Summer has begun—which is to say, wildfires in the West are chasing residents from their homes, the snowpack has dwindled to near-record lows in several states, drought is spreading, and temperatures are regularly exploring new heights. Yet America does not seem to be sweating climate change. You could call it “climate hushing,” as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others do, or a “worry gap,” as one study has. Whatever you call it, America’s interest in talking about climate change is at an ebb.
Certainly, the Trump administration has made a point of disregarding climate change. Yet when President Trump made similar moves in his first term, he was met with a surge of resistance. Environmentalists and Democratic politicians formed their own climate alliances and pushed through state and local laws designed to take carbon out of the American economies. At the time, Jay Inslee, then the Washington governor, said, “We governors are going to step into this cockpit and fly the plane.”
These days, Democrats and even climate activists are acting as if fighting to slow global warming, let alone campaigning on it, is passé. As gas prices soared during the Iran war, blue-state governors have given fossil fuels another look, pushing the message of affordability, debating new gas pipelines, and putting off, in some cases, commitments to cut emissions. California’s frontrunner for governor, Xavier Becerra, who took campaign donations from oil companies, has not committed to phasing out gas cars as the state has planned; New York Governor Kathy Hochul rolled back the state’s landmark 2019 climate law. Congressional Democrats, who need to win seats during the midterms, are focused on economic issues. “Look at the Senate map,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, told me. “I mean, Alaska, Texas, Iowa. These are not places where anyone with brain cells would say: Run on blocking fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis.”
Many of the climate activists who came of age during Trump’s first term have since broadened their portfolio. The most famous one, Greta Thunberg, posts about Gaza and ICE raids alongside her critiques of the fossil-fuel industry; the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led group that championed the Green New Deal, has pivoted to defeating authoritarianism as a prerequisite for passing climate legislation, Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director, told me. Her organization was still hopeful, she said, early in the second Trump administration, that they could mobilize support among Republicans to save some of the funding for renewable energy and climate-related projects. But they quickly saw that wouldn’t happen. The Trump administration has pushed to expand oil drilling, including in sensitive Alaskan wilderness and California coastal waters; to block offshore wind farms; to stop regulating greenhouse-gas pollution, an effort EPA administrator Lee Zeldin described last year as “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion.”
While Democrats and environmentalists have challenged such actions in court, the public hasn’t made much noise about them, and some advocates fear that these kinds of rollbacks could be gathering their own quiet momentum, even in Democratic strongholds, Jon Binder, the executive director of the Model Climate Laws Initiative at Columbia University, told me.
Some environmentalists are more optimistic that the ever-improving economics of clean energy can keep tamping down emissions. They see the need to expand the electricity grid—if mainly to feed the hyper-scale data centers—as an opportunity to add wind and solar energy. And yet, the people who think most about climate seem immobilized. “It’s the responsibility of the environmental community to elucidate what’s going on,” Kathryn Phillips, a longtime California environmental advocate, told me. “But somehow they’re stuck.”
The people still trying to make noise about climate worry that this phase of “climate hushing” doesn’t actually reflect what Americans want. Voters care deeply about the growing risks of floods and wildfires, Whitehouse told me, and about the rising cost of homeowner’s insurance and the threat that poses to the wider economy. But how politicians talk about these issues matters, he said: You’re getting screwed, and your bills are going up because of the fossil-fuel industry is a “much more powerful and salient argument” than setting future climate targets without a way to get to them.
Voters in Rhode Island, where Whitehouse is from, are not exactly on the same page about these questions as voters in, say, Texas, but he may be right that Americans want something more from their leaders on this issue. Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at Yale University, which has long polled Americans about the climate, told me that a majority of people do want their politicians to take action on climate change. “What’s changing is leadership,” she said. “A lot of leaders are thinking, Oh, I’m going to get in trouble if I talk about it, or, It’s too polarizing. It’s turning into this vicious circle.”
Fewer people—in rich countries, at least—appear to be dwelling on the perils of a warming planet. In the U.S., just more than half of the respondents—51 percent—to the new Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, conducted by Gallup, considered climate “a very serious threat” over the next 20 years. The poll also found that people tended to underestimate how worried their peers were. Only 10 percent of Americans thought most other people here saw climate as a real threat. And that makes sense, on some level. If only a bare majority of Americans are that worried about climate, even those who are might reasonably question the country’s collective concern.
Marlon, the Yale scientist, has found, too, that in much of the country, people don’t worry enough about the real threats they face. One of her recent studies mapped heat risk across the country, as determined by the CDC, and compared it with survey results about how worried people are about extreme heat. Apart from the Southwest, where the lethal dangers of heat are well documented and discussed, the level of concern among the public in much of the country lags behind the expert assessments of the risk.
Few places, her study found, face a greater threat from heat while residents worry about it less than a swath of rural counties in Oregon. Three of the top 10 counties in the country with the greatest “worry gap” were in the state. (Virginia also had three in that group.) The finding made me wonder what it feels like out there, where climate threats abound but nobody stresses too much. A place like that seemed pretty in sync with our country at the moment.
I drove out to Gilliam County (population 2,000) last week—No. 4 on the “worry gap” list—on what happened to be the hottest day of the year so far. Thick smoke from a wildfire drifted over the Columbia River into this swath of north-central Oregon. (By the next evening, authorities had ordered more than 10,000 people to evacuate as another fire burned through parts of Spokane; one person died.) Temperature records would break that day in Portland and other cities across the Pacific Northwest. The state had just declared a drought emergency for Gilliam, along with nearly half of Oregon’s counties.
Amid the dry-land wheat fields and sagebrush hills where Trump won handily the past three elections, the residents I spoke with were keenly attuned to the conditions of the soil and the changes in the air. In Condon, the county seat, Gibb Wilkins, the interim city administrator and public-works superintendent, told me he was focused on trying to get the community to conserve water to avoid mandatory restrictions. The winter’s scant snow has stressed water supplies across the West; Condon did not run its snowplows once, when it normally might do so a dozen times. (Wilkins is also the town’s nighttime snowplow driver.) His public-works crews that day were out mowing grass in case they needed to build proper firebreaks later this summer. These employees are older—the town’s median age is more than 60—and he’s had to pull some of them off the job on particularly hot days. “We’re not cooling off like we used to at night,” he said.
If people did not express worry to an official survey taker, he suggested, it probably has to do with the hardiness and resolve of the residents, many of them farmers who have weathered a lifetime of lashing from the elements. “A lot of people here survived the farm downturns of the ’80s, and they just see it as another obstacle that they’ve got to overcome,” Wilkins said.
So maybe people just adapt without complaining. With the morning temperature in the mid-80s and rising, Mark Griffith was kneeling on the patio outside the Elks Club, spreading concrete. The 66-year-old cowboy and construction worker has spent a life outside here. “I enjoy it,” he told me. “It gets a little hot for moving cows around and stuff.” He’d noticed the fire season seems to keep starting earlier, he said, in June, or even May. And he’d noticed that the four-foot snowfalls he’d seen as a kid, back in the ’60s and ’70s, had disappeared. “We’re definitely seeing a change in the environment, for sure,” he said. “What causes it? I don’t know. I’m sure man caused a lot of it, you know. We ruin about everything we touch.”
He knelt back to his work, positioning a metal pole. He was building a sunshade.
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