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Nine House Democrats from the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition published a sweeping federal policy blueprint on Tuesday called the Thriving Economy Project. While it is explicitly not a policy platform, it is the first window we’ve gotten into how lawmakers are thinking about their next set of climate moves in the post-One Big Beautiful Bill Act era.
The last time House Democrats published a major energy and environment policy document was in 2020, when the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis released the aptly titled report “Solving the Climate Crisis.” The Thriving Economy Project covers many of the same themes as that 2020 platform — energy, agriculture, disaster recovery, innovation. It even contains some of the same policy proposals. But as the contrast in titles suggests, the approach is markedly different.
The 2026 version doesn’t call itself climate policy at all. Though it contains plenty of proposals to support cleaner energy and reduced emissions, it frames them in terms of affordability, economic opportunity, resilience, and competitiveness, rather than as a means to stop planetary warming. The words “climate change” aren’t entirely absent, but they appear primarily as the context for proposals to improve disaster preparedness, response, and recovery, or to adapt infrastructure to higher seas and hotter days.
This isn’t a huge shock. We’ve written quite a bit at Heatmap about how climate change advocacy is shifting away from talking about the crisis directly to messaging about the benefits of actions that just so happen to cut carbon or shore up communities against disasters. When I compared the number of times certain words and phrases appeared in the 2020 package versus this new one, the evidence of that rhetorical shift was decisive.
Mentions of “climate change” dropped from more than 500 to 22. Whereas the 2020 package cited the “climate crisis” more than 150 times, the new report casually references it in just four places. In 2020, Democrats framed their entire platform around hitting “net-zero” by 2050, citing the goal 139 times. Net-zero appears just once in the new package in a chapter about investing in innovation. According to the International Energy Agency’s “Net Zero Roadmap,” it says, about a third of the emissions reductions required to get there “will come from technologies still under development.”
While lawmakers took a stand six years ago to fight for “environmental justice,” that term is wholly absent from the new report. Instead of pushing for policies that improve outcomes for “communities of color,” a phrase which appears just five times in the Thriving Economy Project, it focuses on building “thriving communities” and improving outcomes for “low income” and “underserved” populations.
It’s easy to be cynical about the political calculation these rhetorical shifts reflect, but the two policy platforms were also written for different audiences. Florida Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat who led the creation of both versions, told me that the goal of the Thriving Economy Project was to come up with policies that could be adopted in the next two years. “This effort is driven by solving problems ASAP where we think there can be bipartisan support,” she said. The 2020 document, by contrast, was a wishlist for a future Democrat-led Congress and administration. Much of what was in it later became part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the IRA, but has since been dismantled under Trump.
The increased frequency of certain other terms — such as “energy security,” “cybersecurity,” and “geopolitical” — is also a reminder that between the war over Ukraine, the war in Iran, and the AI race, a lot really has changed since 2020.
Just because the report is not explicitly about climate change doesn’t mean it’s not a climate policy document, however. When I asked Sean Casten, a Democratic representative from Illinois who also worked on the project, whether he considered the policies to be about addressing climate change, he responded that there was no way to talk about energy or home insurance and not talk about climate. “You also don’t necessarily have to use the word climate to talk about all of those things, right?” he added.
