President Donald Trump's administration has gutted US climate policy. Yet even as wildfires, record heat waves and flooding hit communities across the country, Democrats are keeping quiet about global warming on the midterm campaign trail. Instead, candidates are packaging climate policy as an affordability issue, stressing how Americans are struggling to afford gas, groceries and to insure their homes against climate-fueled weather extremes.
Take Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico in Texas, who represents the party's best chance at winning the race in the Republican stronghold in nearly 40 years. Though he makes some mention of climate change on his campaign's "energy and environment" page, that is not his focus. His pledges center around lowering energy costs, providing emergency relief for spiking utility bills, making data centers pay for their own grid upgrades and growing energy sector jobs.
This aligns with analysis from nonprofit news organization Inside Climate News showing that the Democrats have dramatically reduced mentions of climate change in their press releases and campaign messaging. "We've entered an interesting space where climate policy doesn't need to be called climate policy to be climate policy," Max Frankel, executive director of the SEEC Institute, a nonprofit that helps guide climate policy in Congress, told DW. Most forecasts project Democrats winning the House and a narrow majority in the Senate in the November 3 election.
But without control of the White House, passing any legislation will be difficult and almost any climate policy will have to be a bipartisan endeavor, say analysts. Given that and the Democrats' messaging-shift to affordability over climate, few experts expect a fully resurrected Inflation Reduction Act. Introduced under the Democrats to create incentives for building clean energy projects, the legislation was largely decimated by President Trump's major tax law.
But Democrats may try to bring back some climate-friendly IRA provisions, particularly measures aimed at lowering household energy costs, analysts told DW. Those include incentives for home energy-efficiency upgrades and appliances like heat pumps to replace oil and gas heaters that typically help bring down household energy bills. Politicians could also expand an IRA manufacturing tax credit for solar, batteries, and critical minerals that largely survived.
One bipartisan bill proposes extending it to include nuclear fusion components. "It's not going to be anything at the scale of the IRA," Adrian Deveny, founder of Climate Vision, a policy firm dedicated to decarbonization, told DW. "It's like singles and doubles as opposed to a home run, which is still worth doing." In a rare area of agreement between the parties, some Democrats and Republicans are already backing a reform bill they're hoping to pass before a new Congress is sworn in January.
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