To check President Trump’s growing grip on the judiciary in the midterms or to advance a legislative agenda in 2029, Democrats need to answer a very difficult question: How can the party keep winning in states like North Carolina, become competitive again in Ohio and expand the electoral map to include Texas or even Alaska and Kansas?
Almost any viable path to a Senate majority runs through those states. They happen to be the ones (along with Iowa and Florida) where Kamala Harris came closest to winning in 2024 that currently have all-Republican Senate delegations.
There are some promising ideas, but they are somewhat abstract: abundance, populism, affordability and the battle against oligarchy.
There is a specific issue that could both boost Democrats in those key states and fit within those frameworks — a position the party embraced in the relatively recent past.
Liberals should support America’s oil and gas industry.
This won’t be popular with everyone on the left. But President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Prime Minister Mark Carney in Canada and the labor parties of Norway and Australia have done it. It’s not just about votes; it’s also a realistic path toward a cleaner environment.
Start with the politics. It wasn’t that long ago — in 2012, for Barack Obama’s re-election — that the Democratic Party’s national platform argued that “we can move towards a sustainable energy-independent future if we harness all of America’s great natural resources.”
Since then, the party has pivoted toward hostility to oil and gas. In a 2020 debate with Mr. Trump, Joe Biden vowed to focus on a green economy and “transition from the oil industry,” and sought to halt new oil and gas leasing early in his term (though ultimately the industry, after defeating the leasing pause in court, thrived). The animus is often invisible to participants in factional arguments because so many of them are based in coastal metropolises that lack major natural resource industries. But from the standpoint of formerly blue or purple states like Pennsylvania and Ohio — or a place like Texas, where Democrats were once optimistic that a growing Hispanic population would deliver them a vast trove of voters — the change is notable.
A changing climate, a changing world
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Climate change around the world: In “Postcards From a World on Fire,” 193 stories from individual countries show how climate change is reshaping reality everywhere, from dying coral reefs in Fiji to disappearing oases in Morocco and far, far beyond.
The role of our leaders: Writing at the end of 2020, Al Gore, the 45th vice president of the United States, found reasons for optimism in the Biden presidency, a feeling perhaps borne out by the passing of major climate legislation. That doesn’t mean there haven’t been criticisms. For example, Charles Harvey and Kurt House argue that subsidies for climate capture technology will ultimately be a waste.
The worst climate risks, mapped: In this feature, select a country, and we’ll break down the climate hazards it faces. In the case of America, our maps, developed with experts, show where extreme heat is causing the most deaths.
What people can do: Justin Gillis and Hal Harvey describe the types of local activism that might be needed, while Saul Griffith points to how Australia shows the way on rooftop solar. Meanwhile, small changes at the office might be one good way to cut significant emissions, writes Carlos Gamarra.
Mr. Obama’s approach, which he characterized in speeches and campaign videos as an “all of the above” energy policy, succeeded in delivering a solid re-election win against a backdrop of falling American greenhouse gas emissions and stricter standards for clean air and clear water. It also succeeded at its stated goal of advancing American energy independence.
Thanks to Obama-era policies, including a historic deal that re-legalized crude oil exports while increasing investments in clean electricity, the United States is now a significant net exporter of oil as well as natural gas.
The benefits of this to the American economy are large. Natural resource extraction offers good-paying blue-collar jobs. It also generates useful tax revenue. In more abstract terms, it improves the country’s terms of trade — when foreigners are buying oil from us rather than us from them, it reduces the cost of our imports of foreign-made food, clothing and other products, in that way driving down the cost of living for everyone.
The national security benefits are also clear. As long as the world is using oil — and it absolutely still is — it is much better for that to be American oil rather than oil from Russia, Iran, Venezuela or Saudi Arabia.
There’s a strong environmental case for Democrats taking America’s natural resource wealth seriously as an asset. Center-left parties in other major energy-producing countries do not position themselves as enemies of domestic production. They take the problems of climate change and other pollution issues seriously by investing in measures to reduce long-term domestic consumption of dirty energy and promote new technologies.
But they acknowledge that oil and gas trade in global markets and individual nations cannot clean up the planet with unilateral supply-side measures. American oil production is less carbon-intensive than its competitors in Russia, Iran, Iraq and Venezuela. Supplying it to global markets is a win-win for the economy and the global environment. To be clear, in any reconciliation with the left, the oil and gas industry will have to do its part, too, and accept climate science. Democrats should insist on best practices, regulate methane leaks, promote electrification of drilling operations and support the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. But they should also work with other low-intensity producers and climate-conscious importing regions, like Japan and the European Union, to promote preferential treatment for cleaner oil.
