Climate advocates finally won in WA. How? By not talking about climate

Midway through the $16 million political campaign this fall to defend Washington’s far-reaching climate change law, University of Washington professor Aseem Prakash noticed something very unusual.

“They weren’t talking about climate change,” he said. “Climate change is the purpose of the law, and they weren’t focusing on that, at all.”

It’s true, and pretty remarkable. A review of the 10 television and digital ads that made up the crux of the “No on I-2117” campaign shows that the word “climate” was never uttered once by the farmers, mothers, firefighters, a rocket scientist or Bill Nye the Science Guy, who all appeared in the ads.

Nor did words like “climate change” or “global warming” ever appear on screen.

“It’s a big evolution in how to wage climate politics,” Prakash said. “It worked spectacularly.”

For the past decade or so, Prakash has been teaching a course on climate politics in the UW’s political science department. During that time, there have been three climate change initiatives on the ballot here. He’s had a front row seat for how policymakers, activists and campaigners have sought to frame and spin one of the toughest issues in politics.

The first two climate measures, in 2016 and 2018, both failed by wide margins. That even such a green state couldn’t pass a climate vote was a blow to the U.S. movement, leading to hesitancy to push for votes on climate policies in other states.

Climate change came to be viewed as dicey ballot box issue. Carbon regulation policies tended to offer immediate pain (higher fuel prices) for speculative future benefit (helping save the planet from warming.) Getting people to vote for that combo just wasn’t working.

So this time around, two things changed. One is that lawmakers wrote the Climate Commitment Act so that some carbon fees were reinvested in visible infrastructure projects around the state — such as in transportation. And two is that the campaign focused heavily on that spending, dropping any talk about saving the planet or stemming climate change.

Prakash said it was genius. Focus groups and polling have shown that the mere mention of the phrase “climate change” can reduce support for a government project or program by double digits, he said.

“The reason is the words ‘climate change’ are a trigger for some, they can ignite a culture war,” Prakash said. “The words also raise the issue that the benefits can be global, and therefore out of sight to the average voter.”

The TV ads instead featured folks talking about how Initiative 2117, the GOP effort to repeal the climate law, would cut state funding for specific projects. A wildland firefighter said it would ax spending for “wildfire prevention,” a Puyallup farmer said it would “cut transportation funding that would make it harder to move products,” and so on.

On the environment side, the ads stressed there would be more air pollution if the law was repealed, showing polluting smokestacks. These ads though never directly mentioned carbon, CO₂, greenhouse gas emissions, warming, the Earth or the climate. There were also no ads featuring Gov. Jay Inslee, who is the state’s career-long crusader against climate change.

Prakash said he noticed the climate campaign also stopped arguing with critics about whether the law had raised gas prices.

“They stopped talking about the costs completely, and instead focused on benefits, benefits, benefits,” he said. “The whole campaign was like one of those highway signs that reads ‘your tax dollars at work.’”

The results were a sea-change — especially in rural counties.

Take Yakima. The climate campaign ran Spanish-language ads there featuring a mother talking about the health effects of air pollution. The pro-climate side won on I-2117 by two percentage points there, compared to losing on the 2018 climate measure I-1631 by 40 points. That’s a 42-point swing in the green direction.

Okanogan County swung by 44 points in the pro-climate direction compared to 2018. Douglas County, home to East Wenatchee, swung by 48 points. These swings in deep red counties were larger than in the liberal urban areas.

“That they were able to succeed in rural areas is a first in climate politics,” Prakash said. “This is a huge, huge win for the climate movement, a much bigger breakthrough than people seem to realize.”

The win was definitely greased by outspending the anti-climate law side by more than 15-1. That imbalance was due to oil companies who spent so much in the past either supporting the climate law side this time, or staying out of it.

Is it ironic, or maybe disappointing to advocates, that a potential key to winning at climate policy is to not talk about the core issue — how humankind is altering the climate? Because the existential stakes might be seen as grating, or “too much?”

Maybe, but Prakash said there’s no evidence that voters were confused, or thought this wasn’t at heart related to climate change. The new argument is instead that climate needs are no longer exotic, and instead have been rolled into the essential infrastructure plans of the state.

“It all led to a massive margin, so this will be studied,” he said.

He closed: “My takeaway is that climate politics has been fundamentally changed, and it all just played out right here, in Washington state.”