Climate change, according to U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), needs to be addressed not as an economic inconvenience but as a catastrophic planet changer that requires immediate and sustained mitigation programs.
That’s different from how the Biden administration is portraying it, according to the Senator, who says “the administration treats it mostly as a jobs issue, not a story with villains and massive looming harm.”
Yet the administration treats it mostly as a jobs issue, not a story with villains and massive looming harm.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) December 26, 2023
Whitehouse cites a Nation article asserting, on the basis of Pew Research data, that “37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress,” while “another 34% put it among their highest priorities.”
The Senator proposes that the Biden administration launch — or reframe — the current narrative to more overtly cast the fossil fuel industry as the aforementioned “villains” in an epic saga of global survival. Biden should also amplify, according to Whitehouse, an imminent doomsday scenario if not enough is done to stop these villains, who’ve been “gaslighting” the public on fossil fuel-induced climate damage since at least the 1990s.
The challenge with the Senator’s suggested approach is how easily such a narrative gets disrupted by the enablers of Big Oil in today’s fractured media environment, where money can buy more influence than ever.
Consider that oil-backed politicians have created angry frenzies of blowback merely by suggesting that the “climate police” are going to outlaw gas stoves. If Democrats can’t combat a small narrative outrage-trigger like that one, how can they be expected to effectively dramatize the big narrative epic Whitehouse is calling for?
The Senator himself knows how challenging it can be to make a narrative stick when big money interests have taken the opposing side. Whitehouse has been trying for months and months to alter the narrative surrounding the Supreme Court and its allegedly dubious ethics to little practical effect. (NOTE: Reacting to public pressure, the SCOTUS recently put out a toothless agenda promising to police itself more honestly and thoroughly, without consequences for a failure to do so.)
The Biden administration — having achieved to date impressive economic milestones on employment, GDP, jobs and more, milestones that many thought unreachable — is presently having a hard time convincing Americans that the economy is strong or that the administration is doing a decent job.
Despite the facts that Americans just spent record amounts on holiday shopping, that they enjoy record low unemployment, that the stock market hovers near an all time high and wages are up in numerous sectors, polls show Biden still gets low marks for his economic stewardship.
Believing, as Whitehouse does, that the same administration that can’t get credit for what it’s done economically could utterly and effectively change the narrative on fossil fuels — while Big Oil fights it every step of the way — seems unrealistic, at best.
But that’s not to say Whitehouse doesn’t have a point: climate change didn’t just happen on its own — its causes are well-known and easy to identify.
Yet the Biden administration has surely come to learn that getting James Comer and Ted Cruz fans who think their country is being “stolen” from them by electric stove-loving communists to pile on Big Oil about a threat they have a hard time qualifying — that is not a fight the Biden administration thinks it can win.
And even if it did win that narrative battle, it wins — according to Whitehouse — a 37% share of mostly still dissatisfied voters.
So Biden says the climate mitigation will provide more and better jobs instead. As Jim Carville said 30 years ago about what really matters to the electorate, no matter what they tell the pollsters: It’s the economy, Stupid.
