How the pandemic upended climate politics

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the chaotic and expensive congressional response, has upended the climate politics landscape. Before the onslaught of the coronavirus, environmentalists had unprecedented success getting the issue into the mainstream, bringing it to the forefront of the 2020 election and, potentially, the policy agenda of a new Democratic government come 2021. But those successes are in question with Americans stuck at home and the economy in free fall, with full recovery likely a distant prospect. In the near term, it might simply be harder to keep climate on the political map, environmentalists and academics said, even as the broader recovery effort offers new opportunities to remake the American energy system. "We have limited attention spans. We obviously can only deal with one crisis at a time, and it's probably true that in the short term, we're going to be dealing with very, very high unemployment and massive economic dislocations," said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. "And that often sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the room."...Polls conducted after elections in Florida, Illinois and Arizona last month saw climate change tumble well below health care and economic inequality as a concern among voters, as coronavirus fears began to permeate society. "It will be very difficult to push the climate agenda, given that people are so concerned about one public health and two the economy, and just how many extreme numbers of people are out of work at this point," said Sanya Carley, an energy policy expert at Indiana University. That may mean climate activists have to reframe their message to focus more on using clean energy to revive the economy, and climate policy to grapple with the socioeconomic injustices highlighted by the pandemic, Carley said...MORE