The mind-set shift needed here is to acknowledge that while climate change is real and harmful, the utility of fossil fuels is not something the oil and gas industry tricked the public into. There is not currently any technologically viable substitute to oil as a fuel for the airplanes and large oceangoing vessels on which global commerce depends.
Electric trains work extremely well, but a majority of America’s freight lines rely on diesel, and building the infrastructure to electrify them would require time and money that has not yet been spent. Electric cars are growing their market share in the United States and other countries, but E.V.s are not yet price competitive when it comes to the kinds of large trucks that American consumers tend to prefer.
Some of these issues are easier to solve than others, but that should be a lodestar for people concerned about climate change — solving the not-yet-solved problems that keep the world dependent on fossil fuels, not trying to strangle American oil production.
The case for natural gas is even clearer. It is much cleaner than coal, consumption of which is still high and rising globally. Increased gas production, by displacing coal, has been the single largest driver of American emissions reductions over time. To the extent that foreign countries can be persuaded to rely on American gas exports rather than coal to fill the gaps left by the ongoing build-out of intermittent wind and solar that’s a climate win.
Gas and renewables are closer to friends than rivals when it comes to electricity generation. From a purely economic standpoint, the value of gas is that unlike wind or solar power, it is dispatchable on a moment’s notice. The downside is that it has fuel costs. Renewables are precisely the reverse: delivering zero marginal cost electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, but without the ability to generate electrons on demand.
Because of these complementary properties, the cheapest way to add reliable electricity in places where natural gas is abundantly available is with a mix of gas and renewables.
Adding cheap electricity is an environmental imperative. Electric cars and heat pumps are much cleaner than conventional alternatives, even if the electricity is generated largely by burning natural gas.
Insisting on a majority of renewable electricity raises costs dramatically, slows the pace of electrification and ultimately leaves us further from a low-carbon future. Renewable boosters are optimistic that improvements in batteries and technologies to improve demand flexibility will ultimately overcome the cost barriers to 100 percent renewable grids. Others believe strongly that alternative zero-emissions forms of energy, like advanced geothermal or a new generation of small modular reactors, will be the solution — all promising ideas that are worthy of public sector support.
But until that happens, responsible environmental policy is inseparable from sustainable political strategy.
Tackling these big, difficult problems requires visionary investments in research and infrastructure, and that in turn requires people who care about climate change to be in positions with political power. To achieve that, Democrats must acknowledge that many voters do not want to bear short-term economic pain to address long-term climate issues.
A realistic look at the Senate map makes it clear that Democrats’ hopes hinge on states that have important fossil fuel industries. A Democratic Party that is open to responsible stewardship of those states’ natural resources can win majorities and invest in solutions for tomorrow — just as Democratic governors in energy-producing states like New Mexico and Colorado have used oil and gas revenue to finance a goal of universal child care and historic upgrades to conservation and recreation on public lands.
The current view from the environmental movement, as expressed by the climate activist and author Genevieve Guenther, is that Democrats should ignore these practicalities because “reducing emissions by some marginal amount while locking in fossil fuel development prevents us from drawing emissions down to (net) zero.”
In this approach to making policy, one starts with an end goal — two degrees of warming; global net zero by 2050 — and asks whether some specific new project is consistent with that goal or not.
Since this would require a very rapid phaseout of fossil fuel use in rich countries, no new fossil fuel infrastructure is permissible even when the infrastructure would — like new pipelines to the northeastern United States or new liquefied natural gas export terminals — likely make emissions lower by promoting more rapid electrification.
This mentality explains why green groups continually find themselves opposing bipartisan congressional negotiations to enact permitting reform legislation that would make it easier to build both renewable and fossil fuel infrastructure. A world that was heading to global net zero in 25 years would not enact such a reform, so it’s unacceptable.
This approach makes the perfect the enemy of the good, makes it impossible for Democrats to fulfill their pledges around affordability and stands no chance of securing the congressional majorities that are needed to fund investments in tackling the hard problems of decarbonization.
Taking climate seriously means adopting politically and economically sustainable approaches to energy economics, and that means a reconciliation with all forms of American energy.
Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias), a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger” and writes at Slow Boring.
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