The Answer to Democrats’ Class Problem Is Staring Them in the Face

And boy, are regular Americans paying the price. They’re paying in higher insurance costs driven by the “violent weather” that Big Oil companies knew their products would cause. They’re paying in homes, businesses, and livelihoods lost in climate-driven “deluges,” from North Carolina to Vermont to New Mexico and everywhere in between. And, most tragically of all, they’re paying with their lives—over 200 killed recently by Hurricane Helene, over 600 killed by “thermal extremes” in Maricopa County in each of the last two years, similar numbers lost in the Pacific Heat Dome several summers ago, and the list goes on and on. These tragedies did not just happen; in many cases, according to climate attribution scientists, they would have been “virtually impossible” but for climate change—just as Big Oil predicted.

This suffering and death is incomparable to any harm that can be even remotely attributed to immigrants or the other “villains” of Trump’s right-wing populism. But here’s the thing—stories don’t tell themselves. Neither Democrats nor many of the larger groups making up the climate movement have ever primarily framed climate as a struggle between the elites who disproportionately created the crisis and the regular people living through its consequences. For many years, the dominant rallying cry among climate activists was “keep it in the ground,” a message targeting fossil fuels themselves, not the lying executives profiting off them. Then the focus shifted to climate jobs, from the left’s “Green New Deal” to the Biden administration’s green industrial policy—a narrative that eschewed villains entirely.

As we enter a new political era, both the climate movement and the Democratic Party need to embrace a new approach to climate change: climate populism. Climate populism focuses less on the macroeconomics of a clean energy transition and more on the severe physical and pocketbook harms caused by Big Oil executives, both through their fleecing of consumers and their fraudulent disinformation campaigns, which are directly connected to the lethal heat waves, devastating wildfires, catastrophic floods, and wallet-busting insurance crises harming hundreds of millions of Americans every year.