Victories, Vulnerabilities, and the Path Forward
This Earth Day, raw politics is the greatest threat to the environment. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act — scaled back as it was — Joe Biden has done more to fight the climate crisis than all other presidents combined. He’s running against Donald Trump, the most extreme climate denier and anti-environment president we’ve ever had. In office, he withdrew America from the Paris Accords — the international climate change treaty — and rescinded more than 100 environmental rules. If elected again, the Koch-funded, Heritage Foundation-spearheaded Project 2025, is a blueprint for his administration that casts climate as a “pseudo-religion,” aimed not just at reversing Biden’s policies but attacking the very capacity to formulate climate policy going forward.
In short, “It’s not hyperbole to say that the outcome of the 2024 presidential race will determine how fast the world’s second-biggest carbon polluter can change its course and, by grim consequence, the fate of vulnerable communities around the globe,” as Jeva Lange wrote for Heatmap in December.
While the media downplays it, “Climate and clean energy messaging moves voters toward Biden, with a significant 10-point net swing in the trial heat,” Hart Research and Climate Power reported on the results of their late January survey of voters in nine swing states.
“It is a mistake to assume that voters remember Trump’s record and how destructive it was”, they wrote. “They must be reminded that he was a consistent climate denier, opposed clean energy, and was the worst environmental president in history.”
What’s more, they said, “Contrast is key. Biden’s accomplishments are not widely known and voters give him little credit for his own wins. Biden’s standing improves significantly when contrasted with Trump’s record as president.”
Though not the only race that matters, the presidential race sets a tone echoed at every level, down to the most local. And every race has some climate impact.
This comes at a time when a super-majority of Americans recognize the climate crisis as a serious threat to humanity and support policies to address it — though they significantly underestimate how many others share their concerns. One recent international survey found that 77% percent of Americans believe climate change is “a serious threat to humanity” while another found that almost half (48%) would even be willing to give 1% of their income to tackle climate change, while the perception was that only 33% would say willing.
So, recognizing how many people support climate action — and thus, how possible success is — may be key to actually achieving it. Coherent understanding is our superpower — understanding the threat, understanding the solutions, understanding our power and understanding the enemy.
Signs Of Hope In Primary Results
There were clear signs of this working in California’s primary election, when oil-backed candidates were soundly defeated despite massive cash advantages. “Despite being outspent 10 to one, we beat back Big Oil in the toughest fights in the state,” said California Environmental Voters CEO Mary Creasman. “In the last few weeks, corporate polluters pushed over $8 million into key legislative races, clearly trying to sidestep our recent winning strategy of using their spending against them by pulling the curtain for voters on who the oil-backed candidates are. This last-minute push highlights that they know their money is toxic in politics.”
What’s more, all three representatives who ran for U.S. Senate are being succeeded by “climate champions” according to CEV’s senior political and organizing director, Mike Young: Laura Friedman, succeeding Adam Schiff, Lateefah Simon, succeeding Barbara Lee, and Dave Min, succeeding Katie Porter. Only Min faces a tough race. Along with Friedman, he cited two other LA-area representatives-to-be — Luz Rivas and Gil Cisneros. “This new class we are sending is the strongest climate class to DC California has ever sent,” Young told Random Lengths, “which makes it possibly and probably the strongest class of new legislators ever.” He also cited two other climate champions in competitive races this November, so it could be even stronger.
“Oil didn’t get its money’s worth,” in legislative races, he added. “They push a big game about how important they are,” but “voters like, they didn’t like ’em. Voters know that oil is toxic and legislators should know that oil is toxic and environment’s the right side.”
These California victories are nationally important — and vulnerable to counter-attack, he noted. Policies laid out in Project 2025 “explicitly go after California and our clean-air and clean vehicle laws,” he said. “It is part of their actual plan to try to devastate California and prevent California’s climate leadership from taking effect on the rest of the country.”
