Cohen: trend ‘may reflect’ Biden-era policy limits
After Donald Trump won the 2024 election, mentions of the climate crisis started to disappear from Democrats’ rhetoric, according to a Guardian examination published Monday. The Guardian profiled three progressive and populist 2026 midterm candidates — Jane Kim in California, William Lawrence in Michigan, and Dan Osborn in Nebraska — who are running campaigns anchored in disaster insurance, datacenter regulation, and right-to-repair legislation, three issues with substantial climate implications that have been surfacing in their platforms even as climate mentions have begun to recede from Democratic rhetoric.
When Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a law in May 2024 erasing the words “climate change” from state statutes — colloquially known as the “don’t say climate change” law — Democrats were outraged, the Guardian reported. Just six months later, after Trump won the 2024 election, many liberal politicians began to go quiet on the issue themselves. The climate crisis, however, continues to fuel heatwaves, wildfires, and floods across the country and to surface in issues animating voters, from datacenter expansion to rising home insurance rates.
University of California, Berkeley sociologist Daniel Aldana Cohen, in the Guardian’s report, called the pattern “climate-hushing” and said it “may reflect” the limits of the Biden administration’s climate policies. Green jobs and housing investments under Biden fell short of the climate movement’s desires, consumer incentives disproportionately benefited wealthier households, and Democrats struggled to effectively communicate their accomplishments, according to Cohen. Trump has since rolled back many Biden-era clean energy incentives and regulations.
“Maybe people don’t rank climate as their main or top issue … but nobody really experiences everyday life like walking around the world rank-ordering the things that they care about,” Cohen said. “What’s important is to learn how to embed the climate issue organically amidst the other issues that people care most about.” If the country is to decarbonize fast enough and adapt to impacts already underway, he added, “we’re going to need a robust majority that backs those policies. Elite consensus alone will not suffice.”
In California’s race for insurance commissioner, Jane Kim — state director of the Working Families Party and a former San Francisco county supervisor — is the frontrunner after receiving 27% of the vote in the June primary. The position oversees the state’s home, auto, and business insurance markets. Her signature proposal is a single-payer system for disaster insurance, developed as climate-fueled wildfires ravaged the state and triggered a homeowners’ insurance crisis: companies have stopped writing new policies and non-renewed thousands of homeowners in high-risk areas, leaving many to rely on the California Fair Plan, the insurer of last resort, which provides limited fire coverage rather than the broader protection of a typical homeowners policy.
“The biggest change in the insurance industry in the past four years is the increase of climate disasters,” Kim said. “We used to have a billion-dollar storm every three to four months, and it seems like we now have one every three weeks, so the price of risk has truly gone up.”
Kim’s scheme would create a public, government-run program to cover wildfire damage for all homes, modeled on government-backed programs in New Zealand, France, and Spain. Homes would be automatically enrolled regardless of condition, with premiums based on property values, risk, and other factors; some aspects would require legislative approval. Because the nonprofit program would not have to generate shareholder profits, Kim said investment returns could build a pool of money for future claims and the program could be designed to mitigate climate risk rather than simply avoid it. “In New Zealand, they actually use a portion of premiums for fire-proofing and flood-proofing, because they guarantee home disaster insurance to everyone,” she said.
Kim said private insurers are also major institutional investors in oil and gas, which are fueling the climate crisis, an issue she would elevate in office though it is outside the direct purview of the role. Critics of the single-payer disaster scheme have argued that shifting financial risk to the state could further destabilize California’s insurance market, leave taxpayers bearing a greater burden, or pose pricing risks either too high or too low for the system to function. Kim said revenues could be raised from a variety of places, including potentially by forcing state insurers to pay an “exit fee,” and that she does not aim to eliminate the private market but to bring in government where it falls short. “The current insurance system is a failure,” she said. “Voters know that.” Insurance, she added, “was invented centuries ago as a form of mutual aid.”
While Democrats nationally may be moving away from tackling climate issues head-on, in California “climate is unavoidable,” Kim said. “It’s a crisis that’s reshaping the way so many people are living,” she added. “Losing your home, your community, your neighborhood, your schools, and then not knowing if you’re going to get insured for the very thing that you paid for? That’s unconscionable.”
In Michigan’s hotly contested seventh congressional district, William Lawrence — a progressive Democrat who co-founded the youth-led environmental justice group the Sunrise Movement, which mainstreamed calls for the Green New Deal in 2018 — has placed his opposition to unchecked datacenter expansion at the center of his campaign. Lawrence won his primary race earlier this year and will face Republican incumbent Tom Barrett in November. Lawrence is calling for a statewide moratorium on new datacenters and backing a federal moratorium, arguing that the facilities strain local infrastructure and drive up energy demand. At least 11 datacenters are planned throughout Michigan, and three hyperscaler-size facilities are proposed in his district alone, with another recently struck down by Lansing’s city council.
