Climate Policy Is Getting Quieter, and That’s Good

Climate Hushing Through the Years

Last week, Breakthrough’s Executive Director, Alex Trembath, wrote in The Argument that so-called “climate hushing”—Democrats’ retreat from climate change as a central issue—is not a defeat for decarbonization and climate policy, but a return to the quieter, bipartisan, technology-and-abundance politics that actually has a track record of emissions reductions.

In his own words:

“The OG climate deniers were crank scientists who attributed climate change entirely to natural variability (or sunspots) instead of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. Their dubious work was cited at the highest levels of government, including by the Bush administration’s Council on Environmental Quality and, perhaps most notoriously, by the late U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, who suggested in 2003 that global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

That outright rejection of scientific consensus has largely lost in the court of public opinion: Recent surveys show strong majorities of Americans accepting the reality of climate change. With such denial in retreat, today’s climate activists have a new pejorative specifically for the Democratic elected officials and analysts who are conspicuously less outspoken on climate change during the second Trump era: climate hushing.

These so-called hushers are “meekly shying away from righteous and winnable fights against evildoers,” according to Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Party moderates are the canonical hushers, at times directly urging Democrats “don’t say climate change,” as Searchlight Institute did last year. But the ranks of the hushers appear to grow larger by the day: The Washington Post recently reported that the word “climate” has vanished almost entirely from public statements by Sen. Ed Markey, a longtime Green New Deal champion who is now locked in a tense primary election against a more moderate challenger.

Democrats’ descent into infighting is most often taken as a sign of retreat for the causes of decarbonization and climate resilience. But that need not be the case.

Indeed, there are reasons to think that climate hushing will promote more ambitious and durable climate action than what came before. Unlocking the next wave of U.S. clean energy will require a return to the bipartisan compromise politics that have historically driven the country’s decarbonization. Maximalist climate activism can only harm these efforts.

In an era when voters are laser-focused on cost-of-living concerns and emerging challenges like artificial intelligence, climate hushing may well be the thing that saves the climate.”

Alex’s essay stands as an important intervention in the “climate hushing” debates, but its origins reach far further back than the current discourse. For years, Breakthrough has advocated for a quiet climate policy. In 2021, almost the entire Breakthrough staff put together research for a report advocating for a “quiet” climate policy that “swims with the tide of existing sociopolitical institutions and economic growth…uses technology and infrastructure as its main lever, and…disrupts, rather than exploits, political partisanship.”

“Historically, the US government has accelerated decarbonization through strategic investments in technology and infrastructure. Decarbonization of the American economy has depended upon the increasing affordability and scalability of lower-carbon alternatives to incumbent technologies: nuclear power plants, shale gas unlocked by the fracking revolution, solar photovoltaic and onshore wind plants, lithium-ion batteries, and biotechnology and other innovations that have improved the productivity of American agriculture. These were all enabled by decades of sustained, technology-specific research, development, demonstration, and deployment efforts made by the federal and state governments.”

And the idea of quiet climate policy goes even further back. In an essay for Foreign Policy from 2019, Breakthrough Founder and President Ted Nordhaus argued that both carbon pricing and the Green New Deal—popular “solutions” to climate change at the time—wrongly assumed that public concern about climate would be strong enough to sustain a partisan, economy-wide approach to decarbonization. Instead, Ted argued, enduring climate progress needed to be made through quiet policymaking:

“In contrast to most current climate advocacy efforts, which seek to raise the salience of the climate problem in order to motivate politically difficult and economically costly climate action, quiet climate policy seeks to deescalate the political controversies associated with climate change and break up the costs of climate action.

Examples include establishing a federal clean energy standard that would require utilities to gradually transition entirely to zero-carbon technologies over the coming decades. Or government procurement at the U.S. Defense Department and national laboratories could be used to create initial markets for promising small nuclear reactors and geothermal and energy storage technologies. Providing U.S. farmers with technology and incentives to become more carbon efficient could bring huge benefits for the climate, as could government investment to develop zero-carbon technologies for industrial heat and power.

Working toward decarbonization, technology by technology and sector by sector, on a bipartisan basis and through careful negotiation with key stakeholders is the sort of thing that Congress still occasionally manages to do—as recent legislative efforts to support commercialization of advanced nuclear and carbon capture technologies demonstrate.”

While quiet climate advocacy, or “climate hushing,” has, for years, been the more effective approach to actually passing and enacting policy, it would be a mistake to understand the current climate hush as a tactical and strategic choice amongst the climate-pilled Democrats. Rather, Democrats—and the general public—have retreated on climate mainly because a whole slew of technological, political, and cultural developments have dramatically altered both discourse and the material world. Even before AI became the clear focus of the moment, the political tides had turned on climate.

In an essay from early 2024, entitled “The Era of the Climate Hawk Is Over,” Alex Trembath argued that “the political, economic, and cultural conditions that allowed for climate hawks’ advances over the last decade simply no longer hold.”

“So here we are, at the end of their era, and the signs are unmistakable. Of course the incoming Trump Administration quickly abandoned any talk of net-zero as well as the government’s commitments to the Paris Agreement. But corporate America is also abdicating net-zero commitments en masse. The taboo on criticizing radical climate activism seems to be breaking down. The effort to convert large swaths of the electorate into “climate voters” has demonstrably failed, and poll respondents increasingly identify a striking gap between Democrats’ values and their own on many issues, including climate change. Even segments of climate philanthropy, the ultimate benefactor of much of climate hawks’ activities over the years, are showing signs of adjusting to the new order of things.

The key question today is whether a critical mass of climate hawks themselves are willing to decenter or deescalate climate politics in service of building a lasting political coalition in support of energy abundance and climate resilience. Doing so, for many, would amount to a tacit acknowledgement that the existential claims of the climate movement have been more tactical than substantive. That may be a bridge too far for many or most committed climate hawks.

For everyone else, some cognitive therapy may be in order. Because it’s not just a dead-end strategy, but a dead-end identity. Climate hawks’ substantive and coalitional propositions can simply no longer be defended.

Frankly, the whole project was always a bit of a farce. Climate hawks’ nominal efforts to differentiate themselves and to move past cap-and-trade were almost entirely performative. Bill McKibben’s clarion call to build a climate movement was just an explicit bankshot strategy to fulfill the lost promise of carbon pricing. [David] Roberts’ obsequious genuflections towards environmentalists presaged the climate movement’s total inability to differentiate itself or prioritize among its various camps. The more recent move beyond carbon pricing may have felt like hard-headed realpolitik, but all the latter-day activist campaigns—from divestment to natural gas bans to liability lawsuits to “climate Superfund” bills—are just thinly veiled efforts to raise the price of fossil fuels. For their grand finale, climate hawks took longstanding bipartisan energy and technology policy and transfigured it into hyperpartisan environmental policy.

Those of us who have worked to construct an actual, coherent post-environmentalism have long seen the path of the climate hawk for what it was: a mirage. Efforts to center emissions and climate change meant de-centering innovation, jobs, and resilience—all things that voters of all stripes demonstrably care much more about. “Raising the salience” of climate change was a chimera—psychically intoxicating but politically dangerous. And draping climate policy in the cloth of “Green New Deal” mass employment or “Build Back Better” post-covid industrial policy ultimately couldn’t disguise the old-fashioned environmentalism underneath.”