Democratic presidential candidates are talking about climate change with increasing urgency as they fight for the party’s 2020 bid, but they’re also still attempting to dodge some of the same political traps as a decade ago.
“There’s been a seismic shift in the Democratic Party on climate change since Trump’s election,” Paul Bledsoe, strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute, told the Washington Examiner.
“The combination of the dire scientific data, the manifest and huge and costly domestic climate change impacts, and Trump’s climate denialism has electrified Democrats to finally put forward climate policies commensurate with the nature of the problem,” said Bledsoe, who worked on climate change in the Clinton White House.
How frequently Democratic candidates talk about climate change is the biggest evolution since 2008, said Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of environmental politics at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Climate change was little discussed in debates and not a main policy focus of candidates in either 2008 or 2016, Stokes added.
In 2020, however, Democratic candidates talk about climate change as a “crisis” or an “emergency.” Having a robust climate change policy plan — or multiple — is no longer something that sets candidates apart. Lacking one is a barrier to entry into the Democratic field.
[Daily on Energy: EPA’s Andrew Wheeler vs. Democrats on climate change]
Observers say the urgency in candidates’ messaging is driven in part by domestic and international reports that say the window to reduce emissions and avoid the worst effects of global warming is closing quickly.
“My sense is that the last few years have been a panic, one big panic of the climate community,” said Noah Kaufman, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
He pointed in particular to a 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change exploring what it would take to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — the Paris climate agreement’s more ambitious target — and what an extra half-degree beyond that would cause.
The gap between science and policy “has just grown so big that people see it more as a crisis and emergency,” Kaufman said.
More people are also connecting extreme weather and climate change, observers say.
“They’re dealing with flooding and wildfires and storms, made more frequent and more severe due to climate change,” said Matt McKnight, director of the League of Conservation Voters’ “Change the Climate 2020” initiative.
More than half of Americans are certain global warming is happening, according to recent data from the Yale Program on Climate Communication and George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. That’s the highest since they began polling in 2008 and nearly 20 percentage points higher than in 2010.
The data also finds nearly half — 46% — of Americans say they’ve personally experienced the effects of climate change.
[Read more: Senate Democrat calls for activists to ‘believe in climate change as though it’s a religion’]
Climate change is now a top-tier voting issue for liberal Democrats and a second-tier voting issue for moderate Democrats, Edward Maibach, director of the George Mason center, said by email. That’s a recent development, as Democrats have moved from viewing climate change as a “distant problem” to “a clear and present danger,” he said.
Nonetheless, political landmines remain, the biggest of which is how to address job losses in fossil fuel communities.
Hillary Clinton, for example, wrote in her 2017 memoir that a comment she made about coal miners was the moment she regretted most from her campaign.
“I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean, renewable energy as the key into coal country,” Clinton said during a 2016 CNN town hall. “Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”
She later said it was a “misstatement” and “out of context” — but the damage was done. Clinton lost every county in West Virginia to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. She’d won big in the state in 2008.
It’s a challenging balance for Democrats, who are trying to win back blue-collar states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin from Trump while pledging to stop or slow drilling for oil and natural gas to curb climate change.
“I don’t know how you talk about it and be truthful and also win votes,” Stokes said.
The issue isn’t going away. In the latest Democratic debate, former Vice President Joe Biden was asked whether he would be “willing to sacrifice” economic growth and displace “maybe hundreds of thousands of blue-collar workers” from U.S. oil and gas to transition to a greener economy.
“The answer is yes, because the opportunity — the opportunity for those workers to transition to high-paying jobs … is real,” Biden said, in a response critics have already pounced on.
Bledsoe said talking about fossil fuel jobs at all is a “fool’s errand,” suggesting Democrats should reframe the issue.
“Trump is going to make natural gas the coal of the 2020 campaign,” said Bledsoe. “You can’t let Trump make climate change a culture war issue.”
It isn’t clear, though, that Democrats will run on climate change in the general election.
Maibach said he thinks the eventual Democratic nominee will run as a strong climate hawk, given the growing number of independents and moderate Republicans who are “very uneasy with the GOP ‘do nothing’ stance on climate change.”
Others are less certain the Democratic candidate will prioritize climate change.
“The Democratic Party is very fearful about talking about climate change,” Stokes said. She noted the party’s decision not to hold a full debate on the issue, despite research showing politicians underestimate voter support for climate policy.
“I think that they live in this worldview that talking about climate change is a loser,” she added.
