Why Climate Politics Can’t Wait

Nobody in American politics today is arguing that immigration is not a politically salient issue.

Progressives like me argue that we shouldn’t throw immigrants under the bus. But we’re not arguing the issue doesn’t have salience—despite the fact that essentially nobody in America is being personally hurt by immigration. Indeed, in many of the places where immigration is most politically salient, almost nobody is interacting with immigrants at all—there aren’t a whole lot of undocumented people or border-related disputes happening in, say, rural central Pennsylvania. But immigration still matters to a lot of voters, in large part because there’s a whole political party and media ecosystem that rants about it constantly. It has been made salient, despite having little material impact on people.

The point is simple: Talking about an issue matters.

I mention this because I have written another piece, this one for Boston Review, arguing against “climate hushing”—the effort by a bunch of corporate- and billionaire-funded centrist think tanks to persuade Democrats to stop talking about climate change.

The piece attempts to methodically rebut each of the—often very weak or dishonest—arguments made by the climate hushers about why climate change isn’t a politically useful issue for Democrats (TL;DR: it totally is).

But in some ways that’s almost besides the point. As we sweat through another deadly heat wave that has already killed tens of thousands in recent weeks, and contemplate that terrifying aphorism—this is both the hottest summer of our lives, and the coldest summer of the rest of our lives—it’s worth insisting not only that there is electoral value in talking about climate, but also that there is a moral imperative to do so.

As I write in the piece:

Though critics of climate activism like to position themselves as tellers of “tough truths,” the toughest truth is that decarbonizing our economy can’t be done obliquely. Whether or not Democrats talk about climate, you can bet that Leonard Leo, the Koch network, conservative media outlets, and the fossil fuel industry will keep working to lock us ever deeper into relying on oil and gas. In 2024 Fox News ran more segments on climate change than CBS, ABC, NBC, PBS, and MSNBC combined; all that Democrats achieve by ceding the narrative on climate to the right is to guarantee that MAGA and Big Oil win the debate.

This fact is so obvious that even some proponents of climate hushing, like Searchlight Senior Fellow Jane Flegal, acknowledge it. In her words, “It is hard for me to imagine ‘solving’ climate change as a problem without somebody caring about climate change qua climate change.” Flegal squares the circle with climate hushing by arguing it’s a temporary measure—someday, maybe, things will look different, and we can talk about climate then. The problem is that physics doesn’t care about politics: the more time we take, the greater the likelihood of truly dystopian scenarios. Plus, it’s hard to imagine how a more favorable political context for climate talk could possibly arise without active efforts to build political will now. When white moderates complained in similar fashion about the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King criticized their “mythical concept of time” in Why We Can’t Wait (1964).

We can’t wait when it comes to climate change, either. In the end, this is about whether we are able to maintain organized civilization on this planet. To push the line—now dominant across the corporatist wing of the Democratic Party—that we shouldn’t discuss climate change is not only morally wrong; it carries water for the fossil fuel industry and the forces that got us here in the first place.

I hope you’ll read the rest of the piece, and—if you find it useful—share it around. I think this is a message that we really need to be hammering home, especially as this summer of climate disasters continues.

P.S. I want to thank Ruth Rivera, Lisa Beade, and Charlie for signing up to support my work with a paid subscription. It really means a ton, thanks a million!