It may be starting to dawn on at least some Democrats that their heavy bet on renewable energy and “net-zero” emissions has been a huge political loser.
Earlier this month, 35 House Democrats voted alongside their Republican colleagues to kill a law in California—a version of which has been adopted by 11 other states—mandating that all new car and truck models sold in the state would have to be “electric or otherwise nonpolluting” by 2035. Last week, the Senate followed suit, with Michigan Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin breaking ranks to join the GOP in ending the mandate.
The Democratic response, at least outside California, was relatively muted. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer’s complaints about ending the EV mandate were mostly grounded in dull, procedural complaints about whether Congress had overstepped its powers. There wasn’t a lot of the screeching we’ve heard in recent years about how, as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it in 2019, the “climate crisis” was “the existential threat of our time.”
What a difference a few years makes. The “Green New Deal,” that much-ballyhooed proposal to essentially restructure the entire economy around renewable energy, is dead and buried. President Donald Trump is deregulating the energy sector, eliminating renewable energy subsidies as fast as he can, promoting fossil fuel production, and withdrawing from international energy agreements. And he’s doing so with little attention from the media or protests from Democrats.
So what gives? Why are Democrats retreating on an issue that was, until very recently, so central to their agenda?