The New Denialism
Another, more ambiguous, sign of progress was a January report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which found a dramatic change in climate denial tactics from 2018 to 2023 on YouTube, the leading source of information for younger voters. “Climate deniers can no longer pretend climate change isn’t happening – so they’ve changed their strategy,” CCDH explained. “New Climate Denial narratives that aim to undermine the climate movement, science, and solutions, now constitute 70% of climate denial content on YouTube in 2023,” double the amount in 2018. And specific claims that climate solutions won’t work, jumped from 9% to 30% over that time. Meanwhile, claims that “global warming is not happening,” one of the main “old denial” claims the study tracked, fell from 48% of all denial claims to just 14%.
“The climate movement has won the argument that climate change is real and that it is hurting our planet’s ecosystems,” CCDH founder Imran Ahmed told CNN. So now, “climate deniers have cynically concluded that the only way to derail climate action is to tell people the solutions don’t work.” But they’re also minimizing what the impacts would be — even claiming they would be beneficial — and intensifying attacks on climate scientists and activists. “They don’t care about saving the planet,” Glenn Beck said in one video they cited. “This is all about gaining power and control over you.” It’s the same kind of victimhood narrative MAGA Republicans have made central to every aspect of their politics.
Trump himself is a bit behind the times. His signature denialist line is to call climate change “a Chinese hoax,” and he continues to deny climate is changing, or that sea level is rising significantly, even as homeowner insurance is rapidly disappearing in his new home state of Florida, due to skyrocketing climate threats. His attitude toward global warming, though hostile, seems variable: It’s a secondary if not tertiary concern, subsumed by his other obsessions — demonizing the Chinese, mocking experts, attacking and belittling enemies (think Gavin Newsom with California’s wildfires), as well as continuing personal and business vendettas, the origin of his repeated complaints about windmills. He will, it seems, grab any petty grievance, anything that pops into his head to avoid actually talking about climate.
“He may say anything that pops into his head, but he’s damn good at it and is playing the media like a piano,” said Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist who’s studied multiple forms of deception and denialism. “I published a paper on this a few years ago.” That paper showed that “increased media coverage of the Mueller investigation is immediately followed by Trump tweeting increasingly about unrelated issues. This increased activity, in turn, is followed by a reduction in coverage of the Mueller investigation.” In short, he’s a master at distraction.
What’s more, Lewandowsky said, “There is also reasonably good evidence that Trump knows that he is lying,” contained in another paper that’s currently under review. That paper also cites the example of fossil-fuel industry leaders “in particular ExxonMobil,” who “were fully aware of the reality of climate change and its underlying causes while simultaneously expending large sums to deny its existence in public and to prevent Congress from enacting climate-mitigation legislation.”
Looking Toward November
Despite such massive deception, climate action now enjoys supermajority support, as already noted. For California voters activists, and donors, that means a two-fold priority: both electing climate champions, and winning as many flippable seats as possible. When it comes to Congress, California and New York are the swing states. Both have enough flippable districts (won by Biden in 2020, but by Republicans in 2022) to determine control of the House, along with vulnerable seats Democrats need to keep. For the class of climate champions, Young cited to really make a difference, they need to be part of a majority.
That’s just the philosophy adopted by Indivisible San Pedro, which is working in coordination with two larger groups, according to founding member Peter Warren. First, “Field Team 6, which is the only year-in, year-out partisan registration effort to recruit likely Democrats to vote,” and second, the California Grassroots Alliance, dedicated to winning in six crucial swing districts. “They all went Biden in 2022, but only one of them was won narrowly by a Democrat in 2022,” Warren said. “That was CA47,” the district Indivisible San Pedro focused on previously when Katie Porter won, and the one they’ll be focusing on again, to elect Dave Min.
“The motto of the Alliance is: The Road to the House Majority Runs through California. Without a working majority in both houses of Congress for the Democrats, nothing really good for climate, reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety, health care, taxes, or most anything, gets done,” Warren said.
