Climate change is still the top issue in the 2024 election 

Before the 2024 presidential and congressional election campaigns get much older, candidates and voters should get a few things straight. 

First, no international, national or local issue is more important than global warming. There is some debate over whether global warming is a crisis. It is. Voters and candidates must treat it as one. 

In August, the Pew Research Center gathered 32 global warming skeptics to explore the reasons for their doubts. “The interviews revealed that language describing climate change as a crisis and an urgent threat was met with suspicion by many participants,” Pew found. 

Why? Most interviewees considered claims of a climate crisis to be “overblown rhetoric.” One explained, “I do believe the climate is changing, but I believe it is changing in a natural cycle that happens all the time.” 

It’s the word “believe” that confuses the issue. Global warming is about science, not beliefs or politics. The realization we must do something is not a religion or a political party. It’s a rational response to an existential threat on which the world’s climate scientists agree with virtual unanimity. 

As one newsletter for journalists notes, “Climate change is, fundamentally, a science story. Many news organizations have instead treated it primarily as a politics story. But what politics says about climate change is secondary; the laws of physics do not compromise or care whether politicians believe in them. Giving the politics side of the story precedence over the science side is the tail wagging the dog.” 

It’s not only news organizations that frame global warming as a political controversy. The fossil energy industry and its Republican collaborators worked hard and spent considerable money to make global warming a wedge political issue. They succeeded. Some Republicans still think it’s disloyal to accept the science or the idea that the government should do something about it. 

Two dates stand out in the history of politicizing the climate crisis. The first was on June 23, 1988, when the U.S. government’s chief climate scientist, Jim Hansen, gave historic testimony before a Senate committee that climate change was not only real but already underway. 

The second date was sometime in 2001, when communications consultant Frank Luntz advised Republicans to plant doubt in voters’ minds about trusting climate science and scientists. 

Back then, Republicans were in danger of being branded as anti-environment, especially after incoming President George W. Bush buried an executive order by outgoing President Bill Clinton to reduce the permitted level of arsenic in drinking water. Luntz called this the “biggest public relations misfire” of Bush’s first year in office and said the GOP had “lost the environmental communications battle.” 

Rather than outright opposition to government action, Luntz advised Republicans to avoid using the words global warming because “climate change” was less frightening. He told Republicans to “make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.” So, Luntz’s memo in hand, Republicans joined the fossil energy lobby in a decades-long campaign to malign climate science and scientists. 

Another malicious development occurred in November 2009 when a group of anonymous climate deniers hacked the email server used by climate researchers at a British university. Shortly before an important international conference on climate change, the hackers released thousands of emails they claimed were evidence of a conspiracy among climate scientists to manipulate climate data and suppress critics. 

Their allegations erupted into official investigations and a major international news story. FactCheck.org confirmed that deniers misrepresented the emails. Nevertheless, a climate communications expert at Yale University concluded, “Climategate had a significant effect on public beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists.” Pew encountered this during its interviews of skeptics when some said they didn’t fully trust scientists because of “uncertainty about their financial motivations and personal biases.” 

Since voters weren’t anxious to embrace even the most credible warnings of a man-made apocalypse, the alleged conspiracy and campaign contributions from oil and gas companies effectively blocked Congress from taking meaningful action on global warming for the next 30 years. Today, 54 percent of Americans consider global warming a significant threat — still too few — but only 23 percent of Republicans agree. 

(It’s important to note that in July 2019, Luntz testified before the Senate that he was wrong, and his memo is “not accurate today.” He offered senators a new list of more affirmative words they should use to communicate about global warming.) 

We cannot let another election pass without a clear, indisputable voter mandate for public officials at all levels to treat global warming like the crisis it is. While a slim congressional majority and President Biden deserve accolades for passing the Inflation Reduction Act and its unprecedented incentives for clean energy, that success is more than negated by the direct and hidden costs of fossil fuels. Few Americans are aware of how big the subsidies are.  

Presidents Obama and Biden tried to reduce or eliminate the more than $20 billion Congress gives oil, coal, and gas in yearly tax breaks. Congress keeps approving them anyway. The result is that taxpayers simultaneously subsidize the production and use of fossil fuels, while paying to retire them. Far worse, fossil fuels cause enormous damage to public health and the environment. Those costs are not reflected in market prices.  

Americans supported fossil fuel production and consumption with direct and indirect subsidies totaling $757 billion last year, far more than the IRA’s support for clean and unlimited energy from sunlight, wind, and other renewable resources. Put another way, every man, woman and child in America paid nearly $2,230 in 2022 to help the fossil energy industry sell products that ultimately destroy homes, lives, lungs, ecosystems, biological diversity, and quality of life. That doesn’t include knock-off effects like the growing “climate insurance bubble,” where 39 million underinsured properties are at high risk of floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. Officials worry about a foreclosure crisis as insurance rates become unaffordable and weather disasters cause home values to decline. 

No responsible nation would allow these things to continue. No rational voter would condone it. No political candidate should be allowed to ignore it. And while many other vital issues command our attention, global warming is a rapidly metastasizing cancer we must force into rapid remission now. Many other things we care about will be immaterial in a world devastated by global warming. Nov. 5, 2024, is our next big opportunity to stop it. 

William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations for the White House as well as Congress on climate and energy policies. He is a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.