Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent

I work in energy compliance in a state that produces more oil than any but Texas, mines lignite that fires the power plants that keep the upper Midwest warm, and ships both by rail through towns where the only other employer is the school, and I want to answer this question plainly, because the people I live among have spent the past year being told by a sixteen-year-old and a freshman congresswoman that their work is a crime against the future, and they have a view about it that the national coverage has not carried. The view is this: the volume changed. The politics did not. And the reason the politics did not is that nothing in the past year’s noise offered anyone in North Dakota a single thing except an instruction to stop.

Let me be specific about the noise, because the question lists it. The Green New Deal resolution introduced in February proposed to eliminate fossil fuels from electricity within a decade, overhaul every building in the country, and guarantee a federal job to everyone displaced, and the Senate voted on it in March and not one senator voted for it; forty-three Democrats voted present rather than put their names on their own party’s signature proposal. The Amazon burned in August and the coverage treated a fire season in Brazil as an American political event, which it was not. Four million people marched last Friday, by the organizers’ count, and a Swedish teenager told the United Nations that her childhood had been stolen, and the President mocked her on Twitter, and the networks ran both for a week. Ten Democratic candidates spent seven hours on television proposing to spend between two and sixteen trillion dollars. That is a great deal of volume. I have read the proposals, which is more than most of the people shouting about them have done, and the thing I notice as a compliance officer is that not one of them explains what happens to the man who runs a coal dragline in Mercer County on the day the plant closes, beyond a promise of retraining that this state has heard before, from both parties, and has learned to price at zero.

Now what actually changed, because straight talk requires saying it. Climate has moved to the top tier of Democratic primary concerns, which it was not in 2016, and that is real and it will shape the party’s platform and its candidate. A majority of Americans now say it is a major threat and two-thirds say the government is doing too little, and those numbers have moved in a decade, mostly among people under forty, and that is real too. The companies I deal with have noticed: every utility in this region has an emissions target now, every oil producer has a methane program, the banks that lend to them ask questions they did not ask five years ago, and the coal plants are closing anyway, not because of any law but because gas is cheaper, and this state’s gas comes out of the same wells as its oil. The energy transition that the marchers demand is happening in North Dakota on the economics, at the pace the economics allow, and it would be happening whether or not anyone had marched.

What has not changed is the thing the question is actually about, which is the politics, and I will say why from the Plains. The politics of climate in this country is a politics of two coalitions that do not need each other’s votes. The coalition that marched last Friday lives in the cities and the suburbs and the universities and votes for one party, and it has concluded that the problem is urgent and the solution is federal and the people in the way are the enemy. The coalition that works in the oil patch and the coal fields and the farms lives where I live and votes for the other party, and it has concluded that the first coalition means to end its livelihood and call it justice. Neither coalition has changed its mind in 2019, and neither has tried to change the other’s, and the Green New Deal was the clearest proof of that: a proposal that read, in every line, as if the people it would displace were an afterthought. The Senate vote in March was the Republicans forcing the Democrats to own it and the Democrats refusing to, which is the politics exactly: the loud party will not vote for its own loudest idea, and the quiet party will not propose an alternative, and the volume goes up while the position of every legislator stays where it was in January.

I want to say what would change the politics, because a compliance officer who only writes findings is not doing the job. It would be a proposal that treated the people in the way as partners rather than obstacles: a carbon price with the revenue returned to households, which the oil companies have said they would accept and which the marchers reject because it is not a revolution; a transition fund for coal counties that is real money and not a retraining brochure; a permitting process that lets the transmission lines and the pipelines and the nuclear plants actually get built, which the same people who march against carbon also march against. None of that was on offer in 2019. What was on offer was a resolution nobody voted for, a teenager’s speech, and a town hall about trillions, and the people here heard all of it as what it was, which was the other coalition talking to itself about them.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the volume and not the politics, and that the volume may have made the politics worse, because a man in Mercer County who was ambivalent about climate in January has spent the year being told he is the villain, and men told that do not become allies. The transition is happening on the economics. The policy that would speed it has not been proposed by anyone with the standing to propose it. And the sixteen-year-old is right that the adults have failed, though not in the way she thinks: they have failed by building two coalitions that would rather shout at each other than make the one deal that would actually move a dragline. I would like to see the deal. I have been in compliance long enough to know that nobody writes a finding against themselves, and both coalitions would have to.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent

Australia held a climate election in May, and the climate lost. I want to start there because it is the clearest natural experiment in the democratic world on the question being asked, and because the Americans asking whether 2019 changed the politics or only the volume can look at a country where the volume reached its peak four months before theirs did and the politics went the other way. The Labor opposition ran on a forty-five percent emissions-reduction target, a fifty percent electric-vehicle target, and the most ambitious climate platform any major Australian party had ever put to voters, against a government whose prime minister had once brought a lump of coal into Parliament to taunt the opposition with it. Every poll had Labor winning. The school strikes had drawn hundreds of thousands. The drought in New South Wales was the worst in a century and the Darling River had run dry. And on 18 May the government was returned, with its largest gains in the coal seats of central Queensland, where the proposed Adani mine had become the symbol of everything the inner cities wanted to stop and everything the regions wanted to keep. The prime minister called it a victory for the quiet Australians. The students were not quiet. They lost anyway.

