Of course, there are many species of crisis and one person’s crisis and another’s not so important consideration. I know this, you know this, we all know this. Climate change is a compelling crisis today, despite the realities and truths of other crises, crises like injustice and human rights, or biodiversity, or cost of housing, or any of the many other important issues we face in these times. The world is a maddening place, with wars and killings, unfairness and cruelty, and greed and inequality. The difference in the nature of the crisis of climate change from other important challenges is that climate change means a changing world, and not a change for the better.

If we allow the world to turn more and more inhospitable as temperature rises over the next decades and centuries, other important issues are negatively affected. In a world where a 3 or 4 degrees Celsius increase in the global annual average temperature wipes out countless more species and biomes, fighting for biodiversity becomes much more desperate and ineffective. In a world where vast areas become unable to support humans who lack the resources to ameliorate the more frequent, more extreme heat and other weather events, income inequality or social justice or fair housing practices take second place to matters of basic survival. That’s the argument for putting climate change at the head of the list of crucial issues when considering one’s voting choices.

This is the argument I write about in Over Brooklyn Hills, the third book of my literary climate fiction series The Streep Climes Quartet. This third book takes place in 2035, and the emergence of an advocacy group called Climate Covenant is part of this world. Climate Consensus is a public education non-profit organized around ranking political candidates on their positions on climate legislation and proposed programs. Climate Consensus is not focused only on the national level but tries as best it can to evaluate candidates for state and local offices and the various regulatory bodies such as public utility commissions. This 501(c) 3 has a 501(c) 4 political advocacy group, Climate Action, that raises and distributes campaign funding to some candidates identified as climate action worthy proponents.

Climate Consensus is not the main focus in Over Brooklyn Hills, but like reality, the human situation described within the series has many elements, and for the vast majority of us such life aspects tend to be personal—a character’s close relationships, the individual’s struggle with household economy, and a person’s interactions with neighbors and community. For some characters, of course, their involvement in climate activism might include membership in an advocacy group or attending marches or working on climate solutions or giving other sorts of close attention to the matter. But for most of us—even as the experience of climate change consequences become more unavoidable—we pay some level of consideration to climate change mostly anchored through exposure of the news and social media and less so directly experienced and thus climate change remains more abstract relative to our other more quotidian concerns.

An ”Explainer” found on the Yale Sustainability website and titled “Yale Experts Explain the Politics of Climate Change,” published October 23, 2024, makes the argument that “American voters’ attitudes about climate change have shifted dramatically over the past decade. A majority of Americans are alarmed or concerned about the state of the planet and more than two-thirds support a variety of government policies to address it.” Yet climate change had been minimized in the 2024 presidential campaign, crowded out by worries over immigration, the economy, and democracy itself. As reported on ABC, science historian Leah Aronowsky said, “I think what we learned last night [2024’s September Debate Night] is that climate really is not on the ballot this fall.” Aronowsky is from the Columbia Climate School, whose research has focused on the history of climate science and climate denialism.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) has been tracking changes in American beliefs and attitudes toward global warming for nearly two decades. Director Anthony Leiserowitz investigates the politics of climate change and why climate groups aren’t as politically powerful as they could be. He argues:

Americans don’t have a single viewpoint about climate change or, frankly, any important issue. Too often people simply divide the public into climate change believers vs. deniers. But that is way too simplistic and not a very useful framework for strategic communication. Seventeen years ago, we at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and our partners at George Mason University conducted what’s called a segmentation analysis and identified Global Warming’s Six Americas—six distinct audiences within the United States that each respond to global warming in a different way.

But of course, “climate change” is a catch-all phrase that breaks out into many interrelated topics, including the science of various aspects of complex phenomenon, myriad economic implications, and even cultural touchpoints and political identities. Organizations like the Environmental Voter Project have tried to motivate potential voters with climate change concerns to show up, but with limited success to date, and this should strike you as odd, at least until you consider how climate change is typically referenced by politicians as this catch-all category. What may be more effective is breaking climate change into specific and actionable plans, and since we’re talking about political offices here, that takes the form of legislative proposals.

