Let’s say you had the chance to name the biggest effort to tackle climate change in United States history. What would you call it?
Democrats got that rare opportunity in August 2022, two years ago this week, when they passed legislation putting nearly $369 billion into investments in renewable energy, electric vehicles, energy efficiency upgrades for homes and other green technologies. When the legislation emerged from negotiations with then-Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the key destination, it had a surprising name: the “Inflation Reduction Act.”
Even as inflation rates rose, the law was not supposed to do much to counter rising prices in the short term, although it did include provisions to allow the government to negotiate prescription drug prices and help Americans afford health insurance. Which it was primarily supposed to do was to address climate change—by one estimate, to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Since President Joe Biden signed it into law, the Inflation Reduction Act has seen tangible results. Last year, about 3.4 million families took advantage of tax credits for clean energy and energy efficiency upgrades, according to recent data from the Treasury Department. This amounts to 750,000 homes newly equipped with solar panels on the roof and almost 270,000 homes with energy-efficient heat pumps. Companies, supported by the legislation’s incentives, invested $360 billion in making batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and other technologies.
But ask the average American what they think of the nation’s landmark effort to tackle climate change, and you might get a blank stare. About 4 in 10 registered voters say they have heard “nothing at all” about it, according to poll conducted this spring by Yale University and George Mason University.
As the 2024 presidential election approaches, Democrats aren’t getting much credit for climate action from voters who care. Just over half of the Liberal Democrats say they haven’t heard much about the IRA. “It raises real red flags for me because, again, this is the base of your party,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. “These are the people who are actually most tuned into politics and follow along with political news. And they don’t know about it.”
Congress once called bills more intuitive—think of the Clean Air Act of 1970. But the IRA follows a more recent tradition of carefully branded environmental accountswith Democrats emphasizing positive qualities they hope will resonate across the political spectrum. Only rarely do those positive qualities include the word “climate”. In 2009, for example, an effort in Congress to adopt a national cap-and-trade system to limit carbon emissions was called the “American Clean Energy and Security Act.”
This reluctance to talk directly about climate change can be traced back to a fundamental bias in American politics, Leiserowitz said. most people, including politiciansbelieve it climate action is far more unpopular than it really is. In fact, the majority of Americans already are concerned or concerned about climate change, and wants to do something about it.
Leiserowitz goes so far as to call the Inflation Reduction Act a “communication failure,” one that could have implications for the presidential election this November. Although addressing climate change is not generally the top issue on voters’ minds, a poll last year found that it was the third-place priority for younger voters, tied with preventing gun violence, only topped by economic concerns like inflation and jobs that pay a living wage.
Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images
The good news for Democrats — and Vice President Kamala Harris, now the party’s presidential nominee after Biden dropped out in July — is that when people hear about the IRA, they tend to like it. Among those who say climate change is one of their top voting priorities, 97 percent supported the law after reading a brief description of it.
Now, with just three months to go until the election, cutting through the news cycle with a message about climate action is sure to be even more difficult. “If they wanted to enjoy the benefits of passing this truly world-changing legislation, they should have communicated it honestly over the last two years,” Leiserowitz said. Apart from the lack of political attention and media coverage, there is another challenge to communicating the IRA’s benefits: People rarely encounter them first hand. The tax incentives go toward things that aren’t regular purchases, like electric vehicles and heat pumps, said John Marshall, the CEO of Potential Energy, a nonprofit climate marketing firm.
But the messaging problem of the Inflation Reduction Act began with its title. “Most people are never going to learn anything more about it than the name itself,” Leiserowitz said. “They lost the first and biggest opportunity they had to communicate if the goal was to emphasize the climate piece.” People aren’t connecting the dots: In an April survey, which didn’t provide much context about the law, 16 percent of Americans said they think the IRA is helping to address climate change.
Many journalists initially resisted the name and used it sparingly in their articles, often only to see if the bill would actually reduce inflation, said Angela Bradbery, a communications professor at the University of Florida. She pointed to a Associated Press article in 2022 who characterized the legislation as “Democrats’ flagship climate and health care bill” — a more accurate description, in Bradbery’s opinion. Biden admitted that the IRA’s name was a missed opportunity. “I wish I hadn’t called it that,” he said during a speech last August.
A lot of effort was spent trying to conjure up the magic words to “reframe” climate change. to elicit more public support for political action, pointing to benefits that will help the economy or public health (or inflation). As Biden often puts it, “When I hear climate change, I think work.” Yet that impulse may be misplaced. “That’s not why people think we need to act on climate change,” Leisorowitz said. “It’s about protecting the people, places and things we love. … It could destabilize civilization, and we’re talking about a few hundred thousand jobs that it’s going to create?”
For the Inflation Reduction Act, a simple message resonates with people, according to Marshall’s marketing research: to emphasize that tackling climate change is a landmark achievement.
The urge to rethink communication, Marshall suspects, comes from the fact that climate change takes decades to resolve. “We as humans naturally get impatient with: ‘Oh, that message didn’t work. We still have climate change. Let’s try another one,” he said. “And the most important thing in marketing and messaging is that you pick one thing and stick with it, and you have conviction about it.”