I offer that not as an argument about the science, which I accept, nor about the policy, which I think Labor’s was roughly right, but as an argument about politics, which is the question. The volume in Australia in the first half of 2019 was higher than anywhere outside Europe: the strikes, the drought, the dying river, a Great Barrier Reef bleaching for the third time in five years, and an opposition that bet its whole campaign on the issue. The result was a government that had done as little as it could on climate for six years being re-elected by voters who had decided that the people shouting about the climate did not understand or respect how they lived. The regional seats that swung hardest against Labor were the seats whose economies depend on coal, and the swing was driven by a convoy of inner-city environmentalists who drove to Queensland to protest the mine and were received, by the towns they drove through, as an invading force. Volume does not change politics. Volume changes who is angry, and the people made angry by the loud side in Australia this year were the people with the swing seats.

Now the American case, which I follow closely and which has a different electoral structure and, I think, the same dynamic. The Green New Deal resolution in February was the American equivalent of Labor’s platform: ambitious, sweeping, and written in a register that treated the people whose jobs it would eliminate as a problem to be managed with a jobs guarantee. The Senate vote in March, on which no senator voted in favour and forty-three Democrats voted present, was the party discovering that it did not want to own its own flagship in the states where the flagship would sink it. The town hall this month, with ten candidates proposing between two and sixteen trillion dollars, was the primary electorate talking to itself. The strike last Friday and the summit this week were the volume reaching its American peak. And the administration, which has spent the year rolling back the power-plant rule, the methane rule, and California’s authority over vehicle standards, has done so with a confidence that comes from having watched exactly what the volume did to Labor in Australia and concluding that it will do the same to the Democrats in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan. The President’s mockery of a sixteen-year-old is not a tactical error, whatever one thinks of it. It is the lump of coal, and it won here.

What has actually changed, in both countries, is underneath the politics and will outlast it. The economics of energy have moved against coal regardless of policy; Australian coal plants are closing because they are old and gas and renewables are cheaper, and the same is true across the American Midwest. The large companies in both countries have adopted targets and disclosures that their investors demanded and their governments did not. Climate is now a first-tier concern for voters under forty in every democracy, and those voters will be the median voter in a decade. And the physical events, the fires that have already started in Queensland this month, the drought, the floods in the American Midwest this spring, are arriving on a schedule that does not consult the polling. Those are changes in the ground. The politics sits on top of them and has not moved, because the politics is a contest between two coalitions, and 2019 made each coalition more certain of itself and no more interested in the other.

I want to say what the Australian experience suggests would change the politics, because I think it is the useful contribution of a country that has run the experiment. It is not louder. The strikes and the convoy and the forty-five percent target lost; the lump of coal won. What has moved Australian climate policy, modestly, in the months since, is pressure from the business lobby, the farmers who have watched their land dry out, and the insurers who have begun to price the bushfire risk, all of whom are inside the governing coalition’s own constituency and cannot be dismissed as the other side. Change that comes from inside the coalition that resists it is the only change that survives an election. The Americans have those constituencies too: the farmers in the flooded Midwest, the insurers who are leaving the fire zones, the utilities closing plants on the economics. None of them marched on Friday. All of them will move the politics before the marchers do, and the marchers, who are right about the problem, will not thank them for it.

So my assessment is that 2019 changed the volume in the United States and not the politics, and that the Australian election is the warning the Americans should read before they conclude otherwise: an electorate can accept the science, want action, and still re-elect the party that mocks the activists, because the activists have made the election about the activists. The ground is shifting, in the economics, the demographics, and the weather, and it will shift the politics eventually, from inside the coalitions rather than from the street. Clarity over fashion: the fashionable view is that the children have changed everything. The clear view is that the children have made the adults who disagree with them angrier, that the angry adults vote in the seats that decide elections, and that in May they decided one, and the lump of coal is still on the government benches.

