Keep Your Climate Goals in Your Pocket While Pursuing a U-Turn from Trump's Lock on Power

U-turns from President Trump’s lock on American power and autocratic ambitions are possible, as we explored a couple of months ago in a wider look at the global threat of autocracy and what conditions are necessary for reversals. They require widespreaad mobilization of civil society, business, the courts and the rest. In the U.S., as experts told me, they require Congress, as well.

That takes me to

Matthew Yglesias

’s latest post on climate policy and the Senate. By now you likely know I’m with Yglesias when it comes to most questions related to the political side of climate policy and clean-energy policy. That hasn’t changed and I’m posting today to build on his warning against an undercurrent in Democratic strategizing pushing for Senate candidates to put the climate crisis in the foreground.

Ballotpedia

My reasoning comes in part from my conversations in recent years with longtime progressive communication strategist David Fenton, who has noted - over and over - that the essential task is gaining political power. That requires careful vetting of messages and planks in the context of what key voting blocs in key states focus on. It requires putting your personal passions in your back pocket.

For instance, it’s worth loooking back at when Fenton described the inutility of the much-used phrase “climate justice.” Fenton stressed that justice may be one of your climate goals (and it is one of his!) but explained why it’s a terrible frame if winning back Congress is a necessary prerequisite. The full Sustain What conversation is here.

Yglesias explains that, in vital regions of the country, campaigning on eliminating fossil fuels, boosting EVs and the like is similarly bound to backfire. Here’s Yglesias followed by Fenton in his own words:

In the post, centered on Democrats’ candidate-recruitment efforts and other steps aimed at winning back the Senate, Yglesias writes:

“A safe seat senator told me that Democrats should “double down on climate change,” which at first I thought was just him being eccentric.

But Jay Inslee published a Washington Post op-ed announcing that the climate movement’s official theory of the case for Democrats is that they could win more elections by talking more — and more aggressively — about climate change. And as I wrote on Tuesday, there’s a push within the climate movement to try to force frontline senators to talk more about climate.

This is a terrible idea, and I believe most stakeholders in the Democratic Party know that it’s a terrible idea. But the climate movement is so over-funded and so shot-through with expressive politics and misinformation that I’m worried party leaders won’t say that it’s a terrible idea.

He goes on to say (boldface is mine):

Everybody knows you’re not winning in Colorado, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, or Alaska on a message of shutting down fossil fuels. But if you’re not winning those states, you don’t have a majority. Instead of the national party adopting a message that’s toxic in those states and then recruiting candidates who try to distance themselves from it, the solution is for the national party to adopt the same kind of messages that work for the center-left in Canada and Australia and Norway.

Here’s Fenton’s point about climate justice:

I don't want to sound insensitive to this. I'm a longtime campaigner for racial and social justice for decades. But if you want climate justice, you shouldn't call it that because nobody will know what you mean. Back to framing. When you say the word justice, what comes into people's head are the police and the courts. And they're like, what does that have to do with climate?

So it's another inside-a-bubble insider term. And our obligation, it seems to me, if we want to help the oppressed and the most vulnerable, is to assemble majority support to get political power. You won't assemble majority support if you use obscure lefty language that most people don't understand. It's antithetical, in my view, to the necessary goal of helping the vulnerable.

Related posts:

My recent discussion with Illinois Representative Sean Casten:

It’s worth recalling the energy policy tradeoffs that progressive climate hawks were fighting in looking up at Yglesias’s list of states where a climate-forward campaign will inevitably falter. As I wrote back in 2022, it’s more fruitful to look at outcomes than labels, and to accept that compromise and tradeoffs are never pretty: