Pressed by Climate Activists, Senate Democrats Plan to ‘Go on Offense’

by Coral Davenport and Sheryl Gay Stolberg (New York Times) Facing a showdown vote as early as this month over the embattled “Green New Deal,” Senate Democrats are preparing a counteroffensive to make combating climate change a central issue of their 2020 campaigns — a striking shift on an issue they have shied away from for the past decade.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, outlined the new strategy in an interview last week, casting it as a way to mobilize millennial voters, a key part of the Democratic constituency that the party will need to turn out to win in swing states.

With progressives pushing Democrats to embrace the Green New Deal — and Republicans ridiculing the idea as socialism — Mr. Schumer is effectively trying to turn a weakness into a strength.

Climate change has for the first time emerged as a front-and-center issue in national political campaigns. On Friday, Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, announced that he would campaign for president on the signature issue of fighting climate change.

Polls show that millennial voters, the largest voting demographic, consistently rank climate change as an issue of top concern — something older generations never did. A 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center found that millennials are the only generation in which a strong majority — 65 percent — says both that there is solid evidence of global warming and that this is attributable primarily to human activity.

Policy experts say the solution to climate change is still to put a price — ideally, a tax — on carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels, essentially creating an energy tax that would raise the price of gasoline and electricity generated from fossil fuels. That idea is likely to remain a tough sell with many voters, even as it energizes the liberal left wing of the Democratic Party.

Veterans of the 2010 debacle say the political risk will not be as great as it was then. READ MORE

HOUSE E&C PREPARES MEAT-AND-POTATOES APPROACH: Amid progressive excitement around the Green New Deal, the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee — where any action on climate change would need to pass through — is hunkering down on several long-stalled, meat-and-potatoes policies, Pro's Zack Colman reports this morning.

That means focusing on issues like energy efficiency, home weatherization, modernizing the electric grid and training a modern energy workforce, which have been circulating for years and tend to enjoy bipartisan support.

Those approaches are more wonky than progressives' moon-shot goals, but some Democratic lawmakers say they're starting to chafe at the attention the progressive policy planks of the Green New Deal are getting.

"The Green New Deal, I can't really wrap my arms around it because it's over here, it's over there, it's up there, it's down there, it's all over the place," said Rep. Bobby Rush, who chairs the panel's energy subcommittee. "Our message, our initiative, our position has to be centered around putting Americans who are out of work back to work."

— Another thing: Worry is mounting that Green New Deal rhetoric could jeopardize the possibility of a bipartisan deal on infrastructure, Pro Transportation's Tanya Snyder reports. READ MORE