BY EMILY ATKIN
Excerpt:
The midterm elections are less than a week away, and there’s a lot riding on the results, including how much more damage Donald Trump can do to the climate.
But for how important this election will be for Planet Earth and the humans who live on it, the issue itself isn’t getting much airtime. Earlier this month, The Guardian examined the campaign websites of Democratic and Republican Senate candidates in eight battleground states. Of all the candidates surveyed, only two explicitly mentioned climate change.
This retreat hasn’t happened by accident. Over the last two years, some of the Democratic Party’s most influential strategists, donors, and think tanks have been explicitly telling candidates to shut up about climate change and focus on the economy instead—as if those were two separate issues.
It’s a strategy known as climate hushing. And with the midterms fast-approaching, it’s worth asking: Who convinced Democrats that ignoring climate change was a winning strategy? Does the evidence actually support that argument? And what is that silence costing the rest of us?
These are the questions I explored in the today’s episode of the HEATED podcast, alongside my producer Tracy Wholf and Aaron Regunberg, who directs the Climate Accountability Project at Public Citizen.
We also took a closer look at some of the country’s most consequential Senate races to see who’s avoiding climate change, who’s still talking about it, and what those differences reveal.
You can listen to our full conversation above, find HEATED on your favorite podcast app, watch on YouTube, or read an edited and condensed transcript of our conversation below.
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