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Will Young Voters’ Initial Excitement for Harris Get Them to the Polls?

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Friday, September 27, 2024

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Tuesday, the youth-led activist group Climate Defiance—which had loudly called for Joe Biden to withdraw his bid for reelection earlier this year—endorsed Kamala Harris for president. But despite that support and soaring enthusiasm from young people after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, with less than 40 days left until the election, excitement has cooled off among many young voters who are prioritizing climate and calling for stronger commitments from the candidate. After the September 10 debate, some young voters and climate groups were unimpressed by both candidates’ support for oil and gas production, voicing dismay over Harris’ shift to the center on climate. “If Harris wants to win, she needs to be far more progressive than she was tonight,” wrote Gen-Z for Change on X after the debate. “She needs to ban fracking, support public transit, secure a permanent ceasefire, and more.”  But the group prioritized defeating the Republican presidential candidate: “Regardless, Trump is dangerous,” the post continued. “Trump is a racist. Trump is a fa[s]cist dictator. We need to stop Trump.” The Sunrise Movement stated that the debate was a “missed opportunity” for Harris to contrast her record on climate with Trump’s.  “Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the youth-led organization wrote. Both groups had been strong voices on the left calling for Biden to cease his reelection bid, and had voiced optimism about Harris’ potential to support swift action on the climate crisis, citing her past support of policies like the Green New Deal and her legal prosecution of oil and gas companies. Gen Z for Change and the Sunrise Movement are among the many progressive organizations phone banking, canvassing and otherwise pushing for youth voter turnout in swing states. But according to some activists, the Harris campaign isn’t doing enough to inspire young people to show up to the polls. The voter outreach nonprofit Vote.org reported a 585 percent increase in voter registration and verifications the night of the debate, and a link Taylor Swift posted on Instagram that night to Vote.gov with her long-awaited endorsement of Harris reportedly received more than 400,000 clicks within 24 hours, more than half of the website’s overall visits that day. But some young voters are still calling for more concrete policy from Harris. “Honestly, young people have grown up seeing politicians share platitudes that they never live up to, and part of what we are just merely asking is, what is your plan?” asked John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old Sunrise organizer based in Washington, DC. “For Harris to meaningfully win over young people, she should show the electorate broadly, but also young people, what she’s fighting for.” For months, Biden seemed to have drawn out everything but passion from young voters frustrated with his mixed record on climate, angered by his lack of empathy for Palestinian deaths, despairing at his debate performance, disdainful of his age, and disenchanted with the US. electoral system in general. In the spring, some polls showed Biden, who won young voters by a more than 20-point margin in 2020, struggling to maintain a lead over Trump with Millennial and Gen Z voters. Even young people who vehemently oppose Trump weren’t enthused by Biden, and were loudly and publicly urging him to step down. When he finally did and Harris announced her candidacy, the political winds seemed to change. Within two days Vote.org saw a 700 percent spike in voter registrations, the largest increase in the entire election cycle, higher than after the September 10 debate and even higher than when Taylor Swift promoted voter registration last year. Of those 38,500 newly registered voters, 83 percent were under 34 years old, Vote.org reported. The day after Harris announced her candidacy for president, Shiv Soin, a 23-year-old climate activist and director of the youth-led environmental justice organization, Treeage, in New York City, said that he was feeling energy he hadn’t seen in years. “I think in the last 24 hours, there has been more excitement in the Democratic Party than there has been since Obama,” Soin said. According to an August poll from NextGen America, a progressive nonprofit focused on increasing youth voter turnout, motivation to cast ballots had grown among young people in battleground states since the spring, with 78 percent saying they are “extremely motivated” to vote in August, compared with 68 percent in March.  Both campaigns are courting young voters. Trump has enlisted Gen Z social media influencers like video game streamer Adin Ross and TikTokker Bryce Hall to try to reach conservative youth online, while the Harris campaign’s rapid-response social media accounts have latched onto viral trends like coconut tree memes—alluding to a Harris comment widely shared online—and pop music references. But the age group leans Democratic. “What is this? A policy platform for ants, @KamalaHarris? The climate proposal needs to be at least three times bigger.” In the swing states NextGen polled, Harris has drawn support from 68 percent of young “double haters”—voters who disapproved of both Biden and Trump—compared with Trump’s 6 percent. Previously, Biden took 29 percent of double haters in those states and Trump took 9 percent. Harris’ pick of Tim Walz also garnered praise from young climate leaders, who pointed out his support of clean energy transition legislation in Minnesota, while others criticized his approval of the Line 3 pipeline that carries Canadian tar sands oil through the state. Days after Harris’ campaign announcement, Sunrise Movement communications director Stevie O’Hanlon called her candidacy a “game-changer” that would put “millions of young voters in play,” and could lead to “historic” youth voter turnout.  But a week after the first debate, the initial excitement from young climate voters seems to be fading, she said.  “In the weeks after Biden dropped out…there was a real upsurge of enthusiasm and energy among young people, and I think a lot of hope among people who felt disappointed by President Biden that she would strike a different course,” O’Hanlon said. “I think there are ways that she has struck another course, and there are also ways where she has stood by some of Biden’s unpopular policies with young people. I think she is a little bit at a turning point now, as we are about 50 days out from the election, about how much deep enthusiasm is she going to be able to draw?” Sunrise has said publicly it intends to reach more than 1.5 million young voters through phone, face-to-face and digital outreach in support of the Harris campaign. As of September 19, Sunrise reported that it has reached more than 350,000 young voters in swing states and plans to ramp up its outreach in the coming weeks. Gen Z for Change, the League of Conservation Voters, NextGen America and Hip Hop Caucus are also doing outreach to young climate voters. O’Hanlon said that most undecided voters the group has contacted are deciding between Harris or abstention from the election, and said she thinks that Harris’ support of fracking during the debate—combined with what she sees as the lack of a comprehensive climate platform, and a failure to take a stronger stance on Gaza—will lose her points with some undecided young voters. “I think it really hurts her credibility with young voters who feel like they’ve been burned before by politicians and aren’t super willing to give grace to politicians right now,” O’Hanlon said. Michael Greenberg, founder of Climate Defiance, met with Harris’ chief climate advisor, Ike Irby, on September 3, and said that he urged the campaign to support an end to fossil-fuel subsidies and exports, as well as a phase down of domestic fossil fuel use, including shutting down projects like the Line 3 pipeline.  “We make our demands based not on what is convenient or easy but what is absolutely necessary,” Greenberg said. “We recognize that there’s obviously a tremendous difference between Trump and Kamala on climate, but we need Kamala to go bolder.” On September 9, the organization posted a critique on X alongside a screenshot of the paragraph-long climate plan on Harris’ campaign website.  “What is this? A policy platform for ants, @KamalaHarris? The climate proposal needs to be at least three times bigger,” the post stated. At a fundraiser on September 24, however, Climate Defiance endorsed Harris for president. Greenberg said that the decision to do so came after discussions with staff and the organization’s board, and a survey of members, in which he estimated about three-quarters of the votes went toward endorsing Harris and the rest went to third-party candidates. Harris “seems to think that she needs to tack to the center on climate and that just isn’t necessarily what polling shows.” “Obviously she’s not perfect at all but we’d rather protest her and try to move her than be protesting Trump who is worse and who we are not as well positioned to move,” Greenberg said, the day before the event. “It’s a crucial time and it’s important that we play our part in saving our country from tyranny.” In early September, Sunrise Movement, Gen Z for Change, the Green New Deal Network and the Climate and Community Project released “Unity 2025,” a platform advocating for clean energy investments, climate-smart farming, public investments in affordable housing and more. The effort to counter Project 2025, a policy wish list for a second Trump administration spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is billed as a way to urge Harris to listen to young voters who want to see real policy commitments from her campaign. Sunrise’s executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, has had multiple meetings with the Harris campaign, including with Irby and new climate engagement director Camila Thorndike. Shiney-Ajay said that her meetings have focused on showing the campaign that there’s an active base of climate-interested young voters who could be mobilized by stronger commitments from the campaign. “[Harris] seems to think that she needs to tack to the center on climate and that just isn’t necessarily what polling shows or at least our efforts on the ground show,” she said. “In my opinion, it’s a little bit of a miscalculation.” In recent years, young voters from both major parties have consistently ranked climate as a top issue, and in this year’s election, it’s more of a priority for them than ever: An Environmental Voter Project poll released last month found that 40 percent of young voters in key battleground states wouldn’t vote for a candidate that doesn’t prioritize “addressing climate change,” calling it a “deal breaker.” An additional 40 percent said they would “prefer” a candidate who prioritized climate change.  