A Brave New World of Climate Politics

By Erik Mebust

It’s easy to lose sight of hopeful developments when a generation’s worth of bad news arrives in a single year. Climate change wreaked havoc in 2020. In one year, the wildfire season doubled California’s previous modern record and the hurricane season was the most active on record. These and other disasters made it hard to be optimistic about the future of our planet.

But there is more to the story. Amid the chaos, the political terrain shifted, and a brave new world of climate politics is unfolding around us—one where commitment to climate action is imperative and where inaction is a serious political liability. This year’s disasters, coupled with strategic pressure from activists, have created a new political reality that more closely reflects what experts have known for years: Climate action is overwhelmingly popular with the American public, especially young people, women, and people of color. This shifting landscape offers more reason to be hopeful about the climate crisis than we have had in a long time, and leaders in all levels of government must meet with ambition this demand for action. 

Climate is now a top-tier issue.

Quickly after the election, a dynamic emerged that would have been unimaginable even a year ago: Establishment Democrats ran for leadership spots on the platform of fighting climate change. In the race to chair the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz released a ten-part plan for how she would address climate change, which she referred to as “the defining issue of our time.” Rep. Marcy Kaptur, who also ran for this spot, talked up her work on the “most climate-friendly bill” passed by the House this year.

The shift was also evident among leaders positioning themselves for cabinet roles in the incoming Biden administration. Climate champion Janet Yellen became more outspoken on the role that financial regulators must play in averting climate disaster; she promoted carbon pricing and released a report on climate risk with the former governor of the Bank of England. The day the presidential election was called, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm published an op-ed on the importance of clean energy in Michigan’s economic recovery. She is now the nominee for Secretary of Energy. 

All three of those jobs are among the most powerful in Washington, each responsible for billion- or trillion-dollar budgets as well as for policymaking across the government. Until 2020, these jobs didn’t require ambition on climate as a credential.

The final selection for leadership positions in Congress did not disappoint. Reps. Wasserman Shultz and Kaptur were beaten out for the Appropriations gavel by the most seasoned climate hawk of the bunch, Rep. Rosa DeLauro, who cosponsored the Green New Deal resolution. In her victory speech, DeLauro made it clear that she has a mandate to use the powerful position to take on the climate crisis, calling it one of three issues the Democratic Caucus elevated as top priorities.

The Caucus also chose another cosponsor of the Green New Deal, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, to lead the DCCC.

Not even House Republicans could ignore climate completely. Their steering committee passed over two climate deniers—Reps. Mike Burgess and Paul Gosar—for committee leadership, instead favoring two infamous greenwashers who were more or less the most pro-climate of the options available.

The new political potency of climate action also appeared in the year-end omnibus spending package, which included a $35 billion energy agreement that Dr. Leah Stokes, a professor of environmental politics at the University of California, Santa Barabara, called “a Christmas miracle.” The agreement features the most significant cut to emissions in at least a decade as well as a provision to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), averting an additional 0.5°C of global warming. Mostly, the bill funds research into new energy technologies, some of which are urgently needed (though others are controversial).

This end-of-year energy deal follows on the heels of the year’s biggest non-coronavirus-related legislation, the bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act, which is widely regarded as the biggest conservation bill since Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. And while these bills are far from sufficient to address the climate crisis, their passage in the face of partisan gridlock is remarkable. In a time when Congress cannot agree on whether to fund state governments, they agreed to fund energy research and the Land and Water Conservation Fund.

This is not to say that Republicans are suddenly allies on climate. Unscrupulous as ever, they neglected to appropriate the funding granted by the Great American Outdoors Act. Such blatant inaction is no more acceptable than outright climate denial.

Biden is creating political will for climate action.

At the ceremony announcing the nominations for his climate and environment team, President-elect Joe Biden leaned into his mandate for bold climate action as a tool for economic recovery, noting a key tenant of his “Build Back Better” economic plan is “building a modern climate-resistant infrastructure and a clean energy future.” He emphasized that “we can put millions of Americans to work modernizing water, transportation, and energy infrastructure to withstand the impacts of extreme weather.”

Then he went even further, tying environmental policy to his commitment to racial justice: “We are committed to facing climate change by delivering environmental justice. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky dreams. These are concrete, actionable solutions, and the team’s going to get it done.”

Both approaches are clearly reflected in his staffing decisions. He created two historic positions coordinating climate action across the government, and made historic commitments that his Departments of Agriculture, Treasury, Defense, and Health and Human Services will all have a climate focus. And—after Julian Brave NoiseCat’s brilliant campaign of Native power and memes—Biden nominated Rep. Deb Haaland, a climate hawk who protested at Standing Rock, to be Secretary of the Interior, where she will hold sweeping powers over public lands and the 24 percent of US emissions that are attributed to the fossil fuels extracted from those lands.

After decades of inaction, we still have a long way to go to address the climate crisis, but the recent words and actions of leaders across the political spectrum show us that new things are possible. Now, the public must hold them to it.