Wash Post: Democrats ‘are going quiet on climate’ – It is now ‘the big issue Democrats have stopped talking about’

By Shannon Osaka 

Now, all that has changed. Since the beginning of 2025, according to data analyzed by The Washington Post, Democrats have pulled back from talking about climate change. At the same time, nations and companies have been whittling down their goals, pulling back from their most ambitious plans to lower carbon emissions — or going silenton the issue entirely.

And as the planet speeds toward 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, that means affordability and energy security — not carbon emissions — are running the show.

“Climate change moves down the list of priorities when people are feeling economically insecure,” said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way. “There’s been a course correction.”

According to a Post analysis of social media posts, podcast appearances, and speeches, congressional Democrats’ mentions of “climate change” and “climate” have decreased from a peak in August 2022, when the party passed the Inflation Reduction Act. According to the analysis, 2025 has seen the fewest mentions of climate change since The Post started gathering data in March 2022.

The Democrats who prevailed in electoral races earlier this week were no exception. Abigail Spanberger, who became the first woman elected governor of Virginia, rarely mentioned climate change on the campaign trail — instead focusing her attention on the rising cost of living and education. Mikie Sherrill, the Democratic governor-elect of New Jersey, largely focused on climate change in the context of resilience against disasters in the coastal state. And Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic socialist winner of the New York City mayoral election, focused intently on rising rents and grocery bills, only discussing climate change when directly asked about it.

According to Adam Jentleson, a veteran Democratic operative and the founder and president of the Searchlight Institute, Democrats are learning that direct focus and messaging on climate change doesn’t necessarily pay off. (In September, the Searchlight Institute urged Democrats to obey “the first rule about solving climate change: Don’t say climate change.”) Democratic voters care about climate change, he argued — but not enough to vote primarily on that issue.

“The climate movement in the past has gotten a lot of flak for being too lofty and abstract,” said Holly Burke, vice president of communications at Evergreen Action, a climate advocacy group. “I see the pivot to affordability not as a shift away from climate, but as a shift to meeting people where they’re at. We’re in a national cost-of-living crisis right now.”

It’s not just Democrats. Republicans are also talking less about climate, The Post’s analysis found, and so is the media. According to a project by the University of Colorado and a suite of other universities, globalmedia coverage of climate change has been decliningsince 2021. In October 2021, news coverage of the issue peaked, with about 1,100 articles per month across newspapers in Africa, North America, Europe, and Asia. In September 2025, the number had fallen to about 400. In the United States, coverage fell by almost two-thirds during that same period.

Philanthropy is also moving away from the issue. Last month Bill Gates published a blog post arguing that the “doomsday view” of climate change is misleading — at least for those in developed, rich countries. Earlier this year, the billionaire’s clean energy organization, Breakthrough Energy, announced steep staffing cuts and removed its policy team in the United States.

Travis Fisher, director of energy and environmental policy issues at the Cato Institute, says that the shift offers an opportunity for both Democrats and Republicans to focus on energy abundance: that is, building both fossil fuels and renewables. Net-zero, he said, “could be a fad that comes back — but it’s definitely on the outs.”

Meanwhile, even the number of climate policies enacted has tapered off. According to the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics, countries added more than 300 climate and environmental policies in 2020 and 2021. In 2024, they added fewer than 50.

Companies are pulling back as well. Mentions of environmental, social and governance — also known as ESG — in corporate earnings calls have fallen to a third of their 2021 peak, according to the energy analyst Nathaniel Bullard. Amazon, which once promised to make half of its deliveries carbon-free by 2030, has shelved that goal. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Post.) Shell similarly canceled a plan to decrease the carbon intensity of its operations.

“The pressure on companies to very publicly demonstrate net-zero plans has certainly eased a bit,” said Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “And some companies are responding by shelving their ESG goals entirely.”

Freed, of Third Way, says that part of the shift is a natural response to inflation and tightening economic conditions. From 2018 to 2022, he argued, the economy was doing well — allowing policymakers and companies to push forward on climate goals.

But the world is now markedly different from the early 2020s. Now that period looks more like an anomaly — a brief period when global cooperation and enthusiasm for clean energy reached its peak.

Ultimately, many experts expect the focus on climate to return. As prices for energy rise, countries will be pushed toward clean energy thanks to the low prices of wind and solar — even if they aren’t doing it to curb global warming. At the same time, the effects of climate change — severe weather and crippling heat waves — are only going to get worse. Last week, Hurricane Melissa blazed through the Caribbean with enormous wind speeds; countries around the world this summer faced record-breaking heat waves.

“The pendulum is going to swing back, for sure,” Bordoff said. “We know that the impacts of climate change are going to be quite bad, and I don’t think people can ignore those forever.”