Youth groups on the left have loudly pressured Harris to take swift action against the fossil fuel industry. A coalition of youth-led organizations including groups focused on climate, immigration and gun control issued a set of policy demands for Harris, emphasizing ending fossil fuel subsidies, investing in green housing and stopping approval of new oil and gas projects. Meanwhile, Trump, a frequent espouser of climate denial, has promised to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, ramp up domestic oil and gas drilling and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s landmark climate law and the biggest investment in slowing global warming in US history. That may be putting some conservative youth votes in play. Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO of the American Conservation Coalition, a group bringing conservative youth together to advocate for environmental protections, said that the Republican party’s failure to platform policy addressing climate change is losing them support from young conservatives.  Currently, nearly a quarter of Congress espouses some form of climate denial, but Franz said that young Republicans aren’t on board with such messages. And, while climate might not be enough to motivate staunch conservatives to vote Democrat, it might push them to abstain from the election, she said.  The Environmental Voters Project said 38 percent of young battleground voters report knowing little, if anything, about Joe Biden’s signature climate bill. “There’s a huge electoral liability for politicians who are still stuck in those types of rhetoric circles,” Franz, 27, said. “It is something that you see both sides of the aisle of young conservatives and young progressives pushing back against, because it’s just not the reality that we live in.” Daniel Rissanen, 22, grew up in a conservative family in Georgia and always considered himself a Republican. He voted for Trump in his first election in 2020, but after the January 6 insurrection he felt alienated from the party he’d grown up in. Now Rissanen identifies as an Independent, and if he had to vote today he’d choose Harris, although he has also considered voting for a third-party candidate. Either way, he is actively discouraging his friends from voting for Trump. “The election no longer feels as tense, as violent, as pressurized, as it did when we thought it was Biden-Trump, which is a relief, I think, for the country in general,” Rissanen said. Climate change is a priority for Rissanen, a recent college graduate and computer numerical control machinist at a fabrication shop in Atlanta. One of his top issues is conservation, with a particular focus on public lands. Seeing Trump gut protections for public lands and sell or lease them off to the highest bidder made him even less enthusiastic about his candidacy.  “Our public lands in this country are really important for people to…get away and get out in nature,” Rissanen said. “It’s also really important to conserve those ecosystems to help slow climate change.” Like many voters across age groups, Rissanen hadn’t heard of the Inflation Reduction Act, but when he learned what it was he was enthusiastic and said it was the type of information that had potential to influence his vote toward Harris. Polling from NextGen in battleground states found that two-thirds of young voters had heard of the IRA, but according to the Environmental Voters Project, 38 percent of young battleground voters reported not knowing much, if anything, about the bill. Only 35 percent knew it included climate provisions.  Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, executive director of NextGen, said that the organization is prioritizing educating young people about the IRA and its provisions, emphasizing opportunities for green jobs. “When young people learn about what the Inflation Reduction Act is, they overwhelmingly support it and are excited about it,” she said. But climate action is not a priority for all young voters, and some young conservatives are still staunch supporters of Trump. According to NextGen’s latest poll, 40 percent of voters 18-35 in battleground states are planning to vote for Trump, compared with 57 percent for Harris. Jordyn Landau, a 27-year-old resident of Ames, Iowa, voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and plans to vote for him again this year. She was originally drawn to him because he seemed like an outsider to politics, and at this point, she doesn’t think there’s much Trump could do to lose her vote.  A certified scuba diver, Landau said that she cares about clean air, clean water and marine wildlife, and believes in climate change.  “We all want our environment to thrive,” Landau said. “We don’t want the end of the world because of different natural disasters and stuff like that… I feel like we all have the same end goal, we just have different ways of thinking of how we should go about that.” Landau said she would support government incentives for small businesses to “go green,” but added that she fears a swift transition could hurt communities like hers. “I just don’t want to be forced to do something that will cost me a lot of money, or hurt my community,” Landau said. “But also…I’m a big advocate for clean oceans and protecting our ecosystems that way.”  The Inflation Reduction act does provide tax credits for small businesses to go green by installing solar power infrastructure or purchasing clean transportation vehicles, for example, and estimates it will make a $24.6 billion investment in clean power generation and storage in Iowa before 2030. But ultimately, Landau emphasized that her top issues are immigration and the economy, specifically tightening restrictions on the U.S.-Mexico border and combating inflation. Climate and the environment aren’t likely to influence her vote, she said. “Climate is not something I think about day-to-day,” Landau said.  In a March poll of voters from 18 to 29 years old nationwide conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 18 percent said they would support one of three third party candidates: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, or Jill Stein. A March poll from NextGen America found that in key battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia—20 percent of voters between 18 and 35 were third-party supporters. In NextGen’s latest poll, conducted in August before RFK Jr. dropped out and endorsed Trump, the number of youth voters supporting a third-party presidential candidate had halved, to 10 percent.  In June, 22-year old Texan Noor Shaikh posted a video on Tik Tok explaining her choice to vote for a third-party candidate, arguing against blind party loyalty. But after Biden dropped out, she made a new video responding to her original.  “At the end of the day, [climate is] one of the things that was going to sway me, regardless, to vote with the Democratic Party.” “I will be voting third-party,” said Shaikh in June, before getting cut off by her July self. “I will now be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said, with a sigh.  Shaikh, who got a degree in psychology from Texas A&M University this year and organizes with a pro-Palestine group on campus, said that as a Muslim American, she couldn’t stomach voting for Biden given his strong support of Israel, but as a progressive, she wouldn’t vote for Trump. She was considering a third-party candidate like left-leaning Cenk Uygur, host of “The Young Turks” podcast, who dropped out of the race in March. “I honestly don’t know if I would have changed my mind, closer to November,” Shaikh said. Now she sees voting as a method of “harm-reduction” on things like transgender rights and the Supreme Court and hopes that Harris can be more readily influenced on issues important to her than Trump or Biden. Climate change isn’t a top factor in determining her vote, Shaikh said, but she thinks often about pollution, safe drinking water and environmental deregulation in Texas. “It’s [about] who’s going to take us the farthest,” Shaikh said. “I think we’re retrogressing as a country, and it’s creating a lot of instability for a lot of my loved ones…this election does have a lot on the line.” Alison Potts, a 32-year old administrative worker in New Jersey had also considered abstaining from the election because of the war on Gaza, but has also decided to vote as a method of reducing harm. Potts said she sees both climate change and abortion as “issues of life or death.”  “At the end of the day, [climate is] one of the things that was going to sway me, regardless, to vote with the Democratic Party,” Potts said. “The detriment we do now when it comes to climate change is going to be lasting for the next generation.” Some young voters aren’t ready to forgive Harris for the sins of the Biden administration. Jana El-Gengaihy, a 17-year-old high school senior in Scottsdale, Arizona, will turn 18 just in time to vote this year, but she’s not sure she will go to the polls. El-Gengaihy, who volunteers with a local hub of the Sunrise Movement, said her top issues are Palestine and the climate crisis. She does not support Trump, and she’s slightly more hopeful about Harris than she was about Biden, but she’s still not convinced that Harris will take young voters’ grievances seriously.  “It just doesn’t sit right with me that voting for either of them means that I’m continuing this genocide,” she said. Low turnout by younger voters has often been met with derision from both major parties, particularly Democrats, who typically get more youth votes. Soin said this is a disrespectful way to look at a constituency with valid reasons to feel apathetic about Congress and the presidency.  “They’re not making the case effectively for young voters to turn out and vote,” Soin, who is planning to vote for Harris, said. “Not voting is a decision that people are making. It is a decision that a lot of people are making. And rather than smearing and disrespecting people, how about we ask why?”

