Yesterday 04:45 PM
(This post was last modified: Yesterday 06:57 PM by C C.)
Wow -- who knew? The para-religious approach of shrieking and preaching on the mountaintop, activists blocking traffic, castigating the "ignorant masses" and opportunistically seizing climate change to advance leftangelical agenda turns people off? But even with this enlightenment trend toward modesty, does the discipline really exist to persist long-term with "silent but effective"? The holy roller urge to get up there like Moses and proclaim commandments and condemn the idolaters like morally superior demigods is pretty much built into the political DNA.
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Climate Policy Is Getting Quieter, and That’s Good
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/cl...-quiet-and
EXCERPTS: 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.
[...] 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.
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... (MORE - missing detaisl)
- - - - - - - - - -
Climate Policy Is Getting Quieter, and That’s Good
https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/cl...-quiet-and
EXCERPTS: 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.
[...] 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.
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... (MORE - missing detaisl)