There is the need to explicate any such proposals through the lens of economics. It isn’t sufficient to declare one’s support for expanding solar power generation or for wind or batteries or the building up of the grid’s capacity, intelligence, and flexibility absent the economic calculus of lower energy prices and strengthening reliability. Claiming benefits of extended options for utilities customers to participate in the energy system, for example, do little to motivate voters if the relevance of such work isn’t made clear. But now I am wading back deep into the weeds in mentioning VPPs (virtual power plants) or DERs (distributed energy resources), and such specificity is out of place here.

What does belong here is well put by Leiserowitz:

I don’t think the climate community, writ large, is particularly well organized for power. Most climate groups tend to focus on policy—they make rational arguments for why and how we ought to reduce carbon pollution. Of course that’s critically important, but it’s weak if you can’t deliver votes or flex political muscle. Unions are well organized for power. The National Rifle Association is very well organized for power. The NRA is about 4 million members in a population of over 300 million but they punch way above their weight because they are organized for power. The climate movement is potentially much larger than this but they’re not as organized. We asked the Alarmed [those in the survey referenced in the diagram] if they’d be willing to join a campaign to convince elected officials to take action and an estimated 37 million of them say they would. But they’re not organized.

One ongoing problem is the common perception that climate change consequences occur in distant lands, or as Leiserowitz puts it, “In part, that’s just the nature of living as a human being on this planet—we all have an incredibly narrow slice of reality that we have direct access to.” This may be especially true in the the advanced economies of America and Europe. Furthermore, the timelines and the huge planetary processes at play in climate change are non-human scale, but with the rising temperatures we grow increasingly likely to experience direct climate change consequences, regardless of living in the developing world or the developed world. In Over Brooklyn Hills, I surmise that in 2035, these climate change consequences are such as to bring the political climate together with climate change.

There remain those who see climate change as an important issue within American elections. I recently posted “It’s the cost of living, stupid: Critiquing Matthew Yglesias’s ‘Doubling down on climate won’t win the Senate’,”  with this political journalist being quite clear on the ineffectiveness of climate change proposals and sentiment for producing votes. I shouldn’t argue, I suppose, since I often like what Yglesias has to say and he does have close to a quarter-million Substack subscribers, but I can’t help but believe putting climate change on the back burner is a bad idea.

This view on single-issue voting is widely cast across our society, where the matter typically gets a bad rap. Here’s the second paragraph of a story by the high schooler Aprameya Rupanagunta, a staff writer for el Estoque, the national award-winning student publication of Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California. The magazine is published every six weeks and their website and social media platforms are updated daily, with content entirely produced by Journalism and Multimedia Design students, with the goal “to inform and entertain the student body and local community, as well as effect positive change.” Pretty darn impressive, but the opinion piece, “Voters need to stop basing their ballot on a single issue,” is a solid example of the prevailing assumptions about single-issue votes:

This mindset [The determinant factor of undecided voters to essentially blindly pick the candidate that appears to solve a problem issue in the 2024 election] that is widely present in the voting demographic in our country is called “single-issue voting” — when a citizen bases their vote on just one issue instead of looking at the wide scope of issues and policies that a candidate stands for. When we focus on just one issue when deciding who to vote into office, we often overlook the parts of a candidate’s campaign that could potentially harm our society.

Of course, here the problem with single-issue voting based on generic climate progress comes into sharp relief, when climate change is still talked about as an argument about the physical world, rather than focused on bringing economic advantages and more equitable power to our society. The climate change issue must start with answering in specific detail actual projects that could be supported by distinct acts of legislation, all undertaken with the aim of making life better for most of us. In other words, make the issue of climate change represent real change for the better in the voters life.

I, for one, would be happy to see C-Level executives and investment entities driving the fossil fuel industry charged with criminal conspiracy, never mind just made less profitable through the transition to renewable energy, but like climate change issues becoming an important and central political element in Over Brooklyn Hills, I’ll have to restrict myself to the comforting fictional future imagining of a pivotal year in resolving the biggest climate change cases in the courts.