Clermont, Florida Correspondent

In August the governor of Florida, a Republican elected with the President’s endorsement, appointed the state’s first chief resilience officer, and I want to begin there because it is the most important climate-politics event of 2019 that nobody marched about, and because it answers the question in a way that the national argument cannot see. The word climate does not appear in the officer’s title. It barely appears in the governor’s statements. What appears is resilience, sea-level rise, flooding, water quality, and the Everglades, and the money attached, which is real, is for seawalls and pumps and septic-to-sewer conversions in the coastal counties that vote Republican and are going underwater. That is the politics of climate in Florida: a Republican state government doing the adaptation work under a different name, because the voters in Naples and Fort Myers and the Keys have watched the king tides come up through the storm drains and have concluded that whatever they call it, they would like it fixed. The politics changed. It changed quietly, in the vocabulary, and the vocabulary is the whole story.

Let me describe what the vocabulary permits, because I advise small firms and I know that what you call a thing determines who will pay for it. A Republican legislator from the Gulf Coast cannot vote for a climate bill, because the word belongs to the other side and his primary voters would punish him for using it. He can vote for a resilience bill, a flood-mitigation bill, a water-quality bill, an infrastructure bill, and he has, and the state has committed hundreds of millions to those things since January under a governor who ran against the previous Republican governor’s record on the environment. The insurers have done the rest: the private market has been repricing coastal risk for years, the state’s insurer of last resort is growing again, and a homeowner in Cape Coral who gets a renewal notice with a thirty percent increase does not need a teenager at the UN to tell him something has changed. He needs a seawall, and he will vote for whoever builds it, and the party that builds it in Florida is the one that will not say why.

Now the national volume, which the question lists and which I will take as a migration analyst would, by asking who it moved and where. The Green New Deal moved the Democratic primary; climate is now a top-tier concern for those voters and every candidate has a trillion-dollar plan, and the Senate vote in March, with forty-three Democrats voting present on their own party’s resolution, showed that the plans are for the primary and not for the states that decide the general. The Amazon fires moved the coverage for a month and moved no American vote. The strike last Friday and the summit this week moved the young, who were already moved, and the President’s mockery of the girl moved his base, who were already moved the other way. Four million people marched and, by the polling I have seen, the share of Americans calling climate a major threat moved by a point or two, within the margin, with the partisan gap wider than on any other issue in the survey. That is volume. It is the two coalitions each confirming what it already believed, at a higher pitch, and the pitch is not the same thing as a changed mind.

Here is the migration angle, because I think it is where the politics is actually being decided. Florida gains close to a thousand residents a day, and the places they are moving to, the coastal counties and the low-lying developments west of Fort Lauderdale and the subdivisions going up on former wetlands around Orlando, are the places most exposed to the thing the marchers are marching about. The people moving in are not, mostly, climate voters; they are retirees from Ohio and families from New York who want the weather and the taxes. But they are buying houses that the insurers are repricing and the mortgage lenders are starting to question, and the first time a family in Cape Coral cannot get a thirty-year mortgage because the lender will not take the flood risk, the politics of climate in that household changes in an afternoon, and it changes toward whoever is offering to fix the drain. That is happening now, in the premiums and the lending standards, and it is the mechanism by which a state that will not say the word is building the pumps. The national argument is about causes. The Florida argument is about drains, and the drain argument is winning, because nobody has to admit anything to fix a drain.

I want to say something about Dorian, because it sat off this coast three weeks ago as a Category 5, leveled the Abacos, and then turned north and spared us by fifty miles, and the whole state spent a week watching it. Nobody in Clermont talked about climate that week. They talked about plywood and generators and whether the evacuation routes would hold, which is what people talk about when the thing is in front of them rather than in a resolution. The politics of a hurricane are the politics of readiness, and readiness is bipartisan in this state because the storm does not check registration. I would offer that as the model for how the national politics eventually changes: not through the vocabulary of the strike, which half the country has decided belongs to the other half, but through the vocabulary of the storm, which belongs to everyone who has boarded a window.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the volume nationally and the vocabulary in Florida, and that the vocabulary change is the one that will produce policy, because it lets the party that controls the coastal states do the work without conceding the argument. The Green New Deal and the strike and the summit were the loud coalition talking to itself; the resilience officer and the septic-to-sewer money and the insurance renewals are the quiet coalition acting on the problem under another name. I would not call that hypocrisy. I would call it the oldest trick in state government, which is to do the thing while refusing to say its name, and I would note that it works, and that the pumps in Miami Beach do not care what the bill that funded them was called. The water is coming up through the drains in Republican counties. The Republicans are buying pumps. That is the politics of climate in 2019, from the state that will live with it first, and it is more than the national argument has produced, and it was done without a single march.

