One of my essays that received a lot of positive comments from readers is one I did a few years ago on why it is important to be a climate voter. I usually put out a modified version of that essay when major election days roll around and may do that again closer to November. But it is also important to pay attention and participate in elections before you walk into the voting booth. That is true even if the races in your state and locality are likely easy to predict as so many are these days.
The primaries have selected candidates to stand for election, and the real campaign season begins now, with Labor Day being somewhat of the flag that drops to start the “races”.
There are so many important issues before voters this year that it would seem to be a year that people may pay greater attention than usual to the candidates ahead of election day. One of those will probably not be clean energy & climate change. But there are issues that relate to clean energy and climate change that the candidates ought to be pressed on. None of them require using the term climate change. Here are three of them?
1. Heat
I don’t need to tell you about the heat. The high temperatures of 2026 are setting records and causing serious harm and discomfort around the world (you are likely reading in the general media about what is happening in Europe). And government leaders and politicians have started to pay attention.
The largest problems and challenges are in cities, and few cities have made any preparations for what they are encountering beyond setting up “cooling centers”. The penetration of A/C in the U.S. is high. But if you go another level down, you have the question of how efficient those A/C units are, and then when you combine that with the high (and rising) cost of electricity you have a situation where people may have A/C but are reluctant to use it as much as they should. And given the multi-degree difference in ambient temperatures between areas with trees and areas without, the A/C units of the people in areas without trees, which may be more concerned about affordability, need to work all that harder.
Then there are the public areas, the transportation systems, the public buildings, etc. Anyone who has waited on a subway platform in NYC for a train, and worse yet, stepped onto a train where the A/C was not working, knows what I am talking about.
People running for office, if not now, will soon be asked by voters what they are going to do about the heat. That ought to generate some interesting discussions and debates where global warming can’t be avoided. And any politician looking for an issue that no one has grabbed yet will think about heat. That is exactly what has happened in France, where the Right’s Marie LePen has come out with an Air Conditioning Plan.
Question for a candidate at a Town Hall: What are you going to do about the heat?
Bonus Questions: Are higher temperatures here to stay? What are you going to do to help us adapt to them? Is the government saving money somewhere to help in adaptation?
2. Affordability
Affordability is already an electoral issue. And it is likely going to be an issue that any politician has to face in debates, town halls, etc.
One of the key items in the household budget is electricity, and the price of that is rising everywhere. Some of that is justifiable in that it goes toward building out the grid to accommodate the increase in demand for electricity (not all of which is coming from data centers). But there are choices in how to do that build-out that affect prices. The cheapest thing to add to the grid right now is solar. Yet gas use is rising and orders for new gas turbines are backlogged. And if some climate-conscious voters use that as an opportunity to force a candidate to talk about adding more fossil-based emissions which will not only add more heat but lead to higher prices, then we may see some entirely new debates in the coming campaigns.
And then there are things like energy efficiency. While not all of the assistance programs from the Inflation Reduction Act have been eliminated, we seem to be in the doldrums when it comes to trying to reduce energy use. And that ties not only to lowering prices but also to heat and comfort.
Question for a candidate at a Town Hall: Can you explain specifically why power prices are rising and what you specifically are going to do about that?
3. Data Centers
In January of 2025, having left the White House only the week before, I found myself speaking about AI at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Davos was an AI love-fest that year. I knew a little bit about AI at that point, but mostly from a standpoint of the rapid rise in electricity demand that the data centers could lead to. But for all the times I had driven past the data centers already existing in Northern Virginia, I really had not thought a lot about them other than saying to myself “Hmm…those buildings are really, really big.
That was only a year-and-a-half ago. But it seems like longer than that because, well … that was then, and this is now when it comes to data centers.
It turns out that data centers can be built very quickly, and they were put up so fast in the past couple of years that it caught the media, government officials (especially local governments) and residents off-guard. They are still catching up but have begun to do that. NY State just declared a temporary moratorium. Pennsylvania has slowed things down. Locally, folks on both the right and the left are joining together to oppose data centers.
I am not anti-data centers. But I don’t give anything a blank check. There are issues attached to everything, not the least of which is where they are sited. As I talked about in a recent essay, not only are data centers contributing to rises in power costs, but they have turned to using natural gas as their energy source. Again, an opening is created here to not only talk with candidates about power prices, but also about the idea of using fossil-based power sources for AI when everyone is talking about the heat from global warming.
Question for a candidate at a Town Hall: What specific aspects of data centers would cause you to support or oppose them?
Finally ….
One important thing to remember if you decide to wade into the campaign by attending events, writing letters to the media, etc. Politicians are trained to handle almost any question they are asked, more often than not in a way that doesn’t lock them into anything. I used to be a part of helping them to do that.
In light of that, the way a question is phrased is important. Don’t ask a candidate whether he will support something. Ask them if they will vote on an issue that allows you to support them. Ask them if they will introduce or co-sponsor a bill on that issue. Ask them if they will send something to their voters and constituents that explains what they will do on that issue.
And all of that goes for those candidates that are a lock to be elected or re-elected. This is your time to express yourself to them. You may know they already support clean energy, so ask them how they will vote and not just support something. Support is cheap. Action is real currency.
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