Is It Better to Speak, or to ‘Hush’?

Hi, I’m Kate Waxman, and this is my first edition of Today’s Climate. I’m taking this newsletter over from my colleague Kiley Price, who I admire for her sharp coverage. I’m a Florida native and was a fellow at Inside Climate News this summer, where I covered climate and environmental justice in my home state. That meant following fights over AI data centers, the homes least prepared for the super El Niño and water quality aid. Across all of that reporting, climate change kept showing up in power bills, insurance premiums and hurricane recovery, but rarely by name. That gap is what this week’s edition is about.

Many candidates in this year’s midterm elections have faced a dilemma heavily romanticized in literature and cinema: “Is it better to speak, or to die?” The choice between speaking up or letting silence take over has a literal, existential meaning when applied to “climate hushing.” Candidates have opted not to discuss climate change in order to protect themselves from political backlash or polarization. 

The case for hushing: The logic for this is simple—talk about what voters say they care about the most. In the Environmental Voter Project’s survey of battleground voters, 66 percent ranked cost of living among their top issues, while 16 percent said the same of climate change and pollution. (You can hear more on this survey and climate hushing in the latest episode of our Inside Climate podcast.) Even a University of California, Santa Barbara, team that set out to test the hushers’ claims conceded the point on priorities: Climate ranked 12th of 15 issues. Strategists also argue the word “climate” itself is a liability. Democratic pollster Jonathan Voss told E&E News that “many Republican voters have been conditioned to feel a certain way” when they hear the word.  

At a rally against a data center this summer in my home state of Florida, nobody I spoke with used the word “climate.” They talked about water, noise and their power bills. And continuing with the theme, my colleagues Claire Barber and Marianne Lavelle reported on a paper from the Searchlight Institute with a perplexing title: “The First Rule About Solving Climate Change: Don’t Say Climate Change.”

Candidates have listened. My colleague Peter Aldhous found that mentions of climate change in Democrats’ congressional press releases plummeted after 2025, giving way to energy affordability once the Iran war sent oil prices soaring. Faced with the choice to speak or hush, Syracuse University geographer Matthew Huber chose hush. For now, he wrote in The New York Times this spring, “it might be better to say nothing at all.”

The case for speaking: Despite these claims, many voters have said they want to hear more. Likely voters in eight Senate battleground states want politicians to talk more about climate and pollution, not less, by 59 percent to 17 percent, according to the Environmental Voter Project. Last week, I reported on a poll that showed that Florida likely voters chose protecting the environment over economic growth 61 percent to 26 percent. Registered Republicans agreed, 48 percent to 35 percent, and the pollster, Sean Freeder, called it “a blowout.” 

Yet in the state’s Senate race, that sentiment isn’t coming through as directly as you might imagine. Rather, it’s showing up in fights over data centers, power bills and hurricane recovery. These all connect back to climate change, but people aren’t talking about that. As Sara Peach writes at Yale Climate Connections, voters take their cues from leaders. When candidates mirror the polls and stay quiet, it can create “a vicious cycle,” teaching the public the issue matters less than it does.

On one hand, it’s hard to blame the candidates for wanting to protect their political image. On the other hand, choosing silence structurally ensures the very outcome we are trying to avoid. Did candidates in your area mention climate change by name? Email me to share your observations. 

The Latest on Earth 

• Yerevan: The United Nations biodiversity summit, COP17, closed Saturday with the “Yerevan Pathway,” a pledge to speed up cuts to nature-harming subsidies and strengthen national plans for oceans and freshwater, but its fund for paying Indigenous and local communities left nearly empty. The Guardian’s verdict: The agreements need to be fast-tracked to make a real difference.
• Atmosphere: A new report shows that the Trump administration’s cuts to satellite weather forecasting will set the country back by a decade, according to CNN. The cuts began in spring 2025, when the administration directed NOAA to scale back its next generation of weather satellites, dropping planned instruments that would have tracked air quality, wildfire smoke and monitored water quality.
• Mediterranean: The European Union has blocked an extension of the Mediterranean deep-sea trawling ban. According to Oceanographic Magazine, this decision leaves deep-sea habitats vulnerable to the impacts of fishing. 