One other seat the Alliance has targeted involves a climate hero cited by Young. “We certainly hope we get someone like a George Whitesides, who has a math and science background on climate,” Young said. “I’ve never met any candidate who knows more of the actual science on climate than George Whitesides.” A former NASA chief of staff, he’s running against Mike Garcia in CA-27, in northeast LA County. As the first CEO of Virgin Galactic, he created hundreds of jobs in the district’s Antelope Valley, and he founded Megafire Action, an organization dedicated to solving the megafire crisis.
Jessica Morse, who’s served as deputy secretary for forest and wildland resilience at the California Natural Resources Agency, is another wildfire expert hailed by Young running in a contested district — California 3. Although not on the Alliance’s list, it’s also a winnable race. “These are people running in really tough seats,” Young stressed. “If you get them elected and get them in, they will be policy experts on our issues” who will “not just give us the majority that we need to move this in the house, but also the policy expertise that we need to pass really strong bills.”
Ballot Measures And Regulatory Battles
In addition to the legislative races, there are two ballot measures to worry about, Young warned. First is an oil-industry-sponsored referendum to repeal SB 1137, which established 3,200 feet set-back zones around sensitive receptors (residences, schools, healthcare facilities, etc), where new oil drilling is prohibited. Oil companies spent $20 million just to gather signatures to put it on the ballot, and “In the primary, they started investing in messaging to try to win that referendum fight,” Young said. “California has the strongest setbacks in the country, the strongest distance between oil derricks and people’s homes, daycare, schools and hospitals. And they are spending, they’re prepared to spend tens of millions of dollars in the general election to try to undo that.”
But, “there’s another big threat that’s worth watching, that I think is far less discussed,” he said. It’s a ballot proposition from the California Business Roundtable that would make it much harder to pass budgets and taxes, which is currently being challenged in California’s Supreme Court. If it does make it onto the ballet, Young said, “Voters need to know this is a really deceptive measure and it really could undo a ton of climate policy. … It would actually undo popular things that we already passed, such as the funding for the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Act,” as well as “money that we raised for addressing plastics pollution… the most aggressive plastics reduction policy in the country” with funding targeting “historically excluded communities that are heavily impacted by plastics pollution.”
While these are the major electoral battles on the table, elections are only one part of the political process. Regulatory battles are equally important, particularly where port pollution is concerned. This year, long overdue action is expected from the Air Quality Management District on indirect source rules (ISRs) covering the ports and related railyards — the largest source of pollution in Southern California. How much these ISRs actually do to reduce pollution and community health impacts greatly depends on how stringently and well-targeted they are, which in turn depends on political will. This is why nine climate, environmental justice and community organizations will hold a rally and “die-in” on the steps of Los Angeles City Hall on April 26, to call on Mayor Karen Bass to follow through on promises made in her election campaign.
“The fight for health and environmental equity in Los Angeles and Long Beach for our frontline, Black and brown, working-class communities has been an ongoing struggle for decades–and still, every election cycle our hopeful communities will turn out and vote for elected officials who promise to rectify this history of environmental racism — only to be disappointed,” Pacific Environment Climate Campaigner Cristhian Tapia-Delgado told Random Lengths.
“This is why, Pacific Environment — in tandem with members of T.H.E. Impact Project are calling on Mayor Karen Bass to stick to her campaign promises of working with all levels of government to reduce the negative health and environmental impacts of fossil-fueled pollution,” he said. “In her mayoral campaign, Mayor Bass promised zero-emission ports by 2030 and to transition the city away from its dependency on fossil fuels to rectify the historical harm that the goods movement has had. We’re now asking her to deliver on these promises by supporting South Coast AQMD’s Rail and Ports ISR.”
As with the still-ongoing China Shipping lawsuit, the gap between promises and reality takes its toll on health, lives and faith in the system. Restoring faith is a key ingredient to everything else.