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This article was originally published here.
By Kate Gordon, Nuin-Tara Key, Matthew Armsby, Alvaro S. Sanchez, and Craig Segall
Since November 2024, many of us in the climate and clean energy advocacy community have been grappling with a key question: why did so many voters decide to stay home at a moment of real reckoning for climate action?
In the debate that’s followed, some have focused on messaging, asking how we could have energized voters with better storytelling around climate action. Others have focused on how we need to change who we are targeting for our outreach and on what channels we are reaching them. And others have taken the troubling path of arguing that no real change is needed, and that we just need to stay the course to defend our gains.
But what if the issue isn’t the storytelling or outreach, but the reality of how our climate policies actually work on the ground? What if the answer is not just defending our gains, but the creation of new models and tools to reimagine what climate leadership actually can look like?
The five of us – who have worked for many years to design, implement, and champion California’s climate policies – are an unlikely group who agree that our challenges don’t start with packaging, but with policy outcomes. We’re ready to own up to the fact that not everything we spent years building is working.
That’s why we’ve come together to urge a new conversation: How do we build an enduring climate agenda that delivers economic prosperity?
In California and across the nation, cost and affordability challenges like stagnant wages and the cost of groceries, housing, and energy rose to the top. We saw voters support candidates that they felt genuinely speak to their primary concerns–even when those candidates lacked real solutions, or worse, preyed on people’s real economic concerns to advance an agenda of greed and hate.
The perverse outcome of an election about affordability is a set of policymakers who are actively promoting income inequality and billionaire tax cuts and who characterize core progressive policies – including many climate policies and programs – as unaffordable, elitist, and incapable of delivering concrete benefits to working people.
Against this backdrop, we propose a hypothesis: it is time to expand the focus of the broader climate movement from regulation and technology as the primary driver of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to a broad-based economic development agenda that can deliver a new climate economy.
To be sure, our earlier focus made sense: the environmental movement made significant progress in the 1970s in building out regulatory structures to address the environmental impacts from industry. Adding greenhouse gases into this regulatory structure, and managing them like local pollutants, was a smart policy move and achieved significant gains in the last decade, including less air pollution, more commercially available clean technologies, allowing clean energy to dominate new electricity additions.
But cutting fossil fuel emissions largely by swapping in new technologies only takes us so far – and misses the reality that pollution policy is a subset of a larger economic shift. First, the economy-wide energy transition requires not only cleaning up existing industry, but actually building out an entirely new set of infrastructure and industries that will be the backbone of a new climate economy – and doing so in ways that do not further worsen economic inequalities.
Second, building resilience to the climate impacts that are already baked into our system requires an entirely new approach to managing physical risks, one that doesn’t continue to shift costs to the public but actually aligns economic incentives toward investment in climate adaptation.
And third, it gives us a chance to build a new climate economy that doesn’t resemble many legacy energy companies in exploiting the planet and its people. A climate economy can’t just be prosperous and resilient; it also must be rooted in equity. A climate economy recognizes that we are all part of an interconnected system and that we are only as strong as our ability to care for those among us who need the most support. We need an economic model that radically meets the needs of all people, including those who have suffered the most under our current paradigm—an economy in which all communities can thrive.
It’s not that strong pollution standards and big climate investments are wrong or misguided. But without equally ambitious policies driving economic equity and resilient economic development, they are not enough to effect a truly just energy transition–or build the political will for sustained climate action.
And by not bringing in economic policy tools in tandem, we’ve lost touch with the very people we need to welcome with more far reaching climate action. The climate movement is failing to deliver the economic prosperity it promised because it has failed to focus on place-based, people-centered economic development.
We believe our best path toward a new climate-smart economy is for climate policy to work for working people. “Climate leader” states like California must shake off our paralysis and move urgently if we are going to achieve the climate progress we must.
Right now, that’s not looking likely. While China has built an entire high speed rail network and the most renewable energy in the world, California is still debating permitting reform and is in its third decade of trying to build a single high speed rail line. Our climate and economy policies move too slow, don’t build fast enough, and don’t ensure benefits are broadly shared.
It is time to investigate and design a new winning formula, backed by a more expansive coalition that can take on the complex challenges of a wholesale economic transition. That means addressing inequality head-on, driving economic growth across every region of the state, and incorporating measures to shore up communities’ resilience in the face of more frequent and severe climate disasters.
If California wants to sell the world on climate action, we must address a more challenging political environment than we have ever faced before through deep listening, understanding, and pivoting our approach to climate policy to address the very real needs and concerns of Californians of all geographic and political stripes while leaning in on project delivery that actually increases the impact and reach of climate action.
This is no time to scale back. Climate policy can make daily life better for Californians but only if we grapple candidly with new challenges and stubborn existing problems. A truly climate-smart economic policy must not only move California toward a more sustainable and resilient future, but also directly address the current crises of affordability and inequality.
Over the coming months, we intend to work in partnership with community, climate, economic development, labor, business, philanthropic and other stakeholders to identify ways to pivot California’s climate leadership, building on existing successes and finding new approaches that deliver demonstrable outcomes on climate and economic prosperity for working Californians, help build a broad constituency and lasting political gains, and establish a new model for the nation.
California has a duty to lead. Let’s not just block the attacks on climate progress, but rethink our climate policy solutions so that they can equally value and deliver economic prosperity, emissions reductions, and climate resilience.
Alvaro Sanchez is the former Vice President of Policy for the Greenlining Institute. Craig Segall is a former Deputy Executive Officer of the California Air Resources Board. Kate Gordon is the CEO and Nuin-Tara Key is the Executive Director of Programs at California Forward. Matt Armsby is the Interim President at Resources Legacy Fund. The authors speak only for themselves not their clients or former organizations.