From Our Bureaus: Marianne Lavelle on “Climate Hushing” 

If you want to know where climate went this election season, ask Marianne Lavelle. ICN’s Washington bureau chief has been covering national elections for over 30 years, and she reported last week that candidates and climate advocates alike have traded talk of climate risk for issues that are closer to home, like data centers and sky-high energy bills. I asked her whether climate has really gone quiet, or just changed its name.

KATE WAXMAN: In 2018, climate helped flip the House. Why has it gone quiet this time?

MARIANNE LAVELLE: In 2018, it just was such a galvanizing issue, especially for young voters. And this year, we’re in a completely different atmosphere, and it’s not only because Trump is denying that climate is a problem; it’s because his presidency is bringing to the surface much deeper problems that the whole climate movement cares about, and they’re focusing on those issues before focusing on climate.

WAXMAN: Is climate hushed, or just hidden inside the talk about energy bills and data centers?

LAVELLE: If you just scratch the surface beneath what people’s concerns are, they’re very upset at this completely unregulated spread of this new industry that affects energy, land, water, and, ultimately, that’s a climate issue. And the one thing that the administration is doing is kind of picking winners and losers. The winners being the fossil fuel industry, ordering coal plants that are uneconomic to run, taking away the licenses of offshore wind projects that were already approved; those things just don’t sit well with people when they’re already seeing their utility bills are so high.

WAXMAN: If control of Congress flips, what could actually change on climate in the next two years?

LAVELLE: One thing I think that Congress is really going to be pushed to do is to at least talk about some sort of regulation for the data center industry, and that sets the trajectory for which way fossil fuel use is going to go in the coming years. The other thing is that you’re going to see a lot of oversight by the House, in particular, of some of these things that the administration has been doing, like shutting down offshore wind, or telling coal plants to run when they were supposed to be closed down. These are the things that in drawing attention to them could really put some brakes on the direction that the Trump administration is going in.

WAXMAN: What did you learn from this story—what’s the one thing that you didn’t know before?

LAVELLE: I didn’t know how much the Democrats are really planning for when and if they take over, and I only scratch the surface of that in this story. They don’t want to pass climate legislation that’s just Democrats. They want to pass legislation that’s positive for climate that they can get bipartisan support for, and I do think you may see that coalesce around energy affordability because of the fact that solar and wind are so competitive and cheaper in places, and that gives them a lot more ability than the Democrats even would have had 10 years ago to push forward on energy policy.

News From Us and Our Partners 

1. Microplastics may not be as inert as we thought: A new study found that tiny plastic particles react with water to create “free radicals”: unstable molecules tied to inflammation and disease, our partner Living on Earth reports. 

Why it matters: Like kindling compared with a log, plastic broken into tiny pieces has far more surface area to react, which may help explain why microplastics have been linked to heart attacks, strokes and other conditions.

From the Amazon community that beat Big Oil: Indigenous leaders challenging offshore drilling in northern Brazil traveled to Sarayaku, Ecuador, whose Kichwa people forced out an oil company and won a landmark 2012 international court ruling that Ecuador violated their rights by allowing oil exploration without consulting them, Katie Surma reports. Why it matters: Sarayaku helped pioneer the “rights of nature” movement, which treats an ecosystem the way the law already treats a corporation, as an entity with its own rights that can be defended in court.

2. Amendment 3 and Florida’s water: If you’re voting in Florida today, you’ll see Amendment 3, which raises homestead property tax exemptions significantly. 

Why it matters: Reducing this tax base would strip tens of millions of dollars from the South Florida Water Management District’s budget. Read Amy Green’s article to learn more on how these shortfalls could worsen urban flooding in low-lying areas.

Thanks for reading this edition of Today’s Climate, a newsletter dedicated to highlighting the latest essential climate news. 

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