For three decades, Democratic leaders described climate change as an emergency that justified radically remaking the American economy. No challenge “poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” said Barack Obama in his 2015 State of the Union address. Kamala Harris said in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.” Climate change is “the existential threat of our time,” said Nancy Pelosi upon becoming Speaker of the House in 2019. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said around the same time, “the world is going to end” in 12 years without action. “Climate change is literally an existential threat to our Nation and to the world,” said Joe Biden, campaigning in New Hampshire in 2019, and said, “I guarantee you. We’re going to end fossil fuel.” In 2023, he said that “the only existential threat humanity faces, even more frightening than a nuclear war,” was warming above 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures. Senator Chuck Schumer in 2021 urged Biden to declare “a national emergency on climate change.”
