The New Politics of Climate Change

Read: Democrats are shockingly unprepared to fight climate change

Democrats have many problems, in other words. Meanwhile the Earth will keep warming.

But Democrats are not the only ones flailing. In the wake of President Trump’s victory, climate advocates across the political spectrum have cast about for paths forward—and they have assembled (loosely) into a few different teams. Each is built around what might be called a theory of change: If we only got everyone on board with this plan, then we could finally pass a big climate policy in the United States. These camps make up the climate battle that happens behind the scenes.

Last Tuesday was only one election, encompassing thousands of candidates who campaigned on issues that mostly weren’t climate change. It would be ludicrous to try to extract lasting takeaways for the climate movement from that range of specific, never-to-be-repeated contests. It would generate some flawed conclusions. It might even be a fundamentally silly exercise. But let’s try it anyway. I looked closely at climate advocates’ theories of change, to see which could claim vindication from the midterm results, and I’m not sure a single one emerged looking vastly stronger and more obviously correct than it did before.

Theory 1: TeamBipartisan

One popular argument holds that climate change will only be solved by working across the aisle. This camp has long rallied around the Climate Solutions Caucus, a group of House members that stayed perfectly bipartisan by design: A Democrat could only join the group if he or she convinced a Republican to join too (and vice versa). Though committed to no particular policy, the caucus was affiliated with the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a similarly nonpartisan association that calls for a carbon fee. The caucus has never passed legislation, but it seemed popular, and by last month it could boast 90 members.

Yet in the election, it hemorrhaged members—and lost its cofounder. Carlos Curbelo, a moderate Republican from South Florida, helped establish the caucus two years ago; he also proposed a symbolic carbon-tax bill this summer that, while criticized by many environmentalists, would have allowed the United States to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement. Curbelo lost his election, and a Democrat will represent his district next year.

He isn’t the only climate moderate gone. Twenty-two of the Climate Solutions Caucus’s 43 voting GOP members will be out of the next Congress; at least 21 of their districts will be represented by Democrats. Caucus members who survived the election look a little less like Curbelo and a little more like Matt Gaetz: a Fox News regular who occasionally talks about climate change but who once sought to “terminate the EPA.”

Read: The GOP just lost its most important climate moderates

Read: The Republican carbon tax is Republican, say Republicans

These policies were not victorious everywhere. A pro-renewables measure failed in Arizona after the state utility spent $54 million to oppose it. Yet at least for now, climate kludges seem to be more popular than carbon prices. And researchers are adapting. On the morning after the election, the Carnegie Mellon University energy economist Costa Samaras rattled off a long list of policies on Twitter that he implied would now take center stage in a climate policy. They included new tax credits, loan guarantees, and subsidized purchase of electric-vehicle fleets.

“It’s sub-optimal,” he said, “but so are most sandwiches and I still eat them.”

So where does all this lead? I suspect we already have a preview. Exactly one week after the election, nearly 200 activists held a demonstration at Nancy Pelosi’s office on Capitol Hill. They called for House Democrats to begin generating a “Green New Deal”: a comprehensive strategy on climate change that would rival “Medicare for All” in its aspirational but policy-dense pithiness. They demanded broad but often easy-to-visualize goals, like generating 100 percent of U.S. electricity through renewable sources. They also demanded the full decarbonization and repair of transportation infrastructure, as well as a “massive investment” in technology that can remove greenhouse gas from the air.

Not once did they mention a carbon tax: a market-based solution that had once been the gold-standard policy for an earlier generation of climate leaders like Al Gore. The era of proud climate kludging has begun.

ROBINSON MEYER is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers climate change and technology.

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