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Tuesday, the youth-led activist group Climate Defiance—which had loudly called for Joe Biden to withdraw his bid for reelection earlier this year—endorsed Kamala Harris for president. But despite that support and soaring enthusiasm from young people after Harris replaced […]

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Tuesday, the youth-led activist group Climate Defiance—which had loudly called for Joe Biden to withdraw his bid for reelection earlier this year—endorsed Kamala Harris for president. But despite that support and soaring enthusiasm from young people after Harris replaced Biden on the Democratic ticket, with less than 40 days left until the election, excitement has cooled off among many young voters who are prioritizing climate and calling for stronger commitments from the candidate.

After the September 10 debate, some young voters and climate groups were unimpressed by both candidates’ support for oil and gas production, voicing dismay over Harris’ shift to the center on climate.

“If Harris wants to win, she needs to be far more progressive than she was tonight,” wrote Gen-Z for Change on X after the debate. “She needs to ban fracking, support public transit, secure a permanent ceasefire, and more.” 

But the group prioritized defeating the Republican presidential candidate: “Regardless, Trump is dangerous,” the post continued. “Trump is a racist. Trump is a fa[s]cist dictator. We need to stop Trump.”

The Sunrise Movement stated that the debate was a “missed opportunity” for Harris to contrast her record on climate with Trump’s. 

“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” the youth-led organization wrote.

Both groups had been strong voices on the left calling for Biden to cease his reelection bid, and had voiced optimism about Harris’ potential to support swift action on the climate crisis, citing her past support of policies like the Green New Deal and her legal prosecution of oil and gas companies.

Gen Z for Change and the Sunrise Movement are among the many progressive organizations phone banking, canvassing and otherwise pushing for youth voter turnout in swing states. But according to some activists, the Harris campaign isn’t doing enough to inspire young people to show up to the polls.

The voter outreach nonprofit Vote.org reported a 585 percent increase in voter registration and verifications the night of the debate, and a link Taylor Swift posted on Instagram that night to Vote.gov with her long-awaited endorsement of Harris reportedly received more than 400,000 clicks within 24 hours, more than half of the website’s overall visits that day.

But some young voters are still calling for more concrete policy from Harris. “Honestly, young people have grown up seeing politicians share platitudes that they never live up to, and part of what we are just merely asking is, what is your plan?” asked John Paul Mejia, a 22-year-old Sunrise organizer based in Washington, DC. “For Harris to meaningfully win over young people, she should show the electorate broadly, but also young people, what she’s fighting for.”

For months, Biden seemed to have drawn out everything but passion from young voters frustrated with his mixed record on climate, angered by his lack of empathy for Palestinian deaths, despairing at his debate performance, disdainful of his age, and disenchanted with the US. electoral system in general. In the spring, some polls showed Biden, who won young voters by a more than 20-point margin in 2020, struggling to maintain a lead over Trump with Millennial and Gen Z voters. Even young people who vehemently oppose Trump weren’t enthused by Biden, and were loudly and publicly urging him to step down.

When he finally did and Harris announced her candidacy, the political winds seemed to change. Within two days Vote.org saw a 700 percent spike in voter registrations, the largest increase in the entire election cycle, higher than after the September 10 debate and even higher than when Taylor Swift promoted voter registration last year. Of those 38,500 newly registered voters, 83 percent were under 34 years old, Vote.org reported.

The day after Harris announced her candidacy for president, Shiv Soin, a 23-year-old climate activist and director of the youth-led environmental justice organization, Treeage, in New York City, said that he was feeling energy he hadn’t seen in years. “I think in the last 24 hours, there has been more excitement in the Democratic Party than there has been since Obama,” Soin said.

According to an August poll from NextGen America, a progressive nonprofit focused on increasing youth voter turnout, motivation to cast ballots had grown among young people in battleground states since the spring, with 78 percent saying they are “extremely motivated” to vote in August, compared with 68 percent in March. 

Both campaigns are courting young voters. Trump has enlisted Gen Z social media influencers like video game streamer Adin Ross and TikTokker Bryce Hall to try to reach conservative youth online, while the Harris campaign’s rapid-response social media accounts have latched onto viral trends like coconut tree memes—alluding to a Harris comment widely shared online—and pop music references. But the age group leans Democratic.

“What is this? A policy platform for ants, @KamalaHarris? The climate proposal needs to be at least three times bigger.”

In the swing states NextGen polled, Harris has drawn support from 68 percent of young “double haters”—voters who disapproved of both Biden and Trump—compared with Trump’s 6 percent. Previously, Biden took 29 percent of double haters in those states and Trump took 9 percent.

Harris’ pick of Tim Walz also garnered praise from young climate leaders, who pointed out his support of clean energy transition legislation in Minnesota, while others criticized his approval of the Line 3 pipeline that carries Canadian tar sands oil through the state.

Days after Harris’ campaign announcement, Sunrise Movement communications director Stevie O’Hanlon called her candidacy a “game-changer” that would put “millions of young voters in play,” and could lead to “historic” youth voter turnout. 

But a week after the first debate, the initial excitement from young climate voters seems to be fading, she said. 

“In the weeks after Biden dropped out…there was a real upsurge of enthusiasm and energy among young people, and I think a lot of hope among people who felt disappointed by President Biden that she would strike a different course,” O’Hanlon said. “I think there are ways that she has struck another course, and there are also ways where she has stood by some of Biden’s unpopular policies with young people. I think she is a little bit at a turning point now, as we are about 50 days out from the election, about how much deep enthusiasm is she going to be able to draw?”

Sunrise has said publicly it intends to reach more than 1.5 million young voters through phone, face-to-face and digital outreach in support of the Harris campaign. As of September 19, Sunrise reported that it has reached more than 350,000 young voters in swing states and plans to ramp up its outreach in the coming weeks. Gen Z for Change, the League of Conservation Voters, NextGen America and Hip Hop Caucus are also doing outreach to young climate voters.

O’Hanlon said that most undecided voters the group has contacted are deciding between Harris or abstention from the election, and said she thinks that Harris’ support of fracking during the debate—combined with what she sees as the lack of a comprehensive climate platform, and a failure to take a stronger stance on Gaza—will lose her points with some undecided young voters.

“I think it really hurts her credibility with young voters who feel like they’ve been burned before by politicians and aren’t super willing to give grace to politicians right now,” O’Hanlon said.

Michael Greenberg, founder of Climate Defiance, met with Harris’ chief climate advisor, Ike Irby, on September 3, and said that he urged the campaign to support an end to fossil-fuel subsidies and exports, as well as a phase down of domestic fossil fuel use, including shutting down projects like the Line 3 pipeline. 

“We make our demands based not on what is convenient or easy but what is absolutely necessary,” Greenberg said. “We recognize that there’s obviously a tremendous difference between Trump and Kamala on climate, but we need Kamala to go bolder.”

On September 9, the organization posted a critique on X alongside a screenshot of the paragraph-long climate plan on Harris’ campaign website. 

“What is this? A policy platform for ants, @KamalaHarris? The climate proposal needs to be at least three times bigger,” the post stated.

At a fundraiser on September 24, however, Climate Defiance endorsed Harris for president. Greenberg said that the decision to do so came after discussions with staff and the organization’s board, and a survey of members, in which he estimated about three-quarters of the votes went toward endorsing Harris and the rest went to third-party candidates.

Harris “seems to think that she needs to tack to the center on climate and that just isn’t necessarily what polling shows.”

