Hey Stupid, it’s the Environment

Why has climate change fallen off our radar?

Originally published in Illumination on Nov. 14, 2024.

In 2008, before American voters headed to the polls, NPR went to air with a Week in Politics program headlined, “It’s the Economy, Stupid.”
On Nov. 6, 2024, following the latest U.S. election, NPR again reminded listeners it’s still the economy that brought Donald Trump back to power.
NPR borrowed the line from James Carville, strategist for Bill Clinton who made the phrase famous and helped get him elected as president in 1992. “It’s the economy, stupid” has since become a political cliché and, if you believe the pundits, a piece of profound wisdom and truth.
I won’t dispute that in the minds of a lot of voters, both in the U.S. and elsewhere (including my own country Canada, which will be facing its own federal election in a year or sooner), the economy is issue numero uno. Bread-and-butter issues are probably what got Clinton and Trump elected into office and people seemed to place their Xs near their hearts and wallets.
But what if the reality is that we’re all stupid, because it’s not the economy really but the environment?
During the latest U.S. presidential election, we heard endlessly about how voters were pissed about inflation, crime, and housing prices. Oh, and immigration of course.
“Are you better off than you were four years ago,” Trump brilliantly repeated at every opportunity.
More than 75 million people seemed to answer no and voted accordingly.
It’s the same in Canada.
Here, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives have been holding a commanding lead in the polls over Justin Trudeau’s Liberals and are poised to form the next government, probably by a large majority.
Poilievre is doing that by capitalizing on rage across the nation against Trudeau and repeating how he will make the economic lives of Canadians better once he gets in office. He also keeps saying how he will “axe the tax,” his weaponized reference to the carbon tax that the Liberals introduced as a measure to fight climate change.
I get all that rage. I think most voters get it.
We see how grocery prices have gone up. In some cases, way up. Gas prices too. In my city of Windsor, Ont., a million bucks could buy you a mansion not long ago. Today, you can find a very nice home for six figures but it’s a far cry from the Taj Mahal.
The environment, however, has fallen so far off the radar in political discourse and campaigns, it’s almost become an non-issue.
In the U.S. election, the climate denier Trump went so far as to mock and tempt Mother Nature — didn’t he watch the Chiffon commercial? — by saying, “Drill, baby, drill.” Because, you know, what we need is more oil so let’s head to the Arctic and get to work!

Trump clearly knew what he was doing. A Pew Research Poll showed how far down the list climate change ranked and he was telling voters what they wanted to hear. Kamala Harris also became tone-deaf about the issue, probably realizing it wouldn’t help get her votes.
But here’s the thing. The high cost of that home that you can’t afford is meaningless if it’s underwater. The outrageous price increases for the bottle of olive oil won’t matter if your town’s on fire, along with your kitchen and that precious liquid you use in your salads. Immigration levels won’t matter if you can’t breathe. In fact, those surges of refugees will probably increase as people try to escape their own climate hells.
All those devastating effects of climate change — extreme heat, droughts, raging forest fires, catastrophic flooding, mudslides, and more — are affecting all of us. I doubt there are many pockets across the great red Trump states that have been spared the ravages of climate change, including many that were hammered by Hurricane Helena. Yet of voters in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, only Virginians chose Harris.
It seems voters everywhere are turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to climate change as an issue in political campaigns. They even cheer as their political heroes mock governments that are trying to rein in deadly carbon emissions.
I have been a labour activist at my workplace and attended many conferences and training sessions where the environment was sometimes a hot issue. For some unionists, like autoworkers who dominated the movement in my town and elsewhere, there was once a feeling that their brothers and sisters should not be wasting their time with the environment. They should not be spending union dues on environmental activism or using their political clout to speak out for things like a cleaner community.
Those union members had to be reminded of something that is more of a truism than what Carville spouted more than 30 years ago: “There are no jobs on a dead planet.”
Maybe we should be adding stupid after that and using it in political campaigns?