https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-surge/2026/09/25/climates-new-messaging-rift-01093089
By SARA SCHONHARDT
Officials criticized efforts at Climate Week to repackage the climate issue as an affordability problem.
Excerpt: CLIMATE SPEAK: Climate Week is exposing a growing rift among advocates over whether climate change needs a rebrand.
“Everyone’s like, ‘Well, we can’t talk about climate to people because people don’t care about climate and they care about affordability,’” said Catherine McKenna, the former climate minister of Canada. “Good news: Climate action is also an affordability opportunity.”
This year’s event has reflected political headlines, with panels and lectures heavy on energy demand and the growing costs of data centers. It comes as President Donald Trump works to erase climate policy — and as leaders around the world start to speak about energy security and affordability as proxies for climate change.
Many Democratic lawmakers in the U.S., including climate champions, have shifted gears to emphasize the need to lower energy costs instead of reducing carbon emissions.
“I just want to give everybody room to talk about this in ways that are maximally impactful,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told Surge. “Back home in Hawaii, nobody has an objection to me saying climate change. But if they did, I would figure out some other way to say it, and it wouldn’t be some moral failing of mine. It would just be that you try to talk to people in a way that is useful to them.”
But some officials and environmentalists argue that climate hushing is wishful thinking at a time when the world is on the cusp of breaching temperature limits and irreversible impacts.
“If we don’t talk about it, others will, and they’ll use the space to pedal lies and disinformation,” Helen Clarkson, CEO of the Climate Group, which organizes Climate Week, said in her opening remarks.
“There’s very intelligent people who disagree with me on that,” she later told Surge. “But I just think without talking about climate, you lose the urgency, you lose why we have to do this right now, and the speed at which we have to go.”
In Europe, many leaders continue to acknowledge the continent’s vulnerability to climate change, but they now talk about acting on it for different reasons. Attention has turned increasingly to energy security, as the U.S.-Israel war with Iran and Russia’s war on Ukraine make the continent vulnerable to higher costs of imported fuels.
“Clean electricity gives us independence, energy security, and it is affordable,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, said at a United Nations climate summit Wednesday, noting this summer’s extreme heat.
The shift in messaging can also be seen ahead of this year’s U.N. climate talks. The hosts of COP31, Turkey and Australia, are pushing for accelerated electrification — rather than for the more polarizing goal of phasing out fossil fuels, the main driver of rising temperatures.
McKenna argued that leaders need to stop side-stepping the issue.
“They need to actually talk about climate as a massive risk,” McKenna said Thursday on a Climate Week panel about climate diplomacy. “So how are we going to adapt, and how are we going to actually do the real things to tackle it and put it in the frame of opportunity and costs.”
“There’s very intelligent people who disagree with me on that,” she later told Surge. “But I just think without talking about climate, you lose the urgency, you lose why we have to do this right now, and the speed at which we have to go.”
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The shift in messaging can also be seen ahead of this year’s U.N. climate talks. The hosts of COP31, Turkey and Australia, are pushing for accelerated electrification — rather than for the more polarizing goal of phasing out fossil fuels, the main driver of rising temperatures.
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“They need to actually talk about climate as a massive risk,” McKenna said Thursday on a Climate Week panel about climate diplomacy. “So how are we going to adapt, and how are we going to actually do the real things to tackle it and put it in the frame of opportunity and costs.”
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