“Obviously she’s not perfect at all but we’d rather protest her and try to move her than be protesting Trump who is worse and who we are not as well positioned to move,” Greenberg said, the day before the event. “It’s a crucial time and it’s important that we play our part in saving our country from tyranny.”

In early September, Sunrise Movement, Gen Z for Change, the Green New Deal Network and the Climate and Community Project released “Unity 2025,” a platform advocating for clean energy investments, climate-smart farming, public investments in affordable housing and more. The effort to counter Project 2025, a policy wish list for a second Trump administration spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is billed as a way to urge Harris to listen to young voters who want to see real policy commitments from her campaign.

Sunrise’s executive director, Aru Shiney-Ajay, has had multiple meetings with the Harris campaign, including with Irby and new climate engagement director Camila Thorndike. Shiney-Ajay said that her meetings have focused on showing the campaign that there’s an active base of climate-interested young voters who could be mobilized by stronger commitments from the campaign.

“[Harris] seems to think that she needs to tack to the center on climate and that just isn’t necessarily what polling shows or at least our efforts on the ground show,” she said. “In my opinion, it’s a little bit of a miscalculation.”

In recent years, young voters from both major parties have consistently ranked climate as a top issue, and in this year’s election, it’s more of a priority for them than ever: An Environmental Voter Project poll released last month found that 40 percent of young voters in key battleground states wouldn’t vote for a candidate that doesn’t prioritize “addressing climate change,” calling it a “deal breaker.” An additional 40 percent said they would “prefer” a candidate who prioritized climate change. 

Youth groups on the left have loudly pressured Harris to take swift action against the fossil fuel industry. A coalition of youth-led organizations including groups focused on climate, immigration and gun control issued a set of policy demands for Harris, emphasizing ending fossil fuel subsidies, investing in green housing and stopping approval of new oil and gas projects.

Meanwhile, Trump, a frequent espouser of climate denial, has promised to gut the Environmental Protection Agency, ramp up domestic oil and gas drilling and repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s landmark climate law and the biggest investment in slowing global warming in US history.

That may be putting some conservative youth votes in play. Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO of the American Conservation Coalition, a group bringing conservative youth together to advocate for environmental protections, said that the Republican party’s failure to platform policy addressing climate change is losing them support from young conservatives. 

Currently, nearly a quarter of Congress espouses some form of climate denial, but Franz said that young Republicans aren’t on board with such messages. And, while climate might not be enough to motivate staunch conservatives to vote Democrat, it might push them to abstain from the election, she said. 

The Environmental Voters Project said 38 percent of young battleground voters report knowing little, if anything, about Joe Biden’s signature climate bill.

“There’s a huge electoral liability for politicians who are still stuck in those types of rhetoric circles,” Franz, 27, said. “It is something that you see both sides of the aisle of young conservatives and young progressives pushing back against, because it’s just not the reality that we live in.”

Daniel Rissanen, 22, grew up in a conservative family in Georgia and always considered himself a Republican. He voted for Trump in his first election in 2020, but after the January 6 insurrection he felt alienated from the party he’d grown up in. Now Rissanen identifies as an Independent, and if he had to vote today he’d choose Harris, although he has also considered voting for a third-party candidate. Either way, he is actively discouraging his friends from voting for Trump.

“The election no longer feels as tense, as violent, as pressurized, as it did when we thought it was Biden-Trump, which is a relief, I think, for the country in general,” Rissanen said.

Climate change is a priority for Rissanen, a recent college graduate and computer numerical control machinist at a fabrication shop in Atlanta. One of his top issues is conservation, with a particular focus on public lands. Seeing Trump gut protections for public lands and sell or lease them off to the highest bidder made him even less enthusiastic about his candidacy. 

“Our public lands in this country are really important for people to…get away and get out in nature,” Rissanen said. “It’s also really important to conserve those ecosystems to help slow climate change.”

Like many voters across age groups, Rissanen hadn’t heard of the Inflation Reduction Act, but when he learned what it was he was enthusiastic and said it was the type of information that had potential to influence his vote toward Harris.

Polling from NextGen in battleground states found that two-thirds of young voters had heard of the IRA, but according to the Environmental Voters Project, 38 percent of young battleground voters reported not knowing much, if anything, about the bill. Only 35 percent knew it included climate provisions. 

Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, executive director of NextGen, said that the organization is prioritizing educating young people about the IRA and its provisions, emphasizing opportunities for green jobs.

“When young people learn about what the Inflation Reduction Act is, they overwhelmingly support it and are excited about it,” she said.

But climate action is not a priority for all young voters, and some young conservatives are still staunch supporters of Trump. According to NextGen’s latest poll, 40 percent of voters 18-35 in battleground states are planning to vote for Trump, compared with 57 percent for Harris.

Jordyn Landau, a 27-year-old resident of Ames, Iowa, voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 and plans to vote for him again this year. She was originally drawn to him because he seemed like an outsider to politics, and at this point, she doesn’t think there’s much Trump could do to lose her vote. 

A certified scuba diver, Landau said that she cares about clean air, clean water and marine wildlife, and believes in climate change. 

“We all want our environment to thrive,” Landau said. “We don’t want the end of the world because of different natural disasters and stuff like that… I feel like we all have the same end goal, we just have different ways of thinking of how we should go about that.”

Landau said she would support government incentives for small businesses to “go green,” but added that she fears a swift transition could hurt communities like hers.

“I just don’t want to be forced to do something that will cost me a lot of money, or hurt my community,” Landau said. “But also…I’m a big advocate for clean oceans and protecting our ecosystems that way.” 

The Inflation Reduction act does provide tax credits for small businesses to go green by installing solar power infrastructure or purchasing clean transportation vehicles, for example, and estimates it will make a $24.6 billion investment in clean power generation and storage in Iowa before 2030.

But ultimately, Landau emphasized that her top issues are immigration and the economy, specifically tightening restrictions on the U.S.-Mexico border and combating inflation. Climate and the environment aren’t likely to influence her vote, she said.

“Climate is not something I think about day-to-day,” Landau said. 

In a March poll of voters from 18 to 29 years old nationwide conducted by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 18 percent said they would support one of three third party candidates: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, or Jill Stein. A March poll from NextGen America found that in key battleground states—Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia—20 percent of voters between 18 and 35 were third-party supporters.

In NextGen’s latest poll, conducted in August before RFK Jr. dropped out and endorsed Trump, the number of youth voters supporting a third-party presidential candidate had halved, to 10 percent. 

In June, 22-year old Texan Noor Shaikh posted a video on Tik Tok explaining her choice to vote for a third-party candidate, arguing against blind party loyalty. But after Biden dropped out, she made a new video responding to her original. 

“At the end of the day, [climate is] one of the things that was going to sway me, regardless, to vote with the Democratic Party.”

“I will be voting third-party,” said Shaikh in June, before getting cut off by her July self. “I will now be voting for Kamala Harris,” she said, with a sigh. 

Shaikh, who got a degree in psychology from Texas A&M University this year and organizes with a pro-Palestine group on campus, said that as a Muslim American, she couldn’t stomach voting for Biden given his strong support of Israel, but as a progressive, she wouldn’t vote for Trump. She was considering a third-party candidate like left-leaning Cenk Uygur, host of “The Young Turks” podcast, who dropped out of the race in March.

“I honestly don’t know if I would have changed my mind, closer to November,” Shaikh said.

Now she sees voting as a method of “harm-reduction” on things like transgender rights and the Supreme Court and hopes that Harris can be more readily influenced on issues important to her than Trump or Biden.

Climate change isn’t a top factor in determining her vote, Shaikh said, but she thinks often about pollution, safe drinking water and environmental deregulation in Texas.

“It’s [about] who’s going to take us the farthest,” Shaikh said. “I think we’re retrogressing as a country, and it’s creating a lot of instability for a lot of my loved ones…this election does have a lot on the line.”

Alison Potts, a 32-year old administrative worker in New Jersey had also considered abstaining from the election because of the war on Gaza, but has also decided to vote as a method of reducing harm. Potts said she sees both climate change and abortion as “issues of life or death.” 

