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Kamala Harris hoped to secure the White House with a platform that vaguely appeared moderate on one hand, while cozying up to radical climate activists on the other.
Donald Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax,” something Democrats hammered the Republican candidate on for years, and promised voters America would “drill, baby, drill” if returned to the White House.
Trump’s resounding victory Tuesday night made clear his position on energy and climate resonated with many voters and did not dissuade others from voting for him, despite Democrats’ insistence that Trump’s position is the wrong one.
“Trump and people like me are on the same wavelength. We got our radar love,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow with the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute and publisher of “JunkScience.com,” told Just the News.
No climate voter
For those voters who see climate change as the central issue of our time, the election outcome was devastating.
“America is a failed Democracy. Our media failed us, our institutions failed us, our people failed us. Worst of all, we now pose a major threat to our planet,” celebrity climate scientist Micheal Mann posted on X.
Nathaniel Stinnett, founder of the Environmental Voter Project, which tries to get voters to support climate-friendly candidates, told The Guardian that the election outcome was a wake up call — not to reconsider the issue, but to advocate for it harder.
“The climate movement urgently needs more political power because the climate crisis is moving infinitely faster than our politics right now. We must work every day to build an unstoppable bloc of climate voters because we’re running out of time,” Stinnett said.
Writing on his The Honest Broker Substack, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., retired professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, argued that there’s no such thing as a climate voter.
“There is an opportunity for Democrats to take a good hard look at the past eight years and think about doing things differently,” Pielke, who was supportive of the Harris campaign and predicted she’d win the election, wrote.
Writing in the Free Press, political scientist and commentator Ruy Teixeira argued that getting rid of fossil fuels and the Green New Deal were terrible ideas that voters weren’t particularly interested in. Progressives’ insistence on focusing on these issues and demanding they not be questioned has harmed them, he explained.
“According to the progressive view, people resist rapidly eliminating fossil fuels only because of propaganda from the fossil fuel industry,” Teixeira wrote. Citing recent polls, Teixeira showed that two-thirds of voters are in favor of increasing domestic production of oil and gas, and most voters support an “all of the above” approach to transitioning the energy system.
“Voters clearly aren’t buying what progressives are selling on energy and climate. Not even close. And that’s another big reason the progressive moment has come to an end,” he wrote.
After Democrats spent years demonizing fossil fuels and lecturing about the need for an energy transition, Trump — a man who has called climate change a “hoax” on more than one occasion — won the popular vote in Tuesday’s presidential election.
