An Inconvenient Blog

By Ashkan

footnotes from Abigail

Kamala Harris, an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal in 2019, has asked Pennsylvania voters for forgiveness. She was wrong, she says. 

Despite previously advocating for a ban on fracking — the highly pollutive and relatively new process to extract fossil fuels — Kamala’s totally on board now. The Pennsylvania economy is strongly buoyed by fracking, and she needs to win Pennsylvania. It’s just basic political calculus; swing voters want their local economy functioning and no matter how pro-oil Kamala falls she won’t bleed any lefty voters to the orange man.

So an original cosponsor of the Green New Deal is now unabashedly promoting fracking.¹ Kamala was even at one point ranked the number two most liberal member of the United States Senate. If she is not willing to get serious about climate, who ever will? My thought: no one, honestly. 

Acting on climate, increasingly, is seeming to be incompatible with representative democracy.² It confronts a fundamental flaw in our system of government — voters will bias towards prioritizing their short-term visceral needs over potential long-term troubles, no matter how plausibly catastrophic. And politicians will listen, as they’re supposed to.

I had a feeling that climate activism and attention had significantly receded since their heydays in the late 2010s, and it’s true. Where did Greta Thunberg go?³ What happened to the Sunrise Movement? Extinction Rebellion? People have started to tune them out as more acute issues dominate their politics. A Monmouth poll in April 2024 found that the proportion of Americans who find climate change to be “a very serious problem” has dropped by 10 points since 2021, from 56% to 46%. This apathy comes from across the political spectrum: Democrats and Republicans both saw 8 point declines and among independent voters, 13 points.

This should make sense, intuitively. I read a quote from former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter recently that I think really sums it up:

“There comes a point where governance, democracy, sanity and protecting this country outweigh any other issue.”

Times are so bad right now that there’s no bandwidth to even think about climate. The economy has been busted, inflation is persistent,⁴ people are struggling to pay for rent and groceries, our democratic institutions are faltering, reproductive rights are being restricted, and thousands are dying in wars across the world. Blue-collar Pennsylvania voters want jobs. Suburban Wisconsin moms want their daughters to have bodily autonomy. Arab-American Michigan voters want the mass killing in Gaza to end. These voters will decide the election, and they don’t really consider a candidate’s plan to combat carbon emissions when casting a ballot. 

It’s strange though, because climate is meant to be the most existential issue facing society. Leading climate scientists say as many as 1 billion people could die prematurely due to climate change by 2100. That’s an unfathomably bad thing — which is exactly the problem. Fathomability.⁵ How can you ask a working class family supported by fossil fuels to give up their livelihoods and say “it’s for the greater good”? How can you sell someone on suffering more now to save a nebulous mass of other people at some undefined point in the future? Even though those in power know the stakes of a climate disaster, and believe in its likelihood, they won’t act. Because it’s incompatible with winning elections, and they need to win.

Climate isn’t the only issue that functions this way — look at the national debt, for example. Voters will almost always prefer spending programs which benefit them instead of pondering the long-term macroeconomic damage of borrowing trillions of dollars more. Any issue that has delayed negative effects is extremely difficult to combat in government. When times are good, it’s easier to plan ahead, maybe. But good times don’t last. Canada passed a carbon tax in 2018, when 40% of Canadians cited climate as a top issue for them. Now that number is only 22% and a plurality of Canadians want the carbon tax abolished. The NDP, the party to the left of Trudeau, have even proposed scrapping it in recent months without a viable alternative.

What can we do, then? Let’s hope that either (1) voters recognize climate change is a serious threat, (2) that politicians like Kamala or anyone else develop the courage to lead the fight, or (3) that it all turns out to be a Chinese hoax as Trump has assured us. As long as one of the three pans out, we’ll be fine…⁶

Abigail’s response

1. While I appreciate that Ashkan is a Republican and therefore irrational, ‘unabashed promotion’ feels a little bit like creative writing to me.
   I hate to ever come across as Snopesian, but the extent of Kamala’s alleged ‘onboardness’ with fracking seems to be a statement released to news orgs after Trump mentioned her past support of a fracking ban that said she no longer supported any kind of moratorium. While obviously a pivot, and one worth noting (and oh how it has been noted!), in my mind, isn’t a whole lot to go on. There are already quite a few think pieces on the new Kamala strategy which seems to have been developed around such inspiring concepts as “ambiguity” and “moderation.” This makes sense now that we’re not in 2020 anymore and it shouldn’t surprise anyone; right out of the gate, Kamala came out determined to show voters that she wasn’t the faux-progressive of the last election cycle anymore–some of her first ads aggressively marketed her tough-on-crime prosecutor background. I don’t find this kind of bait-and-switch particularly endearing, either, but coming from someone whose last post called Trump “one of the most ingenious political operators in modern American history,” I’m surprised that Ashkan has taken it to heart to such a degree. ↩︎
2. Wait til you hear about how incompatible foreign policy is with voter psychology. ↩︎
3. Lack of Greta may be the best PR for climate change we’ve had in a while. ↩︎
4. Inflation is down to 2.9% now! Biden’s America… ↩︎
5. I think climate is also a difficult issue to rile up voters on because thinking about it means getting depressed and realizing there isn’t a waterproof partisan way to spin the blame. Democrats and Republicans can blame each other’s random policies here and there for climate change when it’s electorally convenient, but the climate precipice we’re standing on now is the product of hundreds of years of human behavior motivated by a generally earnest desire for progress, wealth, and increased comfort that all of us are sympathetic to. It’s not even as simple as the most complicated war, where we can still very easily point to the belligerents from the sidelines and wonder why they made the choices that they did. It’s just not digestible and even approaching it from an optimistic perspective is politically controversial because the status quo seems to be all about doom and gloom rhetoric which, shocker, voters don’t find motivating. ↩︎
6. Cheerful post! Thanks, Ashkan. ↩︎