“At the end of the day, [climate is] one of the things that was going to sway me, regardless, to vote with the Democratic Party,” Potts said. “The detriment we do now when it comes to climate change is going to be lasting for the next generation.”

Some young voters aren’t ready to forgive Harris for the sins of the Biden administration.

Jana El-Gengaihy, a 17-year-old high school senior in Scottsdale, Arizona, will turn 18 just in time to vote this year, but she’s not sure she will go to the polls. El-Gengaihy, who volunteers with a local hub of the Sunrise Movement, said her top issues are Palestine and the climate crisis. She does not support Trump, and she’s slightly more hopeful about Harris than she was about Biden, but she’s still not convinced that Harris will take young voters’ grievances seriously. 

“It just doesn’t sit right with me that voting for either of them means that I’m continuing this genocide,” she said.

Low turnout by younger voters has often been met with derision from both major parties, particularly Democrats, who typically get more youth votes. Soin said this is a disrespectful way to look at a constituency with valid reasons to feel apathetic about Congress and the presidency. 

“They’re not making the case effectively for young voters to turn out and vote,” Soin, who is planning to vote for Harris, said. “Not voting is a decision that people are making. It is a decision that a lot of people are making. And rather than smearing and disrespecting people, how about we ask why?”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats: Our Most-Read Articles of the Year

Solutions to our environmental ills abound in these popular Revelator articles from 2024. The post Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats: Our Most-Read Articles of the Year appeared first on The Revelator.

Environmental news stories tend to slip through the cracks during election years — and this year we saw that like none other. Still, this year brought more readers than ever to The Revelator. People wanted to know about the environmental threats the planet faces — and how to stop them. Solutions stories were particularly popular this year, a sign that people are done with putting up with the status quo. Maintaining that energy and drive will be difficult but essential in 2025. Here’s a list of some of our most popular articles of 2024. They cover people helping sloths and other endangered species, studying our blind spots, building environmentally conscious communities, looking at the threats of autocracy, and fighting climate change. They should all continue to offer inspiration and guidance in the troublesome year(s) ahead. Adapt, Move or Die? Plants and Animals Face New Pressures in a Warming World All the Plants We Cannot See Antarctica’s Looming Threat Anthrax in Zimbabwe: Caused by Oppression, Worsened by Climate Change Are Botanists Endangered? Building a Flock: How an Unlikely Birder Found Activism — and Community — in Nature Burning Trees: As the Biomass Industry Grows, Its Carbon Emissions Go Uncounted Coastal Restoration: Recycled Shells and Millions of Larvae — A Recipe for Renewed Oyster Reefs Conservation Works — and Science Just Proved It Environmental Change, Written in the DNA of Birds In France, One Group Seeks to Do the Unthinkable: Unite the Climate Movement The Monumental Effort to Replant the Klamath River Dam Reservoirs Out-of-Control Wildlife Trade Is Shackling a Key Climate Solution Rock and Roll Botany: An Endangered Plant Named After Legendary Guitarist Jimi Hendrix Salmon Have Returned Above the Klamath River Dams. Now What? The Shocking Truth About Sloths Six Lessons From the World’s Deadliest Environmental Disaster Titicaca in Crisis: Climate Change Is Drying Up the Biggest Lake in the Andes Water and Cooperation Breathe New Life Into Klamath Basin Wildlife Refuges What 70 Celebrity Tortoises Can Teach Us About Conservation Stories We’re thankful for our readers this past year. We look forward to bringing you more essential reporting in the months ahead. The post Sloths, Salmon, and Autocrats: Our Most-Read Articles of the Year appeared first on The Revelator.

Activism
Animals
Climate

We used Google’s AI to analyze 188 predictions of what’s in store for tech in 2025

At this time of year investment banks, advertising agencies, and seemingly every other business on the planet share their predictions on what is likely to unfold in the next 12 months. Journalists’ inboxes sag under the weight of unsolicited predictions for the year ahead. But separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to forecasts of the year ahead can be tricky. Use a technology that has come into its own in 2024—generative artificial intelligence—may help. NotebookLM, Google’s note-taking and research assistant, uses its Gemini large language model to synthesize information from a vast number of sources. More importantly for journalism, which tries to avoid errors, it also cites where it gets its information from. Fast Company fed 188 reports looking ahead to 2025 from a variety of industries into NotebookLM (because the tool has a limit of 50 sources per notebook, we were forced to divide it into four separate ones), then asked the chatbot to help pick out patterns in the information. What follows is a human-summarized version of AI’s analysis. AI will remain everywhere Artificial intelligence has changed the way we live and work in the last two years, and going into 2025, many of those 188 reports are in agreement that AI will continue to have a huge impact. The technology will be more actively integrated into business operations across sectors, a significant number agreed. “AI was the big story of 2023 and 2024, and that has not changed. In fact, AI adoption will likely begin to accelerate in 2025 as energy and commodities companies gain confidence in use cases that promote optimization and innovation,” wrote Publicis Sapient, a digital consultancy, in its 2025 outlook. But AI’s use will be deployed across industries. AI is predicted to shift from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” tool for B2B marketers, with adoption increasing for content creation, personalization, predictive analytics, and campaign optimization,” wrote EssenceMediacom, a GroupM marketing agency, in its look ahead. Banks like Barclays believe AI will play a significant role in financial markets, with investors deploying it to try to get ahead. CB Insights believes AI-powered weather prediction could transform the insurance industry in 2025. But others sound a note of caution: in its 2025 trends analysis, Zendesk highlights the risk of so-called “shadow AI” use by employees without their employers’ permission, noting in some industries such shadow use has grown 250%, causing security risks. S&P Global suggests that AI, particularly generative AI, is driving a shift towards focusing on product and service quality improvements and revenue growth—but others worry about the need to ethically develop AI, and to not assume that its training data is obtained officially. Sustainability challenges AI adoption Many reports said 2025 will see consumers and businesses prioritize sustainability—a challenge given the ubiquitous use of AI. Nearly two-thirds of organizations are concerned about the impact of AI and machine learning projects on their energy use and carbon footprint, according to S&P Global. Juniper Research highlights the rise of sustainable fintech as a differentiator for banks, with consumers seeking out financial institutions aligned with their values around climate change and social impact. Similar trends are seen in sectors like the travel industry, where it’s forecast that travelers will pay more for products and services that support biodiversity. Overall, business process management firm WNS Global Services points out that sustainability is no longer a niche concern, but an expectation from the mainstream. Consumers expect brands to lead in addressing environmental issues. Some 61% of US consumers believe that, according to Mintel, a market analyst. Some sectors are doing better than others: biotech ingredients are becoming more common in beauty products, with companies developing in the lab ingredients that replicate nature without depleting resources. Glycoproteins derived from lobsters are gaining traction, Mintel says, offering beauty benefits while supporting marine conservation. The world will remain weird One thing that many forecasts agree on is that they can’t agree on things. Everything from economic fluctuations, geopolitical shifts and the climate crisis are likely to vex us in 2025. The landscape will be volatile, with wildly divergent economic forecasts. UK bank NatWest anticipates market volatility stemming from shifts towards fiscal activism, terminal rates, and global protectionism. Nielsen, which predicts consumer behavior, believes normalized inflation levels and lower interest rates could improve consumer confidence and get us spending… but quickly adds: “However, as we have seen in frantic shifts of the recent past, these pockets of recovery can be fragile—and could evaporate as quickly as they sprout.” There’s also a split over interest rate trends worldwide. While multiple sources anticipate rate reductions, there’s uncertainty about the speed and extent of these cuts. AXA worries social tensions and movements could be a big risk to future growth, alongside climate change and geopolitical instability, while bank Allianz cautions readers about potential “disinflation hiccups” and raises concerns about the potential of geopolitical instability and cybersecurity problems in the year ahead. But consumers are more optimistic than pessimistic, says customer experience platform Disqo, with a particular Millennials, Black consumers, and “very liberal” individuals more eager for the year ahead than others. What will China do? Chinese influence will continue to rise, the reports agreed. Foresight Factory highlighted the growing popularity of Chinese brands such as Shein and Temu internationally continuing into 2025. Chinese culture could also become more influential, with trends like the celebration of Lunar New Year and the embrace of Chinese fashion and C-beauty becoming more common outside China. But China’s potential strength abroad is countered by worries of weakness at home. Geopolitical tensions, and the likelihood of tariff wars between the US and China, could impact global trade and integration, many worried. Multiple sources, from the IMF to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan agree that China’s economic growth is slowing. Julius Bär suggested that China has entered a “balance sheet recession”, with a highly indebted private sector focused on saving rather than spending or investing. Chinese policymakers will take action to try and stimulate the economy, the forecasts believe. “There is a clear realization that exports can no longer be a reliable growth engine given the headwinds from trade tensions and tariff risks under the new US administration,” writes HSBC. Goldman Sachs estimates that US tariffs could subtract almost 0.7 percentage points from China’s growth in 2025. Invesco also highlights recent stimulus efforts, particularly in the housing market, where mortgage rate cuts aim to encourage borrowing and spending. Gen Z rules all—but is cautious “Gen Z are the ultimate entrepreneurs,” write financial consulting firm Mercer in their HR Trends for 2025 report. Youngsters cherish financial security and companies that have a demonstrated positive impact on society. Gen Z’s hope for financial security has been dubbed “muted desire” by Italian market researchers Nextatlas, and suggests a shift in consumption patterns towards more mindful spending habits. TikTok is Gen Z’s most used app, says DCDX, a Gen Z-specific research agency—which could spell trouble if it is banned in January in the United States. One tech tool they’re cautious about? ChatGPT and its ilk. Alongside other generations Gen Z is becoming more discerning about the limitations of generative AI, according to analysts Euromonitor International. Key among Gen Z’s concerns are cautions about the potential for AI-generated misinformation and its impact on job security. The oddest predictions More niche outlooks for 2025 include Bacardi’s prediction that loud nightclubs will be supplanted by more relaxed “listening bars”, where venues prioritize good music, high-quality sound systems and a laid-back experience. Futurist Jim Carroll believes cash will “have all but disappeared” by 2025, though whether “tofu tourists” (identified as an odd trend for 2025 by Lemongrass, a travel PR agency, and describing people who seek out vegan and plant-based travel experiences) will be able to pay for their egg- and dairy-free purchases using Apple Pay or Venmo in more remote areas of the world is yet to be known. They may well dig into their wallets and bring out physical cash for ugly cakes or pickle-flavored foods, both of which are pegged by social network Pinterest as key trends for next year.