Novi, Michigan Correspondent

In July, four automakers, Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen, signed an agreement with the state of California to build cars to a fuel-economy standard tougher than the one the federal government was proposing, and last week the federal government revoked California’s authority to set that standard, and twenty-three states sued the next day, and I want to start there because that sequence is the actual politics of climate in my industry in 2019, and it did not involve a march or a resolution or a teenager. It involved product planning. A car company decides today what it will build in 2025, and a car company that has to build for two standards, one for California and the thirteen states that follow it and one for the rest of the country, has a problem that no amount of political sympathy for either side can solve. Four of them looked at the uncertainty and decided to side with the tougher standard, because a tough standard they can plan for beats a lenient one that may be in court for five years. That is the politics. It happened in a conference room. It will determine what the people in my plants are building for a decade, and the strike last Friday will not.

So my answer to the question is that 2019 changed the politics of climate in the one place that matters for my industry, which is the boardroom, and left it unchanged in the place everyone is looking, which is Washington, and that the difference between those two is the whole story of the year. Let me take Washington first, because it is the easy part. The Green New Deal was introduced in February and no senator voted for it in March, with forty-three Democrats voting present rather than own it. The ten candidates at the town hall this month proposed between two and sixteen trillion dollars, with electric-vehicle mandates and gasoline-car bans on dates that no one in product planning believes. The administration finalized a power-plant rule in June that does less than the one it replaced, proposed rolling back the methane rules in August, and revoked California’s waiver last week. The President skipped the UN session and mocked the girl. Each side did what it would have done in 2017. The volume is higher. Not one vote in Congress has moved, and I would bet the plant that not one will before the election.

Now the boardroom, which is where the change is. The auto industry committed this year to something north of two hundred billion dollars in electric-vehicle investment globally over the next five years. My company’s customers are launching electric trucks and crossovers that were approved before the strike and will ship regardless of who wins in 2020. The investment was not driven by the Green New Deal, which nobody in the industry takes as a planning document. It was driven by Europe’s emissions rules, which start biting next year with fines that run to billions; by China, which has mandated electric-vehicle quotas and is the largest car market on earth; by California and the states that follow it; and by the fact that the batteries have gotten cheap enough that an electric drivetrain will cost the same as a gasoline one by the middle of the decade. The politics of climate, for a supply chain, is the sum of the regulations in the markets you sell into, and the sum moved in 2019, in Brussels and Beijing and Sacramento, and Washington was the one capital that moved the other way, and the industry has decided to build for the capitals that matter.

Here is the part I think the marchers and the mockers both miss, and I will say it as a man who manages the parts that go into these vehicles. The transition that the strike demanded is happening in my supply chain at the pace the engineering allows, and the pace is faster than the skeptics think and slower than the activists demand, and nothing said at a podium this year changed it. What slows it is not political will. It is the battery supply chain, which runs through cobalt from Congo and lithium from Chile and cell plants in Korea and China, and which cannot be built out in a decade no matter who is president; it is the charging infrastructure, which nobody has figured out how to pay for; and it is the fact that a plant that builds engines employs twice as many people as a plant that builds motors, and the people in Michigan who build engines have noticed, and they vote. The Green New Deal promised them a federal job. They have heard that before. What they want is to know which plant stays open, and no one at the town hall could tell them.

On Michigan politics specifically, because the question asks about the United States and Michigan is where the United States decides. The state has a Democratic governor who ran on fixing the roads and a Republican legislature that will not raise the gas tax to fix them, and climate was not an issue in that election and is not one in the legislature now. The autoworkers who are on strike against GM this month are striking over plant closures and temporary workers and health care, and the electric transition is on their minds as a threat to the engine plants, not as a cause. A Democratic candidate who comes to Michigan next year with a sixteen-trillion-dollar climate plan and a ban on gasoline cars will lose the state, and the ones who understand that are already quieter about it here than they were at the town hall. The volume changed the primary. The general will be decided in places where the volume is a liability, and the candidates know it, which is why the loudest ideas will be the first ones dropped.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the politics of climate in the markets that regulate my industry and in the boardrooms that respond to them, where the shift toward electrification is now irreversible and was decided by Brussels, Beijing, and Sacramento rather than by anyone in Washington; and that it changed only the volume in Washington itself, where each party did what it would have done anyway at a higher pitch. The supply chain is transitioning. The engine plants are worried. The marchers are right about the direction and wrong about the mechanism, and the mockers are wrong about the direction and right that the mechanism will not be a resolution. I qualified a battery-module supplier this summer. I did not do it because of the strike. I did it because four automakers signed a deal with California in July and I could read the product plan from the signatures. That is how the politics of climate reached Novi in 2019. It arrived as a purchase order.

