President Donald Trump's administration has gutted US climate policy, but even as wildfires, record heat waves and flooding strike communities across the country, Democrats are largely staying silent about global warming on the midterm campaign trail. Instead of talking about the planet, candidates are presenting climate policy as a cost of living issue, emphasizing how Americans are struggling to pay for gas, groceries and insurance for homes exposed to climate-fueled weather extremes.
Texas offers a clear example. Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico represents his party's best chance in nearly 40 years of winning in the Republican stronghold. Although his campaign's energy and environment page does mention climate change, it is not his focus. His pledges center on lowering energy costs, providing emergency relief for spiking utility bills, making data centers pay for their own grid upgrades and growing energy sector jobs.
The shift is borne out by analysis from the nonprofit news organization Inside Climate News, which found that Democrats have dramatically reduced mentions of climate change in their press releases and campaign messaging. "We've entered an interesting space where climate policy doesn't need to be called climate policy to be climate policy," Max Frankel, executive director of the SEEC Institute, a nonprofit that helps guide climate policy in Congress, told DW.
Most forecasts project Democrats winning the House of Representatives and a narrow Senate majority in the November 3 election. But without control of the White House, passing legislation will be difficult, and analysts say almost any climate policy will have to be bipartisan. Given that reality and the party's messaging pivot toward affordability, few experts expect a fully resurrected Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA, introduced under the Democrats to create incentives for building clean energy projects, was largely decimated by Trump's major tax law.
Still, analysts told DW that Democrats may try to revive certain climate-friendly IRA provisions, especially measures aimed at lowering household energy costs. Those include incentives for home energy-efficiency upgrades and appliances such as heat pumps, which replace oil and gas heaters and typically reduce energy bills. Lawmakers could also expand an IRA manufacturing tax credit for solar, batteries and critical minerals that largely survived, and one bipartisan bill proposes extending it to nuclear fusion components. "It's not going to be anything at the scale of the IRA," Adrian Deveny, founder of the decarbonization policy firm Climate Vision, told DW. "It's like singles and doubles as opposed to a home run, which is still worth doing."
In a rare area of agreement between the parties, some Democrats and Republicans are already backing a permitting reform bill they hope to pass before a new Congress is sworn in in January. If enacted, it could make it significantly easier to build major infrastructure projects, including long-distance transmission lines that carry electricity between regions but currently take years to complete because of complex permitting rules. "The biggest beneficiary of building more transmission will be wind and solar power, because the best and cheapest way to generate wind and solar energy tends to be far away from cities," said David Spence, a political scientist at the University of Texas who researches the politics of energy regulation. Environmental groups caution the bill could also speed approval of fossil fuel projects, and Spence said a big Democratic midterm win might prompt some lawmakers to peel off their support in hopes of a better deal in the next Congress.
Major new federal climate legislation is considered a long shot before the 2028 presidential election, and even then it would likely require Democrats to win the White House, the Senate and the House. Policy experts nevertheless expect certain ideas to feature prominently, starting with data centers. Opposition is mounting to the energy-hungry facilities being built en masse to power the AI boom, and half of Americans now oppose data centers being built close to their homes, according to a poll from news outlet Politico. "I'm sure every candidate is going to have a platform with a focus on data center constraints on some level, as a way to address affordability," said Deveny, who led negotiations on the IRA. "And that's the entry point for climate policy." Ideas in circulation include a proposal by Democrats Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to pause data center construction, as well as ending tax breaks for data centers and imposing new taxes on their electricity use.
Democrats may also seek to restore the IRA's clean energy tax incentives. This year, more than 150 legislators co-sponsored the so-called Energy Bills Relief Act, designed to reinstate those incentives, reform how transmission permits are granted and make data centers pay for the grid upgrades they need. The bill is unlikely to pass anytime soon but offers a window into the party's thinking. "By far, the biggest consensus, to the extent there's anything remotely resembling a consensus, is restoring a lot of the clean energy tax incentives from the IRA," Deveny said. Other proposals include a new federal program to help insurers cover climate-driven disasters and bring down hefty premiums, and climate superfunds that would require fossil fuel companies to contribute to the costs of extreme weather damage and adaptation. Vermont and New York both passed legislation to create such funds, although a federal judge blocked New York's.
The 2028 presidential race is expected to begin a few weeks after the midterms end, bringing a fresh round of policy ideas and debates. A new president typically gets to drive the legislative agenda early in their term if their party also wins Congress. "As long as the consensus is that clean energy is the cheaper source of energy, and it's going to provide stability over the long term for high energy costs, there's a million ways you can propose solutions through that lens," Deveny said.