At this time of year investment banks, advertising agencies, and seemingly every other business on the planet share their predictions on what is likely to unfold in the next 12 months. Journalists’ inboxes sag under the weight of unsolicited predictions for the year ahead. But separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to forecasts of the year ahead can be tricky. Use a technology that has come into its own in 2024—generative artificial intelligence—may help. NotebookLM, Google’s note-taking and research assistant, uses its Gemini large language model to synthesize information from a vast number of sources. More importantly for journalism, which tries to avoid errors, it also cites where it gets its information from. Fast Company fed 188 reports looking ahead to 2025 from a variety of industries into NotebookLM (because the tool has a limit of 50 sources per notebook, we were forced to divide it into four separate ones), then asked the chatbot to help pick out patterns in the information. What follows is a human-summarized version of AI’s analysis. AI will remain everywhere Artificial intelligence has changed the way we live and work in the last two years, and going into 2025, many of those 188 reports are in agreement that AI will continue to have a huge impact. The technology will be more actively integrated into business operations across sectors, a significant number agreed. “AI was the big story of 2023 and 2024, and that has not changed. In fact, AI adoption will likely begin to accelerate in 2025 as energy and commodities companies gain confidence in use cases that promote optimization and innovation,” wrote Publicis Sapient, a digital consultancy, in its 2025 outlook. But AI’s use will be deployed across industries. AI is predicted to shift from a “nice-to-have” to a “must-have” tool for B2B marketers, with adoption increasing for content creation, personalization, predictive analytics, and campaign optimization,” wrote EssenceMediacom, a GroupM marketing agency, in its look ahead. Banks like Barclays believe AI will play a significant role in financial markets, with investors deploying it to try to get ahead. CB Insights believes AI-powered weather prediction could transform the insurance industry in 2025. But others sound a note of caution: in its 2025 trends analysis, Zendesk highlights the risk of so-called “shadow AI” use by employees without their employers’ permission, noting in some industries such shadow use has grown 250%, causing security risks. S&P Global suggests that AI, particularly generative AI, is driving a shift towards focusing on product and service quality improvements and revenue growth—but others worry about the need to ethically develop AI, and to not assume that its training data is obtained officially. Sustainability challenges AI adoption Many reports said 2025 will see consumers and businesses prioritize sustainability—a challenge given the ubiquitous use of AI. Nearly two-thirds of organizations are concerned about the impact of AI and machine learning projects on their energy use and carbon footprint, according to S&P Global. Juniper Research highlights the rise of sustainable fintech as a differentiator for banks, with consumers seeking out financial institutions aligned with their values around climate change and social impact. Similar trends are seen in sectors like the travel industry, where it’s forecast that travelers will pay more for products and services that support biodiversity. Overall, business process management firm WNS Global Services points out that sustainability is no longer a niche concern, but an expectation from the mainstream. Consumers expect brands to lead in addressing environmental issues. Some 61% of US consumers believe that, according to Mintel, a market analyst. Some sectors are doing better than others: biotech ingredients are becoming more common in beauty products, with companies developing in the lab ingredients that replicate nature without depleting resources. Glycoproteins derived from lobsters are gaining traction, Mintel says, offering beauty benefits while supporting marine conservation. The world will remain weird One thing that many forecasts agree on is that they can’t agree on things. Everything from economic fluctuations, geopolitical shifts and the climate crisis are likely to vex us in 2025. The landscape will be volatile, with wildly divergent economic forecasts. UK bank NatWest anticipates market volatility stemming from shifts towards fiscal activism, terminal rates, and global protectionism. Nielsen, which predicts consumer behavior, believes normalized inflation levels and lower interest rates could improve consumer confidence and get us spending… but quickly adds: “However, as we have seen in frantic shifts of the recent past, these pockets of recovery can be fragile—and could evaporate as quickly as they sprout.” There’s also a split over interest rate trends worldwide. While multiple sources anticipate rate reductions, there’s uncertainty about the speed and extent of these cuts. AXA worries social tensions and movements could be a big risk to future growth, alongside climate change and geopolitical instability, while bank Allianz cautions readers about potential “disinflation hiccups” and raises concerns about the potential of geopolitical instability and cybersecurity problems in the year ahead. But consumers are more optimistic than pessimistic, says customer experience platform Disqo, with a particular Millennials, Black consumers, and “very liberal” individuals more eager for the year ahead than others. What will China do? Chinese influence will continue to rise, the reports agreed. Foresight Factory highlighted the growing popularity of Chinese brands such as Shein and Temu internationally continuing into 2025. Chinese culture could also become more influential, with trends like the celebration of Lunar New Year and the embrace of Chinese fashion and C-beauty becoming more common outside China. But China’s potential strength abroad is countered by worries of weakness at home. Geopolitical tensions, and the likelihood of tariff wars between the US and China, could impact global trade and integration, many worried. Multiple sources, from the IMF to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan agree that China’s economic growth is slowing. Julius Bär suggested that China has entered a “balance sheet recession”, with a highly indebted private sector focused on saving rather than spending or investing. Chinese policymakers will take action to try and stimulate the economy, the forecasts believe. “There is a clear realization that exports can no longer be a reliable growth engine given the headwinds from trade tensions and tariff risks under the new US administration,” writes HSBC. Goldman Sachs estimates that US tariffs could subtract almost 0.7 percentage points from China’s growth in 2025. Invesco also highlights recent stimulus efforts, particularly in the housing market, where mortgage rate cuts aim to encourage borrowing and spending. Gen Z rules all—but is cautious “Gen Z are the ultimate entrepreneurs,” write financial consulting firm Mercer in their HR Trends for 2025 report. Youngsters cherish financial security and companies that have a demonstrated positive impact on society. Gen Z’s hope for financial security has been dubbed “muted desire” by Italian market researchers Nextatlas, and suggests a shift in consumption patterns towards more mindful spending habits. TikTok is Gen Z’s most used app, says DCDX, a Gen Z-specific research agency—which could spell trouble if it is banned in January in the United States. One tech tool they’re cautious about? ChatGPT and its ilk. Alongside other generations Gen Z is becoming more discerning about the limitations of generative AI, according to analysts Euromonitor International. Key among Gen Z’s concerns are cautions about the potential for AI-generated misinformation and its impact on job security. The oddest predictions More niche outlooks for 2025 include Bacardi’s prediction that loud nightclubs will be supplanted by more relaxed “listening bars”, where venues prioritize good music, high-quality sound systems and a laid-back experience. Futurist Jim Carroll believes cash will “have all but disappeared” by 2025, though whether “tofu tourists” (identified as an odd trend for 2025 by Lemongrass, a travel PR agency, and describing people who seek out vegan and plant-based travel experiences) will be able to pay for their egg- and dairy-free purchases using Apple Pay or Venmo in more remote areas of the world is yet to be known. They may well dig into their wallets and bring out physical cash for ugly cakes or pickle-flavored foods, both of which are pegged by social network Pinterest as key trends for next year.