Orange County, California Correspondent

California has had a price on carbon since 2013, a renewable electricity mandate since 2002, its own vehicle emissions authority since 1967, and a Republican-free statewide government since 2011, and I want to begin by saying that none of that was produced by anything resembling the year the question describes. It was produced by a long, dull, legislative accretion in a state where one party could pass things, and the result is a state that emits less carbon per person than any but a handful, charges more for electricity and gasoline than almost all, and spent 2019 watching its largest utility go bankrupt over the fires its lines started and watching the federal government revoke, last week, the authority under which it has set vehicle standards for fifty years. I analyze property and business models for a living, and from where I sit the question of whether 2019 changed the politics of climate has two answers, one for the country and one for the state, and the state’s answer is the one that tells you what the country’s will eventually be.

The country’s answer is volume. The Green New Deal moved the Democratic primary and nothing else; the Senate vote in March, with forty-three Democrats voting present, told you exactly how far the party is willing to carry its own resolution into the states it needs. The strike last Friday and the summit this week and the President’s tweet about the girl were the two coalitions performing for their own audiences, and the polling moved a point. The town hall produced plans measured in trillions that no one in a business will model because no one in a business believes they will pass. I do not say that with contempt for the marchers, whose diagnosis I share. I say it because I price things, and the market price of federal climate legislation in 2020 is approximately what it was in 2017, which is zero, and the volume has not changed the price because the volume is coming from the side that already had the votes it was going to get.

The state’s answer is different, and it is the one I want to spend the rest of this on, because California in 2019 is a preview of what climate politics looks like after the argument is over, and the preview is not what either coalition expects. Here the argument is settled: the state has committed to carbon neutrality by 2045 and nobody with power disputes it. What is not settled is the cost, and the cost arrived this year in three forms that the marchers do not march about. The first is the utility. PG&E filed for bankruptcy in January under the weight of wildfire liabilities that exceed its value, and the state has spent the year building a fund to keep it and the other utilities solvent against the next fire, and the ratepayers will pay for it, and the ratepayers are already paying some of the highest electricity prices in the country in part because of the renewable mandate. The second is housing. The state’s climate goals require dense housing near transit, and the state’s local governments, including every city in this county, have refused to permit it, and the result is a housing shortage that pushes people into the fire-prone foothills and the long commutes that produce the emissions the goals are meant to eliminate. The third is the waiver. The federal government revoked California’s vehicle authority last week, twenty-three states sued, and the case will take years, and in the meantime four automakers have agreed to build to California’s standard anyway because they would rather have certainty than a federal rule in litigation. The politics of climate in California is not about whether. It is about who pays and where they are allowed to live, and those are the questions the national argument has not reached and will have to.

Here is what the state’s experience says about the national one. Once a polity accepts the goal, the politics becomes distributional, and distributional politics is the hardest kind, because it pits people who agree on the goal against each other over the bill. The environmentalists in this state fight the housing that the climate requires. The unions that support the renewable mandate fight the solar companies that do not hire union labor. The coastal cities that voted for the carbon price fight the transmission lines that would carry the power. The low-income ratepayers who vote for the party that sets the goals pay the electricity bills that the goals produce. None of that is in the Green New Deal, which assumes that the people who agree on the goal will agree on the means, and the California evidence is that they will not, and that the disagreement is more durable than the one with the skeptics, because the skeptics can be outvoted and the allies cannot.

On the money, briefly, because I follow it. The capital markets moved in 2019 in a way that the politics did not: the largest asset managers wrote to boards about climate risk, the insurers repriced fire and flood exposure across the Sun Belt, the utilities announced retirement dates for coal plants on the economics, and the automakers committed two hundred billion dollars to electrification because Europe and China required it. That is the private sector doing, for its own reasons, what the public sector in Washington declined to do, and it is the mechanism by which the transition proceeds in a country that cannot pass a law. It is not democratic. It is not what the marchers wanted. It is what is happening, and a business analyst would note that it is happening faster than any resolution would have made it happen, and that it is happening without asking anyone in Mercer County or Youngstown what they think, which is the political problem the next decade will have to solve.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the volume nationally and advanced nothing legislatively, that it changed the capital markets in ways that will outlast the politics, and that California, which settled the argument a decade ago, spent the year discovering what the argument is actually about once it is settled, which is the bill and the map. The marchers are right about the science and have not yet encountered the distributional fight that awaits them when they win. The mockers are wrong about the science and right that the fight will be ugly. And the state that is furthest along is bankrupting a utility, refusing to build housing, and suing the federal government over its right to regulate a car, all in the name of a goal nobody here disputes. That is the future of climate politics. It is not loud. It is a rate case, a zoning hearing, and a lawsuit, and nobody has ever marched for a rate case.

