New Deal, where 45X began, but in relabeled boxes that America can buy at Walmart.
As a college English major and writer by trade, I see and respect how words matter in work, life, relationships, policy, and politics. When insider buzzwords like “climate” make outsiders eye-roll rather than ally, we need to respect the ocular expression and talk like real people. Dems are supposed to be smarter than most Americans, so this can’t be that difficult.
Jeffrey Denny is a Washington writer.
