“There’s a thing out there called a ‘climate husher.’ 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.” – Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
Climate messaging is a mess as the Progressive Left tries to square the energy circle with affordability. Traditional messages have flunked. Complained one activist:
Maybe the problem isn’t climate denial. Maybe it’s climate messaging. We’ve been attempting to scare or shame people into caring, and it’s not effective. Is it time to completely rethink how we talk about climate and sustainability? We’ve spent years trying to influence people through fear, data, and moral urgency. The results? Mixed.
The latest despair comes from Bill McKibben in his Earth Day post, Let’s TALK Climate. “The so-called ‘climate hushing’ among Democrats is a product of political consultants looking at polling data,” he complained. McKibben then quotes from Claire Barber’s essay, which summarized a report by Searchlight Institute (a Democratic think tank), “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”
“While battleground voters overwhelmingly agree climate change is a problem, addressing it is not a priority for them,” the report said. Similar to the American Mind Survey, Searchlight found that a majority of Americans believe that climate change is a problem, but rank it below other key issues, like affordability. Searchlight also found high partisan (Democratic) association with the terms “climate” and “climate change” and suggested jettisoning mentions of both altogether.
McKibben then provides some context:
The phenomenon really dates, I think, from the 2024 presidential campaign, and Kamala Harris’s abbreviated run for the White House. Climate campaigners were perfectly happy to shut up during that run for an obvious reason: Joe Biden had given them, in the Inflation Reduction Act [IRA], most of what DC could provide: a massive infusion of funds for the energy transition we require.
The job was to pull Harris across the finish line so that her administration could continue the work well underway with the IRA. We failed at that: her message, on the politics of joy and the dangers of Trump ran aground on frustrations with inflation. Climate played no discernible part in the election…..
Wimp-out. Climate and energy were an issue to Republicans, independents, and libertarians, along with the overreach of the Democrat Party elsewhere. The IRA, notably, was an attempt to create too-big-to-fail, rent-seeking wind, solar, battery, and EV businesses. That horrendous bill threw deficit dollars at the worst energies, pure misdirection and waste that is now being undone by a new administration.
Back to McKibben:
In the wake of their defeat, Democrats have seized on “bread and butter issues,” and left supposed culture war clashes behind. That’s come at a real cost. Corporations, feeling only pressure from the right, have backslid dramatically on their climate commitments. (The big tech guys, who just a couple of years ago were noisily pledging they’d go net zero, are currently planning gas-fired data centers that Wired reports today will produce more emissions than mid-sized European countries). And journalists are, not surprisingly, wandering away from the whole area: the wonderful Amy Westervelt yesterday described a dour meeting of environmental reporters where, among other things, she learned that not just the Washington Post but also Reuters was laying off its climate desk.
Good news, right? The hyperbole and strongarming for bad over good, exaggeration over realism, encouraged at the federal level by a new Administration, was removed. Amway-eyed McKibben can see only red instead of green (as in less wind/solar/battery blight/sprawl).
Meanwhile, funders of climate journalism are largely folding, too, opting to back comms projects instead or simply stay away from anything as “controversial” as climate and journalism altogether. The cowardice is breathtaking.
McKibben quotes from the “media watchdogs” FAIR:
Our research has found that online news coverage of climate change has been trending down. A search of the term “climate change” in Media Cloud’s US–National dataset, which indexes 248 online outlets, found that there was almost 32% less climate coverage in 2025 than 2024. This trend is similar in TV news. A recent Media Matters (3/4/26) study found that climate coverage on major US commercial broadcast TV networks was down 35% in 2025….
McKibben fools himself, something that Richard Feynman warned against decades ago.
What’s interesting about all this is that it’s not being driven by some change in the basic underlying politics of climate [wrong]. New polling data makes clear that Americans are as concerned about climate change as they ever have been [wrong].
Polls? Ask the question in terms of priorities or in terms of monetary sacrifice. Sure, it is easy to want a freebie to make X or Y better. But consider the reality that climate change and the environment are way back of, yes, bread-and-butter issues.
“Americans’ assessments of the environment are particularly bleak ahead of Earth Day,” McKibben continues, “as a record-low 35% offer a positive rating of the environment’s quality and two-thirds say it is worsening.” But that is largely from exaggeration from a political takeover of natural/social science around the issue. The neo-Malthusian consensus has been wrong since at least the 1960s on a variety of related issues. Bottom line: people are not the problem, they are the solution. Julian Simon lives in death. Paul Ehrlich is intellectually dead in death.
McKibben advises what the Republicans would like to see happen.
The key data point here, for political thinkers, is that the increase in worry about the environment is being driven by independent voters, precisely the people who will determine how the midterms go.
I doubt it. The Green New Deal Scam is exposed. “Climate” is code for energy inferiority, don’t eat meat, and don’t be temperature-comfortable indoors. Self-sacrifice, in other words, is a nonstarter from the U.S. to France. McKibben’s alarmism is just too tired and old. [1] Time’s up: Get real or get out.
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[1] McKibben ends on his regular alarmist note:
So, especially as the climate disasters of this hot summer start to mount, and as the El Niño [a natural phenomenon?] starts to scare people anew, I’d spend some time if I were campaigning making fun of the president on this score….
… with a killer fallacy and magical thinking on stilts:
I’d couple [the pitch] with a full-on assault about affordability…. a quick move to clean energy drives down prices. If I were preparing ads for congresspeople, I’d definitely have one about how a solarized Australia will, in June, start providing electricity free for three hours every afternoon to all its citizens. Talk about affordability!