Lawrence, a longtime climate organizer, points to the climate ramifications of datacenter buildout. The facilities consume enormous amounts of electricity, much of which is still generated by burning fossil fuels, and their rapid expansion is driving efforts to keep gas, oil, and even coal online, potentially locking in emissions for decades. Recent research has found that AI could increase fossil fuel production enough to generate at least three times the emissions associated with today’s datacenters. But climate concerns are far from the only reason Michigan voters are worried about the buildout, Lawrence said; some fear water contamination, noise pollution, higher energy bills or falling home values, while others are most concerned about the impact AI will have on the job market and society at large.
“You think you know the place you live and you can envision a future there, but then you have to imagine a behemoth datacenter that … potentially driving you and your neighbors out of town,” Lawrence said. “That is all so deeply destabilizing.” The “most uniting frame,” he added, is a sense that AI companies have too much power to push projects through small communities. “That all really calls our democracy into question.”
Lawrence acknowledged that climate-hushing is an understandable political response. “There are so many acute crises in our world,” he said. “It is challenging to name them all in a five-minute stump speech and weave it all together into one story.” Still, when he talks about the climate crisis and environmental issues more broadly with voters, he said, many are receptive. They understand, he said, that “we live on a living planet and we depend on it.”
Barrett does not support a national datacenter moratorium. This month he released an ad calling for local control of datacenter development and put forth legislation he says would stop federal agencies from overriding local land-use, zoning, siting, or permitting rules for the facilities, according to the Guardian. He had previously backed legislation with billions in tax breaks for AI developers and another bill aiming to limit federal environmental reviews for datacenters and other projects, the American Prospect reported. In Michigan, some unions and local officials have backed datacenter proposals that promise jobs and revenue; Lawrence said he understands their concerns but fears AI will undermine employment in the longer term. Temporary bans, he said, would allow officials to develop stringent regulations before the rapid buildout.
A Data For Progress poll indicates that more than 40% of residents were “much more likely” to vote for a candidate who opposed the buildout of datacenters — a dynamic that helped Lawrence win 49% of the vote in Mason, site of a planned facility.
In Nebraska, Dan Osborn — an Independent and former labor leader running for Senate — has made “right to repair” a part of his platform, featuring the issue in a video ad. The policy would make it easier for people to repair and maintain their cars, farm equipment, and other products, reducing waste and extending the life of goods. Osborn spent two decades as a mechanic at Kellogg’s, where he helped lead a successful 77-day strike in 2021. He became passionate about right-to-repair after a job experience: working with a ball valve used to flavor Fruit Loops, he asked a co-worker how much replacing the valve would cost, and was told between $500 and $600. Only a Teflon seal inside the valve needed replacing — a fix he said he could have made himself for about $80.
“I said, ‘that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,’” Osborn said. “I had no choice at that point but to throw that thing in the garbage.” He sees the same problem playing out with farm machinery, cars, and other products, where manufacturers’ restrictions can leave workers and consumers waiting for authorized technicians or paying for repairs they could otherwise handle themselves. Defense contractors run “the same monopoly repair scam,” Osborn said, forcing the military to pay contractors taxpayer money for repairs.
Osborn frames right-to-repair mainly as an economic justice issue, but he also sees environmental benefits: repair generally uses fewer resources than making and transporting replacements and keeps usable equipment out of the waste stream. “It’s a waste for the environment,” he said. “It’s just a waste all around.”
The issue has gained prominence in recent months. In July, John Deere reached a major settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and five states, requiring the company to give farmers and independent repair shops access to diagnostic software and tools needed to fix equipment, the Guardian reported. Trump has also signed a June memo directing regulators to clarify what car repairs Americans can legally perform and consider easing enforcement against people who fix their own cars. “Talking about the issue is good,” Osborn said. “But there needs to be actual laws around this, and they need to have some teeth.”
Opponents, including the Cato Institute, have argued that right-to-repair laws could expose companies’ intellectual property or that improper repairs could increase emissions. Planet-warming pollution from electronic waste rose by 53% from 2014 to 2020, figures environmental groups cited in the Guardian’s reporting show. “I usually really talk about it as a consumer protection issue … but certainly the environment plays into it for people that are concerned about that; it gets brought up,” Osborn said.
As a candidate in an agricultural region, he said, many voters intrinsically understand the importance of a healthy climate and an uncontaminated landscape. “We only get one planet, and we can’t screw it up,” Osborn said.