Summers in Maricopa County, Arizona, sometimes get unbearable, Kyle Hawkinson said Friday. Smog and haze hung over Phoenix as residents braced for fire season, when heat and air pollution will worsen. Climate change, he said, is at least partly to blame.
But when Mr. Hawkinson, a 24-year-old treasurer, voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, the climate wasn’t really a factor in his choice, he said. As for the November vote, when the Arizona governor’s mansion and one of the state Senate seats are on the line, “that’s going to be a big maybe,” he said, adding, “Climate change is always going to be an issue. It’s just a given. Honestly, there is only so much our country leaders can do.
News on Thursday that even a truncated compromise to deal with a warming planet appeared to be dead was met in Washington by brutal condemnations from environmentalists and Democrats, with some accusing Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-West Virginia, of dooming human life on Earth. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, called Mr. Manchin’s decision “nothing short of catastrophic.”
But an electorate already grappling with inflation, exhausted by Covid and adjusting to tectonic shifts like the end of constitutionally protected abortion, can shrug in resignation to the Democrats’ latest defeat. And that may be why climate change remains an issue with little political traction, both for those pushing for dramatic action and those standing in the way.
“People are exhausted by the pandemic, they’re terribly disillusioned with the government,” said Anusha Narayanan, climate campaign director for Greenpeace USA, the environmental group known for its partisan tactics but now struggling to mobilize supporters. She added: “People see climate as tomorrow’s problem. We have to make them understand that this is not tomorrow’s problem.
“This challenge is not as invisible as it used to be, but for most people, even those who live in greater Miami, it is not something they face every day, while their gas pump encounters are extremely depressing ” said Carlos Curbelo, a former South Florida Republican House member who has pushed his party to act on climate change. He added: “In stronger economic times, it’s easier to focus on issues like this. Once people get desperate, that all goes out the window.
Two years ago, millions of high school students left school early because of “climate strikes.” Greta Thunberg, the teenage Swedish activist, was a hero as she sailed across the Atlantic for UN climate talks, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York preached a Green New Deal. In 2020, Mr. Biden campaigned on a transformative $2 trillion program to wean the nation off fossil fuels.
Until this week, what remained of that program — mainly tax breaks for clean energy and subsidies to buy electric vehicles — appeared dead, killed by Mr. Manchin, who worried it could worsen inflation. The bipartisan infrastructure bill signed by Mr. Biden includes $2.5 billion to help communities install charging stations, but consumers appear to be on the hook for the full cost of cars and trucks that need juice.
In another setback for climate activists, the Supreme Court severely limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate-warming carbon dioxide from power plants.
Even rising gasoline prices appear to have undermined the climate movement’s core belief: that higher fossil fuel prices will naturally drive a shift toward more efficient vehicles and alternative energy sources. Instead, gasoline prices above $5 a gallon have sparked a bipartisan call for more oil production.
Find out what happened to Biden’s domestic agenda
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“Build Better.” Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. framed his ambitious vision for his administration under the motto “Build Better,” pledging to invest in clean energy and ensure that procurement spending goes to American-made products.
A two-part agenda. March and April 2021: President Biden unveiled two plans that together form the core of his domestic agenda: the American Jobs Plan, which focuses on infrastructure, and the American Plan for Families, which includes various social policy initiatives.
Law on investment in infrastructure and employment. November 15, 2021: President Biden signs a $1 trillion infrastructure bill, the result of months of negotiations. The president hailed the package, a stripped-down version of what was outlined in the American Jobs Plan, as proof that American lawmakers can still work across party lines.
Even strong advocates for action admit that voters are putting aside climate concerns for now. Peter Franchot, the Maryland state comptroller who faces a primary on Tuesday in his race for governor, has a history of commitment to environmental issues and the endorsement of Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, one of the original sponsors of the Green New Deal.
But Mr. Franchot, who worked for Mr. Markey as an aide in the 1980s, said the climate is not what voters are focusing on now. “The number one issue facing the majority of Maryland society is the instability and uncertainty regarding the economy. That’s what people are concerned about, and they’re particularly concerned about the rate of inflation,” he said.
Mr Markey argued there would be political consequences if Democrats did not show they were doing all they could on climate. Young voters and liberals are already disheartened by Democrats’ failures on other priorities, as well as Supreme Court decisions. A significant decline in voter turnout would reduce Democrats’ chances of picking up Senate seats in Georgia, New Hampshire and Nevada.
Mr. Markey called on President Biden to declare a national climate emergency, an action he said would energize climate voters.
“Every high school and every college has environmental groups,” he said, “and executive action by the Biden administration will send a strong signal to them that it’s extremely important to get out the vote.”
Mr. Biden said he would “take strong executive action to meet that moment” if the Senate did not, but did not elaborate.
Others expressed broader concerns.
“To have these negotiations, to go on as long as they did, and now to say this is out, it’s disappointing,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, said of the Democrats’ threatened domestic agenda, without specifying Mr. Manchin. “The administration needs to keep pushing.”
Some activists have focused their anger on Democrats outside of Mr. Manchin, such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who they say continues to support moderate incumbents like Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas against a younger and more diverse group of liberals.
“There is a sense of failure of the leadership of the entire party,” said Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement, a group of young climate activists. “There is deep frustration among young people that the issue of our time, which is existential to our survival, is not being met with the level of struggle it deserves.”
She and other organizers argued that anger over the belittled environmental legislation would only push young voters to redouble their commitment to electing progressive Democrats.
“I think they see there’s no room to remake the Republican Party, but there’s room in the states to remake the Democratic Party,” said Cristina Cinzun Ramirez, president of NextGen America, the progressive political action committee founded by billionaire Tom Steyer for mobilization of young voters.
NextGen has committed $1.5 million to mobilize students on 186 university campuses in the battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. It aims to reach 9.6 million progressive voters.
The Sunrise Movement plans to focus on swing states like Pennsylvania and House races. The nonpartisan Environmental Voter Project is targeting the eight million people who identify as environmentalists who did not vote in the 2020 presidential election.
Although Democrats blamed Mr. Manchin, there was little sign that Republicans felt political pressure to act on the climate — and certainly none from the moderate voters who recently sparked a rare bipartisan compromise on gun laws.
Republicans are responding to the localized effects of climate change with calls for action — Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the GOP leader, on Friday pleaded for legislation to save his district’s giant sequoias, which are threatened by fires and drought — but those calls do not cite the primary cause, a warming planet.
Benjamin Bakker, president of the American Environmental Coalition, a center-right environmental group, said Republicans have no incentive to come to the table. Their own voters do not demand action, and liberal activists moving to the left are unlikely to be satisfied with the compromises Republicans might accept.
“The problem with the environmental movement right now is that it’s so one-sided that if someone votes the right way, they’re considered not good enough, and if a Republican votes that way, the voters who care anyway they will not vote for him.’
Mr. Becker and other Republicans involved in the issue insist there is movement on their side. Outright denial of climate change has all but disappeared, at least among elected Republicans. Many in the Republican Party had begun to argue that rising temperatures were just natural.
Now, after members of Congress have in recent years taken bipartisan fact-finding trips to watch Greenland melt and Alaska’s permafrost burn, the prevailing argument has shifted again: tough action by the United States is pointless, many say, because carbon.. .
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