Democrats urged to link clean energy to affordability as Iran war hikes up prices

Democrats should get louder in championing clean energy’s affordability and resilience from global shocks, according to some of the party’s leading voices on the climate.

As the Iran war roils economies by raising the cost of oil and gas, countries are aiming to accelerate their shift to cleaner energy. But in the US, Donald Trump has sought to kill off any alternative to fossil fuels while opposing Democrats have been reluctant to tie the conflict to any action on the climate crisis.

The closure of the strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally travels, in the wake of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran caused energy costs to spike around the world. In the US, the cost of gasoline has soared above $4.10 a gallon nationally, with Trump admitting the costs could even be “a little bit higher” by November.

Democrats have pointed to this as further evidence of the US president’s broken promises to lower the cost of living for Americans. But there have been few calls for a pivotal switch away from the volatility of fossil fuels in favor of clean energy in response to the conflict, to the frustration of those who support action on the climate crisis.

“There’s a timely clash on climate and costs that Democrats can win, as long as we have the nerve to actually show up to the fight,” said Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator, who added “true energy independence will be achieved by powering our economy with renewable energy, the fuel sources for which are unlimited, free and independent of geopolitical events”.

“Democrats will continue to lose the righteous and winnable fight over the future of clean energy if we cede the battlefield to fossil fuel liars and our own party’s misguided climate-hushers,” Whitehouse said.

Climate “hushing”, in which politicians and businesses downplay or ignore the need to cut planet-heating emissions, has been prevalent in the US during Trump’s second term. A bruising 2024 election loss and ongoing inflation concerns – polls show gasoline costs are Americans’ top concern about the Iran war – have left Democrats wrestling with a critique of affordability rather than the imperiled livability of the planet, despite the clear link between the two.

‘Unique moment of opportunity’

The Iran war provides a “unique moment of opportunity” for Democrats to extol the advantages of lower-pollution options like electric cars but the focus should be on “reducing consumer costs, which should’ve been the message over climate protection all along”, according to Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to Bill Clinton’s White House.

“I don’t think they’ve grasped the political opportunity yet,” Bledsoe said. “They have to stay really focused on how these next-generation technologies will provide a consumer benefit. When you pitch clean energy as cutting consumer costs first and improving the overall economy second, people are happy to cut emissions third.”

Translating this into a winning political message has been a struggle for Democrats who in Joe Biden’s administration passed sweeping climate legislation to spur new jobs in the clean energy sector, only for the bill to be gutted by Republicans now in control of Congress. Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader, has proposed a partial resurrection of incentives for clean energy should his party regain power.

But Democrats must do better to pitch solar, wind and battery technologies as a way to reduce US exposure to international fossil fuel costs dictated by global events, according to Ro Khanna, a leading Democratic member of Congress. “I really believe we missed a moment to do that with the Ukraine war,” he said. “We should have been linking the clean energy agenda to Americans’ economic security and our national security, and we should do that again.”

Longer term, Khanna added, the US needs to “wean ourselves off the petro-states. We need a moonshot for clean technology.”

Such a shift from fossil fuels, which scientists say is imperative if the world is to avert catastrophic climate impacts, has been stymied by Trump, who has implemented a “drill, baby drill” approach to oil and gas extraction and has taken extraordinary measures, even amid the Iran crisis, to halt domestic clean energy generation that he has called a “scam” and a “con job”.

The soaring price of oil may even be beneficial, Trump has suggested, because “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money”. This money is mostly flowing to large fossil fuel corporations, with the world’s largest 100 oil and gas companies making more than $30bn every hour in unearned profit during the first month of the war.

Trump’s approach differs starkly from that of other countries that have sought to rapidly reduce their exposure to a faraway conflict. Electric car sales have boomed in South Korea and Malaysia, while in Pakistan electric rickshaws have been selling out. “This is a wake-up call,” Indonesian president Prabowo Subianto said recently. “We will convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles. All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric.”

The European Union, too, plans to accelerate clean energy deployment to help alleviate electricity bills. “Every delayed investment in the energy transition risks greater cost for society at a later stage,” a draft European Commission proposal states. The plan comes ahead of a conference in Colombia this month where representatives from 85 countries will gather to craft a roadmap on how to move beyond the fossil fuel era.

The Iran war is a case study for the need to make this transition, according to the United Nations. “Clean energy is the antidote to fossil fuel cost chaos, because it is cheaper, safer and faster to market,” said Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief. “Wars don’t disrupt the supply of sunlight for solar power, and wind power does not depend on vulnerable shipping straits.”

The mounting toll of the climate crisis, though, is the primary reason to ditch coal, oil and gas, advocates argue. Such impacts are increasingly apparent in the US, as well as the rest of the world, with the country enduring its hottest and driest start to a year in recorded history, with record-breaking March heat and punishing bouts of drought, heat and wildfire strafing much of the US west.

Despite the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate science, two-thirds of Americans are worried about global heating, polling has shown, with most people in the US underestimating how concerned others are about the topic as it has receded from coverage in many media outlets.

There has been “a surprising silence” from Democrats and climate activists on how clean energy is cheaper, inexhaustible and more locally controlled compared with fossil fuels, according to Anthony Leiserowitz, an academic at Yale University who studies public perceptions of the climate crisis. “And, oh by the way, it reduces the carbon pollution causing global warming,” he added.

The Guardian wp:paragraph