The Democrats have claimed climate change as their issue. But on MSNBC, liberals’ home channel, all meaningful discussion of climate change is overshadowed by the ultimate political fixation: Donald Trump.
Barring immediate drastic reductions to greenhouse gas emissions, worst-case predictions expect the global temperatures to increase between 3.3°C and 5.7°C by 2100. Meanwhile, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, a sea level rise of five meters by 2150 “cannot be ruled out due to deep uncertainty in ice-sheet processes.” Vast numbers of climate refugees would proliferate; famine and starvation would become commonplace (due in large part to the collapse of food-producing breadbasket regions); severe heat, intense hurricanes, wildfires, biblical flooding, and other unprecedented weather events would become the norm; and competition over increasingly scarce resources like potable water would make life on this planet pretty darn close to an actual living hell.
Liberals, presumably, are the ones who care about all of this. The Democratic Party has claimed climate change as its issue, while Republicans dismiss it as a hoax or simply dodge the issue. But you wouldn’t think Democrats were terribly interested in climate change if you were to watch liberal social media. On liberals’ home channel, MSNBC, all meaningful discussion of climate change is either edged out by or subsumed into the mother discussion: Donald Trump.
According to data collated from the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, from October 2023 to October 2024, there were eleven times as many segments mentioning Trump as there were mentioning climate change. During this yearlong period, the network went without mentioning climate change for eighty nonconsecutive days; zero days went by without mention of Trump. Furthermore, many of those mentions of climate change were incidental references made in passing, e.g., during breaking news coverage of an extreme weather event like a hurricane or heat wave. Often they were nested within a list of top issues, e.g., a graphic from November 2023 that reads, “Gen Z’s Top Issues: Mass Shootings, Climate Change, Racial Equality, Mental Health, Abortion.” By contrast, segments mentioning Trump were, for the most part, actually about Trump.
Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer measures screen time of caption text — the actual time it takes to utter each word or phrase. In this year of coverage, MSNBC viewers spent roughly 5,300 minutes hearing the word “Trump” and about seventeen minutes hearing “climate change.” That is a ratio of around three hundred to one.
This phenomenon is part and parcel of a broader problem with cable news: driven by a hunger for ratings, it subsumes everything into the electoral horse race. Discussion of an issue gets replaced by discussion of how an issue polls with college-educated males, or Latinos, or white women, and on and on. More important than understanding an issue is understanding who supports or opposes it.
Meanwhile, hosts evaluate the merits of issues on the basis not of their objective importance in society but rather their advantageousness to the horse race. The question becomes not whether fracking is good or bad (or what even is fracking?); the question is whether or not Pennsylvanians will be electorally turned off by a proposed ban on fracking. “She has walked back the idea that she thinks that all fracking should be banned,” said Sarah Longwell on an episode of Deadline: White House during preelection coverage of Kamala Harris. “Medicare for All, she has said she no longer endorses that. . . . Those are good things for swing voters.”
Now that Trump will take a second term and climate initiatives will be hampered or halted, action and education are more important than ever. But MSNBC has spent virtually zero time building literacy around the issue or even impressing its sheer significance on viewers, instead merely framing climate change as an electoral issue that Trump is uniquely bad on and Democrats are uniquely good on. As a result of this abstraction, regular viewers remain uneducated about the topic as anything more than an electoral bargaining chip.
MSNBC viewers know that Trump is a threat to the environment, but they don’t know why or what to do about it. This poses an enormous problem. Climate change is a ticking time bomb. Meanwhile, Trump is in charge, and his opposition is almost entirely illiterate on the issue.
These next several years will prove critical in making the needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to stave off worst-case climate scenarios and remain under 1.5°C or 2°C — though scientific consensus seems to indicate that 1.5°C is now little more than an ever-receding mirage. The bulk of this critical time period will occur under a second Trump term. And if his first term is any indication of what climate policy will look like this time around, working people and the planet are cooked.
“It’s one of the greatest scams of all time. . . . People aren’t buying it anymore,” Trump said in reference to climate change as recently as a September rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, in the immediate wake of Hurricane Helene. During his first term in office, the Trump administration rolled back roughly one hundred environmental regulations. Under his next administration, Trump has indicated intent to target Joe Biden’s so-called landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) of 2022. If implemented as proposed, the IRA would reduce US emissions by roughly 40 percent of 2005 levels by 2030. Subsidies for wind and solar power, consumer tax credits for electric vehicle (EV) purchases, and “unspent funds” allocated through the legislation are targets for removal.
Aside from the IRA, the administration has plans to fulfill many of the deregulatory environmental policy actions outlined in Project 2025, like increasing oil drilling on public lands, extending tax breaks to fossil fuel producers, repealing recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules designed to reduce methane leaks from oil and gas equipment as well as carbon emissions and other airborne pollutants from remaining coal-fired plants (both of which have already faced legal challenges from Republicans and industry), and repealing new pollution standards for tailpipe emissions. Trump is also likely to move toward an isolationist policy as far as climate commitments go, and has stated his intent to pull the United States from the Paris Climate Accords — again.
While MSNBC has mentioned Trump’s intent to slash federal incentives for EVs, the sole takeaway here was that this would make it more difficult for less established EV brands to compete with Tesla — which is owned by Trump surrogate Elon Musk — and enter the market. Likewise, a conversation about rolling back IRA funding for clean energy initiatives and repealing consumer tax credits became solely about how this would be used to finance “Trump tax cuts.” Again and again, any discussion of climate change is rolled into the mother conversation about Trump, flattening the actual danger the issue poses to us all.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but vice president–elect J. D. Vance has not. MSNBC has spent a significant amount of airtime discussing the Right’s policy manifesto — and on this point, the network has emphasized that it would be terrible for the environment. However, they’ve spent little time outlining why this would be the case. In July, when Project 2025 was released, there were only four mentions of the EPA in conjunction with the policy agenda. Of those four, only two actually discussed the effect fulfillment of this policy agenda would have on the agency that protects our right to clean air and water — despite the manifesto devoting an entire chapter to strategies for defanging the agency.
Trump’s pick for EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, appears to affirm this commitment to a deregulatory environmental agenda. A failed New York gubernatorial candidate and Trump loyalist, Lee Zeldin has no specific expertise on the environment and has advocated for lifting the ban on fracking in New York. As Casey Wetherbee wrote in Jacobin, Zeldin received over $400,000 from Big Oil lobbyists and consistently voted in opposition to environmental initiatives as a member of the House. Trump’s pick for secretary of energy, Chris Wright, chief executive of the Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy, isn’t any better.
But you won’t hear analysis of this level on MSNBC. The network frames its coverage of Trump as part of a deep commitment to various movements for justice and for the sake of democracy. MSNBC is on a righteous mission and doesn’t have time for the details. In lieu of substantive discussion of the issues themselves, the network vaguely gestures at them before turning the audience’s attention back to the horse race. This approach poses a big enough problem when Democrats are in charge, rendering audiences entirely too trusting that the blue team has the climate issue under control. Now that Republicans are in charge, the vacuousness of liberal cable news coverage of climate change emerges as a catastrophe.
On MSNBC, talking about Trump has become a roving stand-in for talking about climate and all other movements for justice (“Of course we at MSNBC care about climate change! We even had Bill Nye tell you to vote!”). But the sheer time the network devotes to covering all things Trump — to the exclusion of the true existential threat of our day — belies the truth. The mother discussion has supplanted all else, and if we can’t understand an issue as a pollster, it’s not worth understanding at all.
This work has been made possible by the support of the Puffin Foundation.
