When Gas Prices Become a Political Tool, Climate Change Loses

We are no longer waiting for a global climate catastrophe to arrive—it is already here. This summer was reported as the hottest one on record in the U.S., and wide swaths of the western side of the country were ravaged by devastating wildfires. August recorded a record high average daily maximum temperature of 88.6 degrees Fahrenheit—the warmest August the U.S. has experienced. On top of sweltering heat and extreme weather events, gas prices reached their highest peaks in several years, making daily life for millions of Americans a constant struggle to make ends meet. Diesel reached its highest ever recorded price, and nationally, gas prices skyrocketed to as high as $4.47 per gallon; in the New York City area, prices are around $4.92 per gallon. In the middle of it, politicians have been pointing fingers at each other while we gear up for the November midterm elections. As gas affordability and climate change are intertwined issues, during the midterms, Democrats should seize the opportunity to link the topics to regain attention towards reforming our unsustainable energy system.

The drastic state of both gas prices and climate change should be a wake-up call for American politicians. Instead, the issues are treated as a finger-pointing battle and as two separate ideas during the midterms, not as interdependent, and thus the potential for these ideas to culminate in greater media attention and relevant policymaking is withering away. 

The midterms are opportunities for voters to pay attention to policies again and move politicians to introduce bills. During the midterms, 435 seats in the House of Representatives and one-third of the 100 seats in the Senate are up for election. As these form the legislative branch of the United States, the elections directly impact what laws are proposed and voted on as we move into the second half of Trump’s presidential term. 

Though the midterms serve an important function in America’s democratic process, they tend to function more as a scoreboard of how many issues you can blame on the opposing party before November—when the elections take place. This political strategy is harmful on many issues—not just climate change—because it focuses heavily on the issues of the party in power rather than on proposing practical solutions to real-life problems. We’ve seen examples of the harm of pointing fingers previously. In 2007, a bipartisan bill on immigration was introduced by President Bush and others, but it failed to progress in part because both parties pointed out the issues with each other and looked for extremes rather than trying to move forward with the joint effort. This pattern has held to today. The Republicans have on multiple occasions labeled the affordability crisis as a Democrat-created hoax and claimed that gas prices are down, despite months of campaigning during the 2024 presidential election where they acknowledged the crisis and promised to address it. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has consistently focused on pointing out the detrimental role of Republican legislation. 

The midterms should also serve to help remind Americans of the connection between affordability and climate change so that bills reducing our dependency on oil and gas can be brought back to the spotlight. Yet, candidates have been addressing gas affordability on its own without highlighting the volatility of oil. Oil isn’t just one of many energy sources; it is the fuel that around 89 percent of U.S. transportation runs on. As a result of this, the cost of an American’s daily transportation is highly dependent on the global market for oil. Yet, much of the current discussion on gas prices solely surrounds the war in Iran. Democrats have pointed to it for months as the primary driver of price hikes. In some ways, they’re not wrong. Today, 20 percent of global petroleum liquids are transported through the Strait of Hormuz. As a result of the war, there is now heavily restricted shipping through the strait, and this bottleneck is doing damage to the global supply. But treating the war as the sole explanation for our current predicament frames the entire crisis as a temporary disruption to an otherwise stable system, deliberately ignoring evidence that this system was never stable in the first place.

This is the issue the Strait of Hormuz and other global oil-supply shocks continue to expose: a flawed transportation system in the U.S. that is built almost entirely on an unrenewable commodity. Instead of separating the two topics, we should be wondering why our energy and transportation infrastructure is so dependent on unsustainable fossil fuels from unstable regions and understand how this causes affordability issues like hikes in gas prices.

Furthermore, politicians treating climate policy and the affordability crisis as separate issues during the midterms and choosing to focus on the flaws of the opposing party is incredibly detrimental to an environment that is already becoming less receptive to crucial discussions on climate change. Since 2021, climate change coverage on major news channels has decreased by 38 percent, but each year it becomes a more serious and immediate issue. In the U.S., the Trump administration is continuously fighting for rollbacks on our climate change progress, notably withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, calling climate change a “scam,” and fast-tracking harmful mining practices. Politicians rarely seem to cover the issue anymore, and if they do, it is almost certainly not their main issue. This isn’t a coincidence; it directly aligns with recent media trends. But politicians have a responsibility to keep important conversations alive, such as ones about climate, that fast news cycles would otherwise let us forget. 

Democrats need to be focusing more on bringing climate change into the conversation, because it is not slowing down; every day, new obstacles are making renewable energy and transportation systems difficult. Alternatives to oil-dependent transportation already exist, but they face threats from Republicans and are not yet deployable at the necessary scale. Electric vehicles today still represent less than two percent of vehicles on the road in the U.S. Additionally, with the expiration of Biden-era federal tax incentives to purchase electric vehicles (EVs) in late 2025, the market has slowed. The Trump administration is actively pushing to not renew these efforts and to continue expanding our use of fossil fuels in the transportation sector.

Actions taken by politicians to encourage investment in EV charging stations, EV tax incentives, and public transit expansions would shrink demand for oil and help reduce the transit affordability crisis. If the Democratic Party can tie the idea of lowering the average American family gas bill to electric transportation incentives, they can make the affordability and climate argument in the same sentence.

This isn’t suggesting that gas affordability shouldn’t be discussed by politicians during the midterms, nor that the immediate concerns of the voting party shouldn’t be treated with the same haste with which they arise. Discussing climate change and increasing measures to move towards renewable energy does not mean leaving behind the everyday consumer; it means highlighting the fact that renewable energy has the potential to decrease prices. Electric cars, for example, cost on average 11 dollars to fully charge, far less than gas-powered cars. A study by Yale University also revealed that tying climate change to cost-saving benefit statistics like this has the most impact on making people agree with transitioning to renewable energy. Expanding the idea of affordability to the larger issues behind it related to climate change won’t deter voters—in fact, it will motivate more voters to care about the climate and the election.

Furthermore, talking about climate change and electric transportation in the Democratic Party isn’t introducing a new idea. For decades now, Democrats have aligned themselves with progress towards a more renewable society. For example, under former President Joe Biden, the CHIPS and Science Act was introduced to promote domestic renewable energy manufacturing, and the U.S. rejoined the Paris Agreement to solidify its commitment to addressing climate change. Making the connection between affordability right now and the effect renewables can have is not a stretch of the Democratic Party’s beliefs; it is reinforcing something they have already addressed in the past.

Overall, though the two parties approach gas affordability differently, their current approaches to the midterms—separating two related and important topics and finger-pointing—leave us with the implicit promise that once the war ends, gas prices will go back to normal, and we will continue to rely on an unsustainable fuel-based economy the same way we always have. If we have any hope of bringing back climate solutions to the table of the legislative chamber, we need to take the opportunity to make the connection between gas affordability and climate change. Instead of the current tactic of promising cheaper gas, the more honest and more useful argument that should be made during the midterms is that returning to cheap gas was never the permanent fix. The real goal of this energy affordability crisis should be to reduce our dependency on the inherently finite and volatile energy source in the first place. The affordability crisis and the climate crisis are not two separate objectives competing for campaign airtime. They form the same story, and pretending otherwise for another election cycle is a choice—the wrong one.