The COVID-19 pandemic, and the chaotic and expensive congressional response, has upended the climate politics landscape. Before the onslaught of the coronavirus, environmentalists had unprecedented success getting the issue into the mainstream, bringing it to the forefront of the 2020 election and, potentially, the policy agenda of a new Democratic government come 2021. But those successes are in question with Americans stuck at home and the economy in free fall, with full recovery likely a distant prospect. In the near term, it might simply be harder to keep climate on the political map, environmentalists and academics said, even as the broader recovery effort offers new opportunities to remake the American energy system. “We have limited attention spans. We obviously can only deal with one crisis at a time, and it’s probably true that in the short term, we’re going to be dealing with very, very high unemployment and massive economic dislocations,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “And that often sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the room.” To view the full article visit EENews.