Activism
Business
Climate

How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law

Even if the railway promoters win, here's why the train won’t get built.

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The state of Utah has come up with its share of boondoggles over the years, but one of the more enduring is the Uinta Basin Railway. The proposed 88-mile rail line would link the oil fields of the remote Uinta Basin region of eastern Utah to national rail lines so that up to 350,000 barrels of waxy crude oil could be transported to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The railway would allow oil companies to quadruple production in the basin and would be the biggest rail infrastructure project the U.S. has seen since the 1970s. But in all likelihood, the Uinta Basin Railway will never get built. The Uinta Basin is hemmed in by the soaring peaks of the Wasatch Mountains to the west and the Uinta Mountains to the north. Running an oil train through the mountains would be both dangerous and exorbitantly expensive, especially as the world is trying to scale back the use of fossil fuels. That’s why the railway’s indefatigable promoters, including the state’s congressional delegation, will probably fail to get the train on the tracks. However, they have succeeded in one thing: providing an activist Supreme Court the opportunity to take a whack at the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, one of the nation’s oldest environmental laws. Enacted in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental and public health effects of such things as highway construction, oil drilling, and pipeline construction on public land. Big polluting industries, particularly oil and gas companies, hate NEPA for giving the public a vehicle to obstruct dirty development projects. They’ve been trying to undermine it for years, including during the last Trump administration. Last week, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, former Solicitor General Paul Clement channeled those corporate complaints when he told the justices that NEPA “is designed to inform government decision-making, not paralyze it.” The statute, he argued, had become a “roadblock,” obstructing the railway and other worthy infrastructure projects through excessive environmental analysis. “NEPA is adding a juicy litigation target for project opponents,” Clement told the court.   But NEPA has almost nothing to do with why the Uinta Basin Railway won’t get built. “The court is doing the dirty work for all of these industries that are interested in changing our environmental laws,” Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, said in a press briefing on the case, noting that Congress already had streamlined the NEPA process last year. Earthjustice is representing environmental groups that are parties in the case. “The fact that the court took this case means that it’s just issuing policy decisions from the bench, not deciding cases.” The idea of building a railway from the Uinta Basin to refineries in Salt Lake City or elsewhere has been kicking around for more than 25 years. As I explained in 2022, the basin is home to Utah’s largest, though still modest, oil and gas fields: Locked inside the basin’s sandstone layers are anywhere between 50 and 321 billion barrels of conventional oil, plus an estimated 14 to 15 billion barrels of tar sands, the largest such reserves in the U.S. The basin also lies atop a massive geological marvel known as the Green River Formation that stretches into Colorado and Wyoming and contains an estimated 3 trillion barrels of oil shale. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported to Congress that if even half of the formation’s unconventional oil was recoverable, it would “be equal to the entire world’s proven oil reserves.” Wildcat speculators, big oil companies, and state officials alike have been salivating over the Uinta Basin’s rich oil deposits for years, yet they’ve never been able to fully exploit them. The oil in the basin is a waxy crude that must be heated to 115 degrees to remain liquid, a problem that ruled out an earlier attempt to build a pipeline. The Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, a quasi-governmental organization consisting of the major oil-, gas-, and coal-producing counties in Utah, has received $28 million in public funding to plan and promote the railway as a way around this obstacle. The coalition is one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case. “We don’t have a freeway into the Uinta Basin,” Mike McKee, the coalition’s former executive director, told me back in 2022. “It’s just that we have high mountains around us, so it’s been challenging.” Of course, there is no major highway from the basin for the same reason that the railway has never been built: The current two-lane road from Salt Lake City crests a peak that’s almost 10,000 feet above sea level, which is too high for a train to go over. So the current railway plan calls for tunneling through the mountain. But going through it may be just as treacherous as going over it. Inside the unstable mountain rock are pockets of explosive methane and other gases, not all of which have been mapped. None of this deterred the Seven County coalition from notifying the federal Surface Transportation Board, or STB, in 2019 that it intended to apply for a permit for the railway. The following year, the board started the environmental review process, including taking comments from the public. In December 2021, the STB found that the railway’s transportation merits outweighed its significant environmental effects. It approved the railway, despite noting that the hazards from tunneling “could potentially cause injury or death,” both in the railway’s construction and operation. It recommended that the coalition conduct some geoengineering studies, which it had not done. Among the many issues the board failed to consider when it approved the project was the impact of the additional 18 miles of oil train cars that the railway would add to the Union Pacific line going through Colorado, including Eagle County, home to the ski town of Vail. Along with creating significant risks of wildfires, the additional trains would run within feet of the Colorado River, where the possibility of regular oil spills could threaten the drinking water for 40 million people. The deficiencies in the STB’s environmental impact statement prompted environmentalists to ask the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to review the STB decision, as did Eagle County. Read Next Can you tell if a ‘bomb train’ is coming to your town? It’s complicated. John McCracken In August 2023, the appeals court invalidated the STB’s approval of the railway. Among the many problems it found was the STB’s failure to assess “serious concerns about financial viability in determining the transportation merits of a project.” A 2018 feasibility study commissioned by the coalition itself had estimated that the railway would cost at least $5 billion to construct, need 3,000 workers, take at least 10 years to complete, and require government bond funding because the private sector had little incentive to invest in the railway.   As Justin Mikulka, a research fellow who studies the finances of energy transition at the New Consensus think tank, told me in 2022, “If there were money to be made, someone would have built this railroad 20 years ago.” The appeals court was also skeptical that the railroad had a future: “Given the record evidence identified by petitioners — including the 2018 feasibility study — there is similar reason to doubt the financial viability of the railway.” Indeed, the plan approved by the STB claims the railway construction would cost a mere $2 billion, to be paid for by a private investor. So far, however, only public money has gone into the project. The private investor, which is also one of the petitioners in the Supreme Court case, is a firm called DHIP Group. When I wrote about the railway in 2022, DHIP’s website showed involvement in only two projects: the Uinta Basin Railway and the Louisiana Plaquemines oil export terminal, which had been canceled in 2021. Today, the long-dead Louisiana project is still listed on its website, but the firm has added a New York state self-storage facility to its portfolio — a concrete box that’s a far cry from a complex, multibillion-dollar infrastructure project. DHIP’s website also touts its sponsorship of the Integrated Rail and Resources Acquisition Corporation, a new company it took public in 2021 with a $230 million IPO. But in a March 2024 SEC filing, the company disclosed that the New York Stock Exchange had threatened to delist it, because in the three years since the IPO, it has done … nothing. (The company has managed to hang on.) Environmental concerns notwithstanding, DHIP seems unlikely to come up with $2 billion to build the railway. A spokesperson for DHIP did not respond to a request for comment. Even if environmentalists had never filed suit to block it, the railway probably would have died under the weight of its own unfeasibility. Instead, the Seven County coalition appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that the appeals court had erred when it required the STB to study the local effects of oil wells and refineries that it didn’t have the authority to regulate. In July, the Supreme Court agreed to take the case. Now the court stands poised to issue a decision with much broader threats to environmental regulation by considering only one question raised by the lower court: Does Supreme Court precedent limit a NEPA analysis strictly to environmental issues that an agency regulates, or does the law allow agencies to weigh the wider impacts of a project, such as air pollution or water contamination, that may be regulated by other agencies? During oral arguments in the case, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor expressed frustration with Clement’s suggestion that the court prevent NEPA reviews from considering impacts that were “remote in time and geography.” She suggested that such an interpretation went against the heart of the law, noting, for instance, that if a federal agency allowed a car to go to market, “it could go a thousand miles and 40 states away and blow up. That’s a reasonably foreseeable consequence that is remote in geography and time.” A federal agency, she implied, should absolutely consider such dangers. “You want absolute rules that make no sense,” Sotomayor told Clement. Sotomayor seemed to be alone, however, in her defense of NEPA, and the majority of the other seven justices seemed inclined to require at least some limits to the statute. (Justice Neil Gorsuch recused himself from the case because his former patron, Denver-based billionaire Philip Anschutz, had a potential financial interest in the outcome of the case. His oil and gas company, Anschutz Exploration Corporation, has federal drilling leases in Utah and elsewhere and also filed an amicus brief in the case.) While the justices seemed inclined to hamstring NEPA, such a ruling would be a hollow victory for the Utah railway promoters that brought the case. When the appeals court voided the STB decision approving the railway, it cited at least six other reasons it was unlawful beyond the NEPA issue. None of those will be affected by a Supreme Court decision in the Seven County coalition case. The STB permit will still be void, and the oil train will not get out of the station. There will be winners in the case, however, most likely the big fossil fuel and other companies whose operations would benefit from less environmental scrutiny, should the court issue a decision reining in NEPA. For instance, the case could lead the court to strictly limit the extent of environmental harms that must be considered in future infrastructure projects, meaning that the public would have a much harder time forcing the government to consider the health and environmental effects of oil and gas wells and pipelines before approving them. “This case is bigger than the Uinta Basin Railway,” Earthjustice’s Sankar said. “The fossil fuel industry and its allies are making radical arguments that would blind the public to obvious health consequences of government decisions.” The court will issue a decision by June next year. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How a fantasy oil train may help the Supreme Court gut a major environmental law on Dec 22, 2024.

