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“Climate hushing” is all the rage among Democrats. That’s a big mistake.
Climate politics are in a very weird place right now. On the one hand, current events would seem to be fertile ground— perhaps more fertile than ever—for generating popular support for climate action. Renewables are now the most competitive form of electricity generation, meaning a climate agenda can have relatively short-term material benefits for voters. The Iran war has demonstrated the inherent superiority of clean energy over fossil fuels: sunlight does not have to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, and nobody ever went to war over wind. The harmful effects of climate change are also becoming noticeable for millions of Americans who are regularly experiencing summer-ruining heat waves, record-breaking droughts, historically destructive storms, and dystopian wildfires, to say nothing of the financial impacts of this extreme weather, from skyrocketing insurance rates to collapsing property values. And the current administration, which is staffed top-to-bottom with climate deniers and oil and gas executives, is making the corruption and clownishness of the United States’s fossil fuel addiction explicit for all to see. How else to describe “Coalie,” the anthropomorphised mascot of Trump’s “American Energy Dominance Agenda”?
On the other hand, we are seeing a massive deprioritization of climate across multiple sectors. Businesses have been ditching their previously professed climate pledges and going silent on the issue. Bill Gates has started arguing that “climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries,” amplifying a false dichotomy between efforts to decarbonise the economy and efforts to improve human welfare. Politico recently announced it is folding E&E News, its standalone climate and energy outlet; NPR just shut down its climate desk, and Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post laid off its climate team earlier this year. Meanwhile, a host of think tanks and pundits—mostly corporatist outfits like WelcomePAC, the Searchlight Institute, and the Breakthrough Institute—have been aggressively arguing that Democrats should stop talking about climate change and abandon climate action as a policy priority. And many prominent Democrats are doing just that. New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s successful push to water down her state’s signature climate law has gotten the most attention, but similar efforts have been pursued by California’s Gavin Newsom, Rhode Island’s Dan McKee, and other politicians at both the state and federal levels.
This “climate hushing,” as it has been derisively but accurately labelled, deserves serious examination. Three main arguments have been made.
First, corporate-aligned think tanks— joined by some voices on the socialist left, like Matt Huber—argue that climate is an electoral anchor that hurts Democrats’ chances of regaining Congress and the White House, variously claiming that climate policy is not popular enough, or that it’s popular but not deeply felt enough, or that it’s simply too polarizing to benefit Democrats at the ballot box. As Huber recently wrote in the New York Times, “The Democratic Party remains deeply unpopular. The way out is to stop elevating a litany of single-issue policies that appeal to the already converted. When it comes to climate change, for now, it might be better to say nothing at all.”
Second, and closely related, it has been argued that Democratic advocacy on climate has pushed working people away from the party and that rebuilding a working-class base requires essentially dropping or deprioritizing the fight for climate action.
Third, in a quite different vein, some climate advocates themselves have argued that at a time of authoritarian takeover, we need to prioritize fighting fascism over a focus on climate. This is not so much an argument for “hushing” as a brief for reorienting the climate movement. As the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, Aru Shiney-Ajay, wrote in March, the organization “is pivoting to end authoritarianism and win a democracy capable of addressing the climate crisis. We’re still a climate movement, but this moment requires the acknowledgment that climate action is impossible under authoritarianism.”
None of these cases for hushing or pivoting away from climate action really holds up.
The first argument—simply put, that Americans don’t really care about climate change—typically cites public opinion data. Take the Searchlight Institute’s claim, in a research report last September, that “the first rule about solving climate change” is “don’t say climate change.” Founded last year by former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson, Searchlight is funded by billionaires, including hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel and real estate investor Eric Laufer. The think tank preaches “heterodoxy” as the answer to the Democratic Party’s woes, though in practice that has meant enjoining Democrats to distance themselves from positions it deems too progressive and out of step with voters.
In this case, Searchlight concedes that “battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem”, but argues that “climate change is not a high priority for most Americans.” For support, the think tank cites a survey it conducted, which found that 22 per cent of battleground voters listed climate change as one of their top three priorities, and 17 per cent of these voters say “climate change affects themselves and their family a great deal.” The latter figure doesn’t sound great. But what the survey data actually shows is that an additional 28 per cent say climate change affects themselves and their families “a fair amount,” and another 26 per cent say it affects them “somewhat.” In other words, just under half of battleground voters believe climate change is personally affecting them at least a fair amount, and more than two-thirds believe it’s personally affecting them at least somewhat.
