Trump’s climate policy threatened by Democratic election win
Charles Rotter reflects on the US Democrats’ resounding election victory. What does this mean for the climate policy introduced by Trump?
Source: Shutterstock
Charles Rotter
Date: 9 November 2026
Democrats took the House and the Senate on Tuesday. The climate argument that followed is not mainly about whether the party ran on emissions. It is about which Democrats inherit the committees that will oversee Lee Zeldin’s EPA and the rest of Trump’s energy agenda, and whether the morning-after climate machine can sell that oversight as a climate mandate the campaigns never ran.
A week before the vote, Josh Freed at Third Way described the candidates he was watching as all-of-the-above Democrats: affordability, more production, infrastructure, utility reform, and oil and gas talk in energy states. “Gone are the finger-wagging calls for regulations, standards, or carbon pricing.” He said that was not a climate surrender, just a path that builds wind, solar, geothermal, batteries, nuclear and transmission by talking about bills and reliability instead of mandates. Roger Pielke Jr. pointed readers to that piece.
The map mostly followed it. James Talarico in Texas ran on protecting oil and gas jobs while growing renewables. Axios reported that even Ed Markey played down the Green New Deal on the trail, and that Kathy Hochul moved to weaken parts of New York’s climate law on affordability grounds. Campaigns hushed climate; the Associated Press named the drivers of the blue wave as high prices, the Iran war and concerns over government corruption.
Then came the morning after.
Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, according to Marc Morano, emailed supporters to “connect with newly elected officials and tell them climate should be one of their first priorities.” Sheldon Whitehouse called it “a bright new morning in America.” Grist wrote that the sweep will have “profound consequences for climate action,” listed subpoenas, appropriations brinkmanship and even a push to restore clean-energy tax credits, and quoted House Appropriations Democrat Chellie Pingree on forcing Zeldin to spend climate money: “if you’re not going to spend the money, we have the power to withhold other funding.” On Axios’s post-election call, Climate Power’s Lori Lodes called Trump’s energy agenda “an economic disaster for families and a political disaster for Republicans.”
Climate smackdown
Steve Milloy put the other reading: “No one voted for more climate policy,” and warned that Democrats plan to “investigate the Trump energy agenda to death.” Morano’s line was the whiplash version: “Just when you think you’re out — the U.S. midterm elections pull us back into the climate agenda,” with Democratic Socialists and green allies “poised to reverse the Trump climate smackdown.”
Friday’s Climate Realism Show #224 answered that morning-after claim from the other direction. Host Jim Lakely read the same Grist piece live — subpoenas, impeachment talk over funding clawbacks, must-pass funding leverage, a push to reimpose clean-energy tax credits, Pennsylvania solar bills, Georgia’s governor and Public Service Commission flip — then noted that voters had passed more than 20 ballot measures to ban or restrict data centers, and that Michael Bloomberg’s program of paying to install environmental lawyers in Democratic attorneys general offices, shut down in August, was back under a new name in Vermont. Jason Isaac of the American Energy Institute called the restart “popping right back up in Bernie’s backyard.”
Sterling Burnett took the optimist’s chair against Grist’s giddiness. “I think Grist is largely whistling past the graveyard,” he told the panel. Democrats cannot reverse the Paris exit, the UNFCCC-IPCC posture, or funding already cut; Trump still has the veto; there is no veto-proof or filibuster-proof Senate majority; “a lot of stuff that’s been done can’t be undone.” The election point cut harder: Democrats did not run on climate, they ran on affordability, and if they “pull the sheep’s wool off” and raise costs through climate policy, they will suffer the next round, because “people didn’t vote for climate change.”
Anthony Watts pointed to a Politico Pro piece whose gist matched the trail silence: Democrats did not campaign on climate, and readers had to go to the end to find former Washington governor Jay Inslee. Isaac added a harder count from the contested Senate field: only two of fourteen Democratic candidates had climate on their websites — Abdul El-Sayed and James Talarico. He said he hoped Democrats would waste the next two years on impeachment circuses rather than “God forbid, get anything done.” Watts’s read was that hate-Trump tunnel vision would crowd out a climate push the consultants already told candidates not to run on.
That is a cooler morning after than Morano’s “climate smackdown” about to be reversed. Oversight theatre and appropriations riders are real. So are the durable facts Burnett listed.
The wins those allies want to reverse were celebrated hard only weeks ago. Through September and October, The Climate Realism Show’s own episode notes were still talking as if the movement were on the run: Net Zero “dying” in Europe and muted in Democratic messaging, Climate Week as “the wails of a dying movement,” and, by late October, “the U.S. is getting out of the global climate grift.” The peak was September 18, when the show titled its episode Massive Victory: EPA Power Grab Ends. Host Jim Lakely called EPA’s repeal of the Obama/Biden power-plant greenhouse-gas rules “a massive victory for climate realism” and said “this great day has finally come.”
The same show already expressed some caution. Milloy told the panel what a Republican Congress had not done: “what we actually need are some laws… we’ve had a Republican Congress for two years have done nothing on this stuff.” On whether a Democrat could put the old rules back: “If it’s a Democrat… they’re gonna stop that litigation and we’re gonna go right back to the Biden and Obama rules.”
Big Beautiful Bill
Most of the 2025–26 skeptic policy agenda consisted of executive orders and agency actions: the Paris exit, Unleashing American Energy, the EPA power-plant repeal, the endangerment track. The durable statute was the July 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which gutted IRA credits.
S&P Global says Democrats now get “broad oversight powers” and appropriations leverage, with “relatively few avenues to enact major energy policy changes” against a veto and a filibuster. An LSE pre-election forecast put the same point flatter: midterms can freeze further legislative rollback, but they cannot undo what already passed, and executive rollback “rolls forward regardless.” Democrats can make Zeldin, DOE and Interior testify and attach spend-the-climate-money riders, just not rewrite the statute book over Trump’s signature.
The map elected all-of-the-above Democrats.
People didn’t vote for climate change. The morning-after emails are from the old climate machine.
Which faction gets Energy and Commerce, the environment panels, and the appropriations seats that write the riders aimed at Zeldin’s EPA?
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