Myrtle Beach, South Carolina Correspondent

I am the youngest person on this roster, I work in the medium the climate movement lives in, and I am going to disagree with the premise of the question, which assumes that volume and politics are different things. For my generation they are not. The politics of my generation happens in the volume: in what trends, in what a candidate is forced to answer at a town hall, in what a company has to say when its hashtag is hijacked, in what a sixteen-year-old can make the United Nations sit through. Older readers will say, correctly, that no law passed in 2019 and no senator changed a vote, and they will conclude that the politics did not change. I would say that the politics of a law is the last stage of a process that begins in attention, that 2019 was the year the attention became permanent, and that permanent attention is a political fact whether or not a bill has yet been written to match it.

Let me describe what I mean by permanent, because I measure attention for a living and I know how it usually behaves. Most issues spike and decay: a shooting, a hurricane, a scandal, each gets its week and recedes. Climate did not recede in 2019. It spiked with the Green New Deal in February, spiked again with the Senate vote in March, with the Amazon in August, with the town hall in early September, with the strike last Friday and the summit this week, and between the spikes it did not fall back to where it had been. The search volume, the engagement, the share of political content that touches it, all of them have a new floor, and the floor is the thing that matters, because a floor means the issue is now part of the background against which everything else is argued. That has happened to very few issues in my professional lifetime. It happened to guns after Parkland, briefly, and then the floor dropped. It has not dropped for climate, and I think the reason is structural: the thing itself keeps happening, in fires and floods and a hurricane that sat over the Bahamas for two days three weeks ago, and every event is a new post, and the posts do not stop.

Now what the volume has done to the politics, concretely, because I promised to argue they are the same thing. In 2016 climate was not asked about in a single presidential debate. This month ten candidates spent seven hours on it on national television, because the primary electorate demanded it and the network could sell it. Every one of those candidates has a plan with a trillion-dollar number attached, and the plans are, as the skeptics will say, unpassable, and they are also the price of admission to the primary, which they were not four years ago. That is a political change. The Green New Deal got zero votes in the Senate, and the vote was a stunt by the majority to embarrass the minority, and the minority voted present, and I understand that as a defeat. I also understand that a resolution introduced by a freshman in February was, by March, the thing the Senate majority leader felt he had to hold a vote on, which is a measure of how fast the attention converted into agenda. The administration rolled back the power-plant rule and the methane rule and revoked California’s waiver, and it did so loudly, and the President mocked the girl, because the other coalition’s volume is also politics and he understands that better than anyone alive.

Here is where I will concede the older view, because I run campaigns and I know what attention cannot do. Attention cannot pass a bill in a Senate where the states that produce fossil fuels have the same two votes as the states that march. Attention cannot change the mind of the man in a coal county who has been told he is the villain; it hardens him, and Australia proved that in May when the climate election went to the party with the lump of coal. Attention cannot build a transmission line or a nuclear plant or a battery supply chain, and the people who march against carbon are frequently the people who march against those too. And attention, when it is concentrated in the young, is attention held by the people who vote least, and that is a fact my generation has spent a decade failing to fix. The volume is politics. It is not yet power. The gap between those two is the whole question, and I would be lying if I said 2019 closed it.

But I would also be lying if I said the gap is where it was, and here is the Grand Strand evidence, which is small and which I trust. This coast is Republican, retired, and dependent on a beach that the Corps of Engineers has to rebuild every few years with dredged sand, and the rebuilding costs money that comes from Washington, and the flood maps are being redrawn, and the insurance renewals are coming in high, and the clients I work with, who did not say the word climate in 2016, say it now, carefully, as a thing they have to plan around. Not because they marched. Because the attention made the subject speakable in a conservative beach town, and speakable is the stage before actionable, and the stage before speakable was the one we were stuck in for twenty years. Hurricane Dorian sat offshore for a week this month and every one of my clients’ pages was full of it, and the comments were not about causes. They were about the beach, and the beach is where the politics on this coast will be decided, and the beach is a climate issue whether or not anyone here will ever say so.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the politics by changing the volume, because for the people who will be the median voter in a decade those are the same thing, and that the change has reached the agenda and the primaries and the vocabulary of a conservative beach town without yet reaching the Senate or the coal counties or the law. The older view says that is only volume. I would say that volume with a floor under it is the first stage of politics and that 2019 built the floor. The sixteen-year-old at the UN did not change a vote. She changed what every candidate has to answer, and what a client in Myrtle Beach can say out loud, and those are the things that change votes later, when the people who heard her are the people who are counted. We are not counted yet. We are loud. Loud is where it starts, and I have never seen a campaign win that did not start there.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

