“Democrats Will Push on Climate Change,” declared the lead story on the front page of the November 27 USA Today. (The online version bore the more verbose headline, “Once Democrats Take Charge of the House, Addressing Climate Change Will Become Top Priority Again.”)
You might think the story was about the Green New Deal, the nascent environmental and social justice agenda that would include a special congressional committee on climate change, championed by incoming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and endorsed by at least a dozen co-sponsors.
You’d be wrong.
The real point of the 925-word story, by Gannett Washington reporter Ledyard King, was conveyed in the print edition’s subhead: “Policies Could Carry Risk for Leaders of New House.”
King led with a warning that set the tone for the rest of the article:
Capitol Hill Democrats who soon will run the House of Representatives are prioritizing climate change nearly a decade after their attempts to slow global warming helped whisk them out of power.
By “attempts to slow global warming,” King was referring mainly to the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, the bipartisan carbon cap-and-trade bill known as Waxman/Markey. The legislation, which would have set a national limit on greenhouse gases and created a market to buy and sell emissions permits, passed the House in June 2009, but was not taken up by the Senate. It has lain dormant since Republicans took the House in 2010.
For King, this attempt to fight climate change was why Democrats lost power eight years ago:
The quandary for the party leaders when they take back power January 3 is how aggressively to pursue an issue that contributed to the Tea Party wave that fueled the Republican takeover of the House in 2010.
That bill and other efforts to address climate change “helped fuel the Tea Party wave that propelled Republicans to take control of the House in 2010,” King wrote.
USA Today journalist Ledyard King (11/27/18) claims that fighting climate change is too risky electorally
But the case for climate change having a direct impact on the 2010 election is weak. Most obviously, the Democrats suffered losses because the electorate was older, whiter and less Democratic compared with 2008. When asked what the most important issue facing the country was, 63 percent of voters said it was the economy—understandably, since unemployment was still at 9.8 percent in November 2010 as the effects of the economic crisis lingered on. Eighteen percent more named healthcare as the top issue (with voters split on whether to repeal Obamacare or not); 8 percent picked immigration and 7 percent the Afghan War, accounting for 96 percent of voters.
Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin pointed out in the New Republic (11/5/10) that voters blamed Wall Street (35 percent) for the state of the economy more often than they blamed President Obama (23 percent) or his predecessor, George W. Bush (29 percent). “But these Wall Street–blaming voters supported Republicans by 56–42 percent,” Teixeira and Halpin noted—suggesting that Obama’s Wall Street bailout (and failure to prosecute bankers) drove independents to vote for Republican candidates.
It’s true that the attempt to pass climate-change legislation did solidify the Republican Party’s climate denial position, as a New York Times investigative piece by Coral Davenport and Eric Lipton (“How GOP Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science,” 6/3/17) documented last year. The billionaire oil baron brothers David and Charles Koch, backers of conservative think tanks and advocacy groups, were galvanized by the cap-and-trade vote to pour their money into campaign support for far-right, fossil fuel-friendly Republicans. The Koch network, the Times reported,
put pressure on any Republicans who were considering taking climate action or even acknowledging climate change…. Republicans who asserted support for climate change legislation or the seriousness of the climate threat saw their money dry up or worse, a primary challenger arise.
King writes of the “Tea Party wave” without mentioning the fossil fuel money behind it. But treating that spending against climate action as the definitive cause of the Democrats’ defeat is dubious, given that, as Time’s Bryan Walsh (11/3/10) wrote, “Democrats who voted against cap-and-trade were three times more likely to lose then those who voted for it”—and seven of the eight Republicans who voted for it were re-elected. (The other, Mike Castle of Delaware, retired to make an unsuccessful bid to run for Senate—and was replaced in the House by a Democrat.)
Just as the environment was at best a minor factor in the Democrats’ loss in 2010, it didn’t drive most Democratic voters to the polls for their victory this year. As USA Today itself reported:
According to a Washington Post/Schar School survey…in battleground districts across the country…44 percent of voters said healthcare was the most important factor in casting their ballot, while 43 percent said Trump was the top issue driving their decision.
But by continually harping on the challenges the Democratic climate hawks face, based on a questionable, unsubstantiated analysis of the political risks, USA Today’s article seems designed to push back on a Democratic push to do anything at all about the climate catastrophe.
