How Green consensus gave rise to this

Expensive, unreliable energy is always going to be a vote-loser

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There are lots of reasons Donald Trump is being inaugurated again today. Most of them amount to variations on a theme: a progressive elite lost sight of how normies think and live and made catastrophic political mistakes as a result. You’ve read a million takes on this, because it’s basically right: across the board on race, gender, immigration, energy, etc, Democrats found themselves advocating policies that normal people find abhorrent.

But we’re here to talk about energy, so let’s do that.

The progressive climate consensus puts Democratic politicians in an impossible position. Climate advocacy has succeeded in making a renewables-heavy grid a non-negotiable. That leaves Democrats forced to choose between going to war with some powerful parts of their coalition, rendering themselves unelectable in a primary, or to push an agenda that voters consistently tell pollsters they don’t want, making themselves unelectable in the general.

The logical thing then is to pander to the elite advocates early, secure the nomination, then pivot to the center. Tried-and-true technique, but awkward in that it leaves the other side with great fodder for attack ads. Kamala Harris’s mental gymnastics on why exactly she was against fracking before she was for it was just the Nth example of a toxically unpopular progressive priority leaving a Democrat stranded on politically indefensible ground.

What were the wages of pushing Harris to denounce fracking back in the day? Well Harris lost, and a fiercely pro-fossil fuel administration is taking power in Washington. You can’t fight climate change if you’re not in office, and you can’t win office by promising more expensive, less reliable energy.

Voters won’t stand for it. Nor should they.

After the election, clear-eyed Democrats began to realize the error of their ways. Emmanuel Macron saw the light in 2018 when rising fuel prices led to street protests across France. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are having their epiphany now, as ascendant Conservatives hit them hard over the Carbon Tax. Keir Starmer and Ed Milliband are going to have it soon, if they stay wedded to a Net Zero strategy that picks their constituents’ pockets.

The right has a message for those voters: climate change is a Chinese hoax, we can just double down on fossil fuels, it’s not a problem. The left has no response, other than to scold Republicans for climate denialism.

This is untenable ground for progressives. Along with similar dynamics playing out on race, gender, and immigration, it threatens to lock the Democrats into perpetual warfare against the majority of voters. Suicide politics.

Issue by issue, Democrats must adopt positions that appeal to people who don’t spend all day thinking about politics. On energy, they can promise clean, affordable power supported by reliable, high-wage jobs if they have the courage to champion nuclear energy over wind and solar.

That’s a message most people can get behind, a message that skips the bullshit and balances voters’ economic concerns with their climate worries.

The green lobby will lose its mind, of course. But it’s not Democrats’ job to keep the green lobby happy; their job is to get elected.