And that’s just from Searchlight’s own polling. “Anyone can usually find a poll that backs the argument they’re trying to make,” Huber recently observed, noting that the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) surveys are “some of the most respected.” The YPCCC recently released its annual “Climate Change in the American Mind” report for 2026, which found that majorities of registered voters think global warming is causing the price they pay for goods and services to increase, with 66 per cent saying this is true of their home utility bills, 61 per cent for groceries, and 51 per cent for home insurance.
The survey further shows that many climate policies poll very well. Some 77 per cent of voters support regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, while 65 per cent support transitioning the U.S. economy from fossil fuels to 100 per cent clean energy by 2050. More than half of registered voters (58 per cent) think that developing clean sources of energy should be a “high” or “very high” priority for the president and Congress, and the same percentage reported that they would prefer to vote for a candidate who supports action on global warming, compared to only 14 per cent who’d prefer a candidate who opposes climate action. “There are lots of different lines of evidence that suggest that climate change as an issue overall helps the Democrats and hurts Republicans,” economist Matt Burgess notes. Burgess himself coauthored a 2024 study that found that if climate change had not been an issue in the 2020 election, Republicans might have gained an approximately three-point swing in the popular vote, which would have handed the election to Trump.
Climate change messaging offers even clearer political opportunities today. A strong majority of Americans are struggling with rising electricity prices. According to the climate hushers, Democrats should only talk about lowering energy prices, leaving climate out of the conversation. As Searchlight writes, “There is a partisan gulf that emerges as soon as you insert the words ‘climate change’ into a sentence.” What this analysis misses is that climate change can help Democrats capitalize on this affordability fight. Neither party has a significant trust advantage on “electric utility bills” (D+1) or “the cost of living” (R+1). But Democrats do have a major trust advantage on “climate change” (D+14). By articulating how their climate agenda can address energy costs— by building out the cheapest power sources and making polluters, not families, pay their fair share—Democrats can leverage their advantage on climate to win voters’ trust on the cost-of-living crisis.
One good example of this kind of message was a recent ad from Lisa Kaul, a Democratic candidate for New York State Senate in the Poughkeepsie area who just won her primary to challenge an incumbent Republican in November. In the spot, Kaul first connects climate change to affordability:
Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax. But climate change is fueling extreme weather. We’re paying more for home insurance. More for our roads and bridges. More for our food. I’m Lisa Kaul, and I’m running for New York State Senate. To make our lives affordable, we have to address climate change.
She then explains how climate policies can deliver material benefits to regular people:
When I get to Albany, I am going to rein in utility policies so we can have affordable solar power on every roof. Let’s help people with the upfront costs of EVs and heat pumps so everyone can enjoy the savings.
None of this is to deny that public opinion around climate could be even more favorable to climate action. The recently released 2026 World Risk Poll report, completed in partnership with Gallup, asked 143,000 people across 140 countries if they think climate change is a “very serious threat,” and then asked if they think most other people in their country view climate change the same way. The United States had one of the largest gaps: about 51 per cent of Americans answered that they believed climate change to be a very serious threat, but only 10 per cent of Americans thought most other Americans feel this way. This large discrepancy indicates the enormous potential upside of a strong climate message, which can help people understand that their concerns are broadly shared.
The popularist case for climate hushing becomes even harder to accept in light of its neglect of popular opposition to AI data centers. Opposing Big Tech’s data center buildout is a profoundly potent political opportunity for Democrats. A recent Gallup poll found that 71 per cent of Americans oppose data centers being built in their area. This opposition is bipartisan, deeply felt, and cross-ideological. A significant proportion of the AI buildout is occurring in red states, like Ohio and West Virginia, where data centers have added billions of dollars to household energy bills and drawn serious hostility from Democrats and Republicans alike.
The biggest buildout is happening in Virginia (where Democrats, as the party in power, stand to be blamed) and Texas (where James Talarico is running for a Senate seat). When a conservative voter in Hood County, Texas, was asked, “You’re willing to forgo every conservative issue and let the Senate fall into the hands of Democrats if that’s what it takes to kill data centers?” her response was immediate: “Yep. My entire community’s going to break rank.” Yet Searchlight has recommended that Democrats oppose data center moratoria, proposing that data centers be taxed instead, while WelcomePAC’s report on how Democrats can “decide to win” ignores data centers, citing a poll they conducted last summer that AI was of relatively low importance to voters. The incoherence of these messages with a “popularist” strategy makes more sense when you learn that these organizations are funded in part by some of the Big Tech billionaires behind the AI infrastructure buildout.
Continues in BOSTON REVIEW (www.bostonreview.net), July 6, 2026.