One of Congress’ loudest climate hawks is trying to fend off a push within his party to abandon the issue of climate change at a time when left-leaning agenda-setters plot to reclaim both chambers of Congress.
In a long social media thread Tuesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) declared that anyone who thinks Democrats should avoid talking about climate change “are wrong about pretty much everything.”
The posts are part of the debate within the Democratic Party about the best messaging ahead of the midterm elections, and as leaders grapple with their 2024 loss to Donald Trump.
“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher,'” Whitehouse, the Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member, posted.
“Anyone who cares about what fossil fuel pollution is doing to Earth’s natural systems needs to ignore these so-called ‘climate hushers’ — people who think Dems should stop talking about climate.”
Immediately after losing the White House and both chambers of Congress, many Democrats said they should have focused more on kitchen table issues and less on progressive causes. Whitehouse argues climate change is compatible with that.
The senator’s lengthy thread notes that people are feeling the economic burdens of climate change throughout the country — from home insurance hikes to drops in property values. And he asserted that congressional Democrats should lean into that message rather than shy away from it.
“When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Whitehouse posted. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.
“The ‘climate hushers’ are conceding defeat, falling into circular reasoning, asking us to make our own doldrums. Specifically, they ignore the endemic Democratic problem of ‘poll-chasing’: we take a poll, ask where voters are, and then ape what they were thinking when the polls were taken back to them.”
In an interview about the post, Whitehouse said the “climate hushing” narrative has made its way into strategy conversations on Capitol Hill.
Indeed, many congressional Democrats have noticeably narrowed their discussions of climate change to center exclusively on rising utility bills, in response to the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on renewable energy.
Whitehouse pushed back on this strategy, saying that the party should also continue calling out the harmful impacts of fossil fuel emissions and the influence of oil and gas companies on Trump administration policy.
Republicans have picked up on the shift and have used it to their advantage. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said on Fox Business this week: “You actually see on the left, this debate going on right now, where a lot of people within the Democratic Party, they are talking about how they’ve lost the narrative, or the culture war, on climate.”
Left-leaning thinkers and independent analysts have also argued that Democrats may have gone too far in following the lead of environmental groups they say were out of touch with most Americans.
Columnist Matt Yglesias argued in a New York Times op-ed that Democrats should not be hostile to oil and gas. Longtime energy expert Daniel Yergin wrote in Foreign Affairs about the “troubled energy transition” and the need for a “pragmatic path” forward. And Veteran Democratic operative Adam Jentleson started the think tank the Searchlight Institute to curb the influence of the “groups” on party positions, including climate.
But Whitehouse shrugged off this narrative as being fed by pollsters who “don’t even understand the climate problem.”
“I’ve been at polling presentations made to the Senate Democratic Caucus in a so-called strategy retreat that didn’t ask about climate change and didn’t ask about dark money corruption. So there’s this massive blind spot that we have as well,” he said.
Although Whitehouse has acknowledged some shortcomings to Democrats’ past depictions of climate change — “as sort of a moral imperative, as an intangible thing floating out there, something that will affect polar bears” — he has continued to stand out among Democrats on the Hill as someone who thinks policy-makers should be talking about climate change more, not less.
Instead, he has relentlessly argued — 303 times on the Senate floor, in fact — that climate is in fact an economic issue that touches all facets of life for everyone, and that fossil fuel companies are the “villains” behind it.
“Democrats and environmental groups’ climate messaging for years has been crap, and so if you go back to that crap messaging, obviously it’s not going to succeed,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean that the alternative is to throw in the towel.”
‘Cheap is clean’
Whitehouse’s fellow congressional climate hawks have mostly embraced the pivot toward talking about energy affordability rather than traditional climate priorities like decarbonization and clean air and water legislation.
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who last year removed “climate hawk” from his bio on X, has spoken explicitly about the need to shift on messaging, arguing repeatedly on social media and in floor speeches that Democrats need to remain focused on costs and shortages if they want their message to resonate with Americans.
“Those of us in the climate community who are used to making a more broad argument about where we are in the sweep of history have to get comfortable making a more immediate argument that says the reason prices are going up is a deliberate policy choice of the Republican Party,” Schatz said last year at an event affiliated with New York Climate Week.
Schatz in a statement this week said that he and Whitehouse were united on their ideas around “climate action.” But he doubled down on the importance of affordability messaging.
“There are think tanks and advocacy organizations that are dedicated to the proposition that climate action is incompatible with affordable energy, but those factional rivalries have been overtaken by events,” Schatz said. “Cheap is clean, and clean is cheap.”
On the House side, recent actions from the Democrats’ Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition (SEEC) have also focused squarely on energy costs and the ability of clean energy to lower Americans’ bills.
At a SEEC press conference last week meant to respond to the last year of energy and environment policy under President Donald Trump, a roster of climate-focused Democrats spoke nearly exclusively about energy prices. “Trump lied; Energy costs are up,” read the main sign at the presser.
It was a striking difference in tone from several years ago when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in 2019 elevated the “existential threat” of climate change immediately upon retaking the gavel.
That year, the Democrats’ renamed a panel about global warming the “Select Committee on the Climate Crisis,” as progressives pushed the party to highlight the issue with more urgency.
Is Whitehouse alone on an island?
Whitehouse said that the narrative from Democrats around energy bills is entirely compatible with his continued push to talk about fossil fuels; the two should go hand in hand, he said.
But in interviews with a half dozen Democratic lawmakers this week, the conversations revealed many in the party are not particularly worried about leaving some traditional climate change rhetoric behind for the time being in favor of talking nearly exclusively about clean energy prices — begging the question of whether Whitehouse is digging his heels in alone.
“My theory of the case is that the argument that I’ve been making for 30 years is finally breaking through,” said Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.), SEEC’s vice chair and a former clean energy professional.
“The urgency of climate change means that we have to focus on it especially when it’s not as salient with the American people, if we are to be the leaders we claim to be,” he added. “But I think that’s largely a separable conversation from what is the best way to talk about it in any given moment, that has the most ability to move public opinion.”
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), a Natural Resources Committee member, said in an interview that Democrats need to focus on energy prices because Trump has used that as a justification for executive actions that bolster oil and gas.
“People, when they see the ways in which the energy policies that are serving big oil are hurting their pocketbooks, it makes it more tangible for why folks should care, in addition to the welfare of the planet,” Stansbury said.
And Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce’s Energy Subcommittee, downplayed the notion that congressional Democrats were at odds over how to message on climate. Talking about affordability need not negate the focus on the impact of climate change, she said.
“I think they are one in the same,” Castor said. “Take my community in Florida. We’re still recovering from Hurricane Helen and Milton and people understand that those storms were supercharged because the Gulf was very, very hot, very warm. And the rain was unlike anything we’ve ever seen. So they are trying to afford rebuilding their homes and paying their property insurance and also suffering higher rate increases.”
Whitehouse, for his part, said that he is in step with fellow Democrats focused on climate in raising concerns about new narratives.
“I think most of the what you might call ‘climate hawks’ in the Senate see this the same way: that we fell into a hole that we need to get out of and that there is a winning message,” he said.
Andres Picon and Timothy Cama contributed to this report.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
