Net Zero Is a Net Loser for Democrats

Time to face the facts.

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.

Early last 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. The Senate later 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?

I’ll tell you why: It’s because Americans, in poll after poll, and now election after election, have shown that their views on a rapid renewable energy transition oscillate between indifference and outright hostility.

Cost and reliability is what voters really care about when it comes to energy. Given four choices of their energy policy priorities in a 2024 YouGov climate issues survey, 37 percent of voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them. Another 36 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Meanwhile, just 19 percent thought that the effect of their energy consumption on the climate was most important.

These views are especially pronounced among the working-class (non-college) voters that Democrats are desperate to claw back from Trump. Given the four choices posed, 41 percent of these voters said the cost of the energy they use was most important to them and 35 percent said the availability of power when they need it was most important. Together, that’s a whopping 76 percent of the working class prioritizing the cost or reliability of energy over effects on the climate.

In a separate question, voters were most worried, by far, about the effects on energy prices from reductions in fossil fuels and increased use of renewables. And again, these concerns were more intense among working-class voters.

Unsurprisingly, given this pattern, it turns out that voters just don’t care very much about climate change, at least as a political issue. As part of that 2024 YouGov survey, voters were asked to assess their priorities for the government to address in the coming year. Among 18 options, climate change ranked 15th, beating out only global trade, drug addiction, and racial issues.

In fact, voters are deeply reluctant to put up with even minor changes to their energy bills to fight climate change.

When asked if they would be willing to pay $1 more to protect the climate, only 47 percent said yes, with a solid majority of the working class opposed to even paying that much. Raise the price to $20 and just 26 percent (21 percent among the working class) are willing to pony up the extra cash. Support keeps dropping as the price tag gets higher: Only 19 percent of voters said they were willing to spend an extra $40 a month, and a mere 11 percent said they’d be willing to pay another $100.

Consistent with these results, a September 2024 New York Times/Siena poll found that two-thirds of likely voters supported a policy of “increasing domestic production of fossil fuels such as oil and gas.” And similarly, support for increasing fossil fuel production was particularly strong among working-class voters: 72 percent of these voters backed such a policy. Support was even higher among white working-class voters (77 percent).

And remarkably, the poll found support for fossil fuels was also strong among liberal-leaning constituencies: 63 percent of voters under 30 said they wanted more oil and gas production, as did 58 percent of white college graduate voters and college voters overall.

In fact, the Times survey found substantial majority support for more fossil fuel production across every demographic group they measured: among all racial groups, in every region of the country, in cities and suburbs and rural areas, and regardless of education levels.

So what have the Democrats gotten from their fervent embrace of climate catastrophism and renewable energy over the last decade? Not much.

Sure, they did manage to pass the misleadingly-named Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which pumped hundreds of billions of dollars—if not over a trillion—into the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries. But the share of renewables in the country’s primary energy consumption increased only very modestly under Biden, from 10.5 percent to 11.7 percent. And the share of energy consumption from fossil fuels remains over 80 percent, just as it does in the world as a whole.

It’s just very hard to bring that share down quickly while keeping an advanced industrial economy chugging along. That’s why, despite the Biden administration’s professed climate change commitments, energy realities forced it to preside over record levels of oil production, record natural gas production, and record liquid-natural gas exports. (The YouGov survey found that most voters were not aware that this actually happened during the Biden administration but, when informed that it did, there was a strongly favorable reaction.)

Democrats have not yet fully absorbed the implications of these shifts and how the tide has decisively turned against their energy policies. Sure, there is a modest cohort in the party that has bowed to political reality and supports scrapping EV mandates, but the overwhelming proportion of the party remains committed to the unrealistic and unpopular net-zero goals that drive its energy policy agenda. Blue-state governors continue to roll out ambitious renewable energy plans, along with lawsuits and legislation to recover “climate change damages” from fossil fuel companies.

This is madness. As the great Vaclav Smil has observed:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

What is really needed is a program for energy abundance that prizes cost and reliability over maximalist climate change goals. Yet most Democrats still seem blithely unaware of the fundamental lack of support from voters for their current approach. You’d think the massive April 28 blackout of Spain and Portugal’s renewables-dependent electricity grid would encourage them to hit the pause button on those plans before such a disaster hits the United States, which would completely discredit the renewable energy push.

There is, however, a politically sound way for Democrats to fight climate change. And it involves taking a page from the Obama administration, which adopted the “All-of-the-Above” energy strategy, aimed at achieving “a sustainable energy-independent future” through “developing America’s many energy resources, including wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydropower, nuclear, oil, clean coal, and natural gas.”

The YouGov survey shows that 71 percent of voters still approve of this approach, strongly favoring the U.S. using a mix of energy sources including oil, coal, natural gas, and renewable energy. Only 29 percent preferred a strategy that looks to phase out fossil fuels completely.

What voters want—and need—is abundant, cheap, reliable energy. So when Democrats advocate for something that seemingly runs counter to that, they will lose elections. No amount of effort to tie every natural disaster to climate change is likely to generate the support needed for what is sure to be a lengthy energy transition.

Climate change is a serious problem, but it won’t be solved overnight. As we move toward a clean energy economy with an all-of-the-above strategy, energy must continue to flow into American homes. That means fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will continue to be an important part of the mix.

Democrats, hopefully, are starting to get the message: that it’s time to cast off the party’s delusions and meet energy realities—and voters—where they are.

Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is a contributing writer.