In February the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority voted to close the Paradise coal plant in Kentucky and the Bull Run plant outside Oak Ridge, twenty miles from where I am writing, and the President of the United States tweeted the day before the vote asking them not to, and they did it anyway, five to two, and I want to start there because it is the clearest climate-politics event of 2019 in my part of the country and it was decided by a utility’s accountants over the objection of the man the coal counties voted for. The board did not cite the climate. It cited the cost: the plants were old, the coal was expensive relative to gas, the capacity was not needed, and keeping them open would have raised rates for nine million people in seven states to preserve a few hundred jobs. That is how the energy transition is actually arriving in East Tennessee, and it is arriving under a federal agency created by Franklin Roosevelt, run by a board appointed by this President, closing coal plants on the economics while the President asks it not to and the marchers in Nashville take credit they did not earn. The politics of climate in 2019, from a county shop, is that the politics is almost beside the point, and the question of whether the volume changed it is the wrong question, because the thing that is changing is not being changed by anyone’s volume.

Let me take the volume anyway, because it is what the question asks about, and I will take it the way a civil engineer takes a load that is not on the drawings. The Green New Deal was introduced in February and the Senate voted it down in March without a single vote in favor, and I read the resolution, and it reads like a document written by people who have never had to get a project through a permitting process, which is the thing I do for a living. It proposes to rebuild the electrical grid, retrofit every building, and overhaul transportation in ten years, in a country where I cannot replace a bridge in six without an environmental review that the same coalition insists on. The strike last Friday and the summit this week moved the people who were already moved. The President’s tweet about the girl moved the people who were already moved the other way. The town hall produced numbers in the trillions that no one in public works can relate to a budget. I do not say the marchers are wrong about the problem. I say that a movement that wants to build a great deal of infrastructure very fast and also wants to preserve every procedural obstacle to building infrastructure has not yet noticed that it is arguing with itself, and until it notices, its volume is a load on a structure that cannot carry it.

Now what is actually changing, because an engineer reports what the gauges say and not what the crowd says. The TVA, which is the largest public power system in the country and serves this whole region, has retired or scheduled for retirement more than half the coal capacity it had a decade ago, and it has done so under boards appointed by both parties, for the same reason every time, which is that gas is cheaper and the plants are old. Its remaining carbon is now mostly in gas and its carbon-free share, from nuclear and hydro and a little solar, is over half, which is better than most of the country and was achieved without a single climate law in Tennessee, because the state has none and will not pass one. The utilities in the surrounding states are doing the same thing for the same reasons. The automakers whose plants anchor this state’s manufacturing have committed to electric vehicles because Europe and China and California require them, and the battery plants are being sited in states like this one because the labor and the power are cheap. The transition is proceeding at the pace of the balance sheets, in a region that voted overwhelmingly for the man who tweeted at the TVA, and the people doing it are not activists. They are accountants, and accountants do not march.

Here is the rural-county view, because I work for a county that sends its labor into the city and gets lectures back, and the climate debate is the purest form of the lecture. The people in the counties east of here have watched the coal plants close and the coal trains stop and the railroad jobs go with them, and they have heard, from the people who are glad about it, that this is progress and that the displaced will be retrained. They have also heard, from the people who claim to speak for them, that the closures are a plot and the climate is a hoax and the President will bring the plants back. Both of those are lies, and the people in those counties know it, because the plants closed under a board the President appointed and nobody has been retrained for anything. What they have not heard from anyone is the truth, which is that the plants were going to close on the economics regardless, that the transition will produce jobs somewhere but not necessarily here, and that the honest policy question is what the country owes a county whose one industry was ended by a spreadsheet. Neither coalition has asked that question, because asking it would require the loud side to admit that its vision has losers and the quiet side to admit that the losers are real and cannot be saved by denial.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the volume and did not change the politics, and that the politics was never the thing changing the energy system, which is being changed by cost under the noses of both coalitions while each claims credit or assigns blame. The marchers are right about the science and have not reckoned with the procedural state they have built or the counties they will leave behind. The mockers are wrong about the science and right that the Green New Deal cannot be built. The TVA closed two coal plants this year over the President’s objection and nobody in either coalition has told the people of Anderson County what happens to them next. I run a public-works shop. When a structure is being replaced, the question is never whether; it is what the people under it do while the work is going on, and nobody who shouted in 2019 has an answer for that, and the people under the structure have noticed, and that is the politics, and it did not change.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent

Three weeks ago Hurricane Dorian sat over Grand Bahama for the better part of two days as a Category 5 and then crawled up this coast at walking pace, and the Navy moved its ships out of Mayport, the port closed, the terminals cleared the yards, the drivers took their trucks inland, and the whole of Duval County spent four days boarding windows and watching a storm that eventually passed fifty miles offshore. I want to begin there because it is the climate event of 2019 that actually touched this city, and because nobody in the yard that week talked about climate. They talked about the track, the surge, the fuel supply, the evacuation routes, and whether the terminal’s generators would hold, which is to say they talked about readiness, and readiness is the only climate politics I have ever seen work in Florida, and it is not the politics the question is asking about.

The question lists the Green New Deal, the Amazon fires, and the strikes, and asks whether they changed the politics or only the volume. From the dock, the answer is volume, and I want to say why plainly. The Green New Deal was introduced in February and got no votes in the Senate in March, with the Democrats voting present on their own resolution, and I read enough of it to know that it is a document about what a government should want and not about how anything gets built, moved, or paid for, which is the only part of any document I have ever been asked to execute. The Amazon burned and the coverage treated it as if it were in Georgia. Four million people marched last Friday and a Swedish girl told the UN how dare you and the President mocked her and both of them got what they were after, which was the other side’s attention. Ten candidates spent seven hours on television describing trillions. None of that reached the terminal. The thing that reached the terminal was Dorian, and Dorian did not care about any of it.

Here is what readiness politics looks like, because I think it is the thing that has actually moved in this state and that nobody marches about. After Irma in 2017 flooded the riverwalk downtown in a storm that was on the other coast, the city started a resilience study it had refused to fund for a decade. The port has raised the elevation of the new terminal pads. The Navy, which is the biggest institution in this county and does not do politics, has been planning for sea-level rise at Mayport and Norfolk and every other coastal base since long before anyone in Washington wanted to say the words, because the Navy’s job is to keep the ships afloat and the piers above water and it does not have the luxury of a position. The governor, a Republican who ran with the President’s blessing, appointed a chief resilience officer last month and has put real money into the Everglades and the coasts. The insurers have repriced the whole state. None of those actors used the vocabulary of the strike. All of them moved, and they moved because the water did, and the water is the only lobbyist in Florida that both parties return calls from.

Now the national politics, and I will give the state-office view, since I spent two years in one that measured success in press releases and learned to tell a release from a result. The Democratic primary has made climate a top-tier issue and every candidate has a plan with a trillion-dollar number, and that is a change in the party’s agenda and it is real. It is also, for a general election in Florida, a liability, because the plan with the trillion-dollar number and the gasoline-car ban does not play in Duval County, where the drivers I dispatch own their trucks and the Navy families drive to the base and the retirees drove here from Ohio. The administration has spent the year rolling back the power-plant rule and the methane rule and revoking California’s authority over car standards, and the President skipped the UN climate session, and that is a change in the other direction and it is also real, and it also does not play here, because the water in the riverwalk did not check the rules. Florida in 2020 will be decided by people who want the drain fixed and do not want to be told who to blame for the rain, and neither national coalition has a message for them, and the one that figures it out first will win the state.

I want to say the plain thing about my own son, who is ten and came home from school after the strike last Friday having been told by a teacher that his generation would fix what mine had broken. I did not argue with the teacher. I did tell my son that the people who were going to fix it were the ones at the port raising the terminal pads and the ones at Mayport planning for the water and the ones at the insurance companies pricing the risk, and that none of them had marched, and that if he wanted to fix something he should learn how a thing gets built rather than how a crowd gets gathered. That is not an argument against the strike. It is the view from a yard that has to be cleared before every storm, and the view is that the work is being done by people who do not have time for the argument, and the argument is being had by people who do not do the work.

So my answer is that 2019 changed the volume and not the politics, nationally, and that the politics that actually changed in Florida changed under the name of readiness, in the port and the Navy and the governor’s office and the insurance filings, because the water moved and the water is bipartisan. The Green New Deal and the strike and the summit were the two coalitions shouting at each other across a state that is quietly raising its piers. I am not a mascot for either coast of this state or either side of this argument. I move freight. The freight moved out of the yard before Dorian and moved back in after, on a schedule written by people who had learned from Irma, and that schedule is the only climate policy I have ever seen executed, and nobody voted on it, and it worked. The marchers want a law. The yard wants a plan. In Florida, so far, the plan is winning, and it does not have a name, and it does not need one.