The Climate Hushing Is Coming from Inside the House
Climate Hushing Is a Material, Not Messaging, Phenomenon
In January, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse coined the term “climate hushers” to describe his fellow Democrats who stopped talking about climate change in recent years. Inside Climate News recently quantified this trend, observing a marked decline in congressional press releases that mention “climate change” since 2022.
Whitehouse and his allies have chalked up climate hushing to bad advice from a cowardly pundit class. In April, Bill McKibben called climate the phenomenon “a product of political consultants looking at polling data.” Last week, Kate Aronoff described hushing as “received wisdom among party pollsters and pundits,” while Aaron Regunberg attributed the trend to “a host of think tanks and pundits—mostly corporatist outfits like WelcomePAC, the Searchlight Institute, and the Breakthrough Institute.”
Most of the coverage of climate hushing has tended to invoke this polling and the punditry. In particular, the anti-hushers are furious about a September 2025 analysis from the Searchlight Institute counseling Democrats “Don’t Say Climate Change,” and a May 2026 op-ed in the New York Times in which the socialist scholar Matt Huber wrote “American voters broadly agree that climate change is a real concern and support addressing it, but they largely do not see it as a top priority.”
And, as the author of the original essay on what we now call climate hushing, I feel some standing to intervene here. So let me be clear: Climate hushing is not principally a punditry phenomenon. It’s an increasingly widespread stance taken not just by moderate strategists, but by the progressive politicians and environmental movement leaders who shape the Democrats’ climate and energy agenda. And it’s happening because the world is changing faster than the anti-hushers can keep up with.
Take Robinson Meyer’s recent reporting for Heatmap. Many of the rising progressive stars in American urban politics got their start in the Green New Deal coalition of yesteryear, whether it was Zohran Mamdani’s “ecosocialist” upbringing or Nithya Raman’s focus on carbon neutrality in Los Angeles. But as Meyer astutely observes, green industrial policy quickly came into conflict with the anti-imperial commitments of this new progressive class. “Instead of revitalizing the country’s industrial might,” Meyer writes, “it sought to pacify and dismantle the military industrial complex.”
Portions of the environmental movement have also conceded that the old emphasis on the climate apocalypse is no longer tenable. A better approach “is talking about a climate solution, but it’s talking about it in a way that meets voters and the public where they are,” according to LCV Action Fund’s Sara Chieffo.
As Eric Michael Garcia observed, progressives’ new political project “does show how little the modern left talks about climate change compared to 2018.” Even the climate donor class has taken notice. “We gave them money, and all they do now is talk about Palestine,” said Open Society Foundation chairman Alex Soros.
But the mistake that almost everyone involved is making here, on both sides of the hushing debate, is in thinking that that the shift is one of talk or messaging. But it’s not merely a matter of whether Democrats should stop saying “climate change” or start saying it again. Rather, it’s that climate hushing reflects a reaction to the very real material developments that have occurred since climate change came to occupy such a prominent place in Democrats’ issue prioritization.
As I have written since before the re-election of Donald Trump, the events of recent years have destabilized the conditions that characterized the era of the climate hawk. The once seemingly durable Obama-era political coalition is defunct. Interest rates, inflation, and energy prices are stubbornly higher than they were in the 2010s. First Ukraine, then Gaza, and now Iran have drawn political and economic attention away from the domestic decarbonization agenda. Gaza in particular has reordered the progressive prioritization stack, with climate activist groups like Sunrise now almost entirely focused on solidarity with Palestine.
These events in aggregate have fundamentally altered the climate commitments of governments and corporations alike. Net-zero is gone and it’s not coming back. The 1.5 degree target, which was always preposterous, is now acknowledged as such by the United Nations and the wider commentariat.
And all of these developments have occurred during the relative infancy of the issue that will increasingly eclipse climate change even within the attention spans of progressives and environmentalists: artificial intelligence.
AI obviously reorganizes pre-existing emissions and infrastructure debates. New data centers are powered overwhelmingly by natural gas, obviating the emissions expectations and modeling scenarios that undergirded energy and climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act. Many anti-fossil activists have shifted their attention to these data centers as a result. The pro-technology wing of the climate movement, meanwhile, is trying, and mostly failing, to shoehorn an electrification-and-renewables agenda crafted before the rise of AI onto a context in which data center load growth is outpacing even the impressive expansion we have come to expect from solar, electric vehicles, and heat pumps.
But this is only the beginning. If projections of AI compute and load growth are even directionally correct, AI will take up not just an increasing portion of our infrastructure and electricity demand but also of our cultural and political attention. In my view, that can all redound to the benefit of electrification and decarbonization—AI may be the strongest demand signal ever for new low-carbon energy technologies. But beyond that, I think AI will come to occupy a central societal anxiety that progressives always hoped would become attuned to climate action.
Democrats, the climate movement, and broader civil society may not have fully reckoned with this epochal shift. But sooner or later, they’ll have to. Progressives and climate advocates are already talking more about data centers, Gaza, and energy prices than they are about heat waves and emissions targets.
In other words, the climate hushing is coming from inside the house. And the sooner that pundits like McKibben, Regunberg, and Aronoff understand that, the better off our climate discourse will be.