One of Congress’ loudest climate hawks is trying to fend off a push within his party to abandon calls to combat climate change as left-leaning agenda-setters are plotting to reclaim both chambers of Congress in the midterms.
“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher,’” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, posted as part of a long social media thread last week.
“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,” he said.
In a later interview about his posts, Whitehouse warned these “climate hushers” have also made their way into strategy conversations on Capitol Hill. He noted he’s been present for some of them, which he described as “polling presentations made to the Senate Democratic Caucus in a so-called strategy retreat that didn’t ask about climate change … There’s this massive blind spot.”
In recent years, Democrats have been handwringing over the best messaging on environmental issues to reach an electorate that cares about “kitchen table” matters – and doesn’t uniformly consider the rapidly warming planet to be one of them. Environmentalists made a strong argument during the 2024 presidential campaign that the climate crisis should be a motivator in electing Kamala Harris — but the contest went to Donald Trump.
Now Democrats are increasingly showing they have decided it’s a losing message to tout the ways in which they’d curb fossil fuel production to thwart the most dire effects of climate change. Instead, they’re choosing to focus on policies that would lower energy costs and lean hard into affordability talking points embraced by Trump and congressional Republicans.
Whitehouse understands the importance of talking about affordability — for years he’s spoken about the climate crisis as a threat to the global economy.
His social media thread notes that people are feeling the economic burdens of climate change throughout the country, from home insurance hikes to drops in property values.
That’s the message Democrats should lean into, he said, rather than shy away from.
“When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Whitehouse wrote in his post. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.”
This is something Democrats are grappling with on Capitol Hill. Interviews with a half dozen House and Senate Democrats revealed how many are still struggling with how to discuss climate change, a problem they consider existential but that doesn’t register among voters’ top immediate concerns.
Some are talking nearly exclusively about competitive prices for clean energy — largely in hopes of beating Republicans at their own messaging game.
“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.), 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.”
Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii, who is on track to be the next Senate Democratic whip, has a similar perspective.
Last year, he removed “climate hawk,” along with other self-descriptions, from his bio on X. And during an event this fall affiliated with New York Climate Week, he said that “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 in a statement last week that he and Whitehouse were united in their ideas around “climate action,” but he also doubled down on the importance of affordability messaging at this time.
“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.”
Recent actions from the Democrats’ Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition, or SEEC — of which Casten is vice-chair — have also focused squarely on energy costs and the ability of clean energy to lower Americans’ bills.
At a SEEC press conference earlier this month 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.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.), a member of the House Natural Resources Committee, 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.
Meanwhile, Republicans have picked up on the Democrats’ shift in talking points and have used it to their advantage.
“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,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said on Fox Business this month.
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.
Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, 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 change. 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 in an interview 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,” but said the solution wasn’t to be silent in calling out the harmful impacts of fossil fuel emissions and the influence of oil and gas companies on Trump administration policy.
Ultimately, there’s only so much he can do to press his case. In recent months he has organized forums on climate change as the senior Democrat on the Environment and Public Works panel, toured red states to talk about rising insurance rates related to natural disasters spurred by global warming and said he has commissioned his own polling on the issue.
Those activities, plus delivering speeches and crafting social media posts, are among the limits of what he can achieve with his party in the minority and his colleagues making their own messaging choices.
He isn’t giving up.
“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,” Whitehouse said. “But that doesn’t mean that the alternative is to throw in the towel.”
Andres Picon and Timothy Cama contributed to this report.