Activism
Climate
Energy

Texas regulators shelve an electricity market reform proposal they say does too little to shore up grid

The Public Utility Commission found that the performance credit mechanism, a financial tool the Legislature capped at $1 billion, would only marginally improve reliability of the state power grid.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. The Public Utility Commission on Thursday shelved the performance credit mechanism, a controversial idea that was designed to bring more power onto the state grid and increase its reliability. “I don’t believe that the PCM, as currently designed, will provide the reliability benefits needed in the ERCOT market,” PUC Chair Thomas Gleeson wrote in a Dec. 18 memo that the rest of the commission endorsed on Thursday. The performance credit mechanism represented a complex change to the way Texas’ electricity market works. The idea would have required electricity providers — the companies, co-ops and municipal utilities that sell power to people — to pay more to generators that committed to having electricity available when grid conditions get tight. Electricity providers then could have passed those extra costs onto consumers. The goal was to incentivize companies to build more of what are known as dispatchable power facilities. Dispatchable power sources, such as natural gas, nuclear and coal-fired plants, can turn on any time and fill in the gaps in supply when demand for power is high — unlike renewable sources that depend on sun and wind. Amid concerns that the tool would lead to skyrocketing electricity bills without guaranteeing greater reliability, the Legislature last year imposed a $1 billion cap on how much it could cost consumers. That cap, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the state grid, was the parameter that “most significantly limits the effectiveness of the PCM.” ERCOT and an independent market monitor found this year that with the $1 billion limit, the proposal would have only minimally improved the grid’s reliability, estimating that it would lead to an extra 780 megawatts of generation — far short of the 10,000 megawatts needed to meet the state’s reliability standard. The most important Texas news,sent weekday mornings. A coalition of consumer advocates, oil and gas lobbyists and environmental activists had demanded the cost limit to protect consumers from higher electricity bills. Companies that operate gas-fueled power plants had opposed a cap, saying it would reduce or kill the effectiveness of the credits. The PUC on Thursday pointed to other mechanisms that commissioners said would do more to increase reliability. “While reconsideration of the PCM may be appropriate in the future,” Gleeson wrote in his memo, “at this point I believe our collective resources are best directed toward implementing other market design initiatives.” Those measures include tools to streamline how ERCOT procures power and a new ancillary services program that can offer power to smooth out uncertainty on the grid. In August, the PUC adopted a grid reliability standard that said a major power outage due to inadequate power supply could take place no more than once every decade on average; any outage must last less than 12 hours; and the amount of power lost during any hour of an outage could not exceed the level that could be safely rotated through rolling blackouts. Beginning in 2026, ERCOT must conduct an assessment every three years of whether the system is meeting the reliability standard — an opportunity, the PUC said, to evaluate the effects of changes implemented by the agency and the Legislature since Winter Storm Uri in 2021 and to consider any other measures that may be needed.

Activism

Montana Supreme Court upholds youth climate activists' victory

Montana’s Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a 2023 ruling siding with young climate activists who asserted the state government violated their right to a healthy environment. In August 2023, Montana’s First Judicial District sided with the 16 plaintiffs, who cited a state constitutional provision guaranteeing “a clean and healthful environment” to argue the state violated...

Montana’s Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a 2023 ruling siding with young climate activists who asserted the state government violated their right to a healthy environment. In August 2023, Montana’s First Judicial District sided with the 16 plaintiffs, who cited a state constitutional provision guaranteeing “a clean and healthful environment” to argue the state violated that right with a law that barred weighing climate impacts during the approval process for energy projects. The state supreme court upheld the finding in a 6-1 ruling Wednesday, writing, “Montana’s right to a clean and healthful environment and environmental life support system includes a stable climate system, which is clearly within the object and true principles of the Framers inclusion of the right to a clean and healthful environment.” Justice Jim Rice, who was appointed by former Gov. Judy Martz (R), was the only dissent. The court rejected an argument from Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen (R) that state-level efforts will have no effect without action from the rest of the world, comparing that argument to “the old ad populum fallacy: ‘If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?’” The plaintiffs’ attorney, Melissa Hornbein of the Western Environmental Law Center, hailed the decision as “a monumental moment” for young people and the state. “This ruling clarifies that the Constitution sets a clear directive for Montana to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, which are among the highest in the nation on a per capita basis, and to transition to a clean, renewable energy future,” she said. Knudsen’s office criticized the decision in a statement, with Montana Justice Department Press Secretary Chase Scheuer calling the ruling “disappointing, but not surprising.” “The majority of the state Supreme Court justices yet again ruled in favor of their ideologically aligned allies and ignored the fact that Montana has no power to impact the climate,” Scheuer said. Montana Supreme Court justices are directly elected to eight-year terms but midterm replacements are appointed by the governor. Two of Montana’s governor-appointed judges were named by Gov. Steve Bullock (D), while Rice is the only justice appointed by a Republican.

Activism
Climate
Health

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