The 2026 election cycle is heating up, and every candidate is getting the same advice: Don’t say “climate.” Talk about affordability. Rebrand as energy dominance. Drop the word “clean.” But climate doesn’t need a messaging rebrand. It needs a new agenda — one built on winning the energy race, not blocking fossil fuels.
Political operatives have deemed climate a liability because the old playbook has become synonymous with obstruction, regulation, and higher costs. It draws on policy tools developed to conserve nature in the early 1900s and to protect public health starting in the 1960s, which produced historic, landmark victories from National Parks to the Clean Air Act. But this narrow emissions focus pulled the climate movement toward obstruction: pollution regulations, carbon taxes, pipeline protests, punishing polluters. Not only is this a problem for political messaging, but it also does not solve the climate problem.
Achieving net-zero emissions is the right outcome but the wrong goal. The goal should be rooted in both speed and cost: build clean energy faster and make it cheaper. That objective leads to an entirely different playbook: policies to reform permitting, build out infrastructure, commercialize new technology, de-risk investment. And this agenda actually drives economic growth and affordability — major voter priorities especially right now.
Unblock the market to win the race
The electricity grid has the most urgent need for a new approach. Skyrocketing demand is colliding with outdated regulations, inadequate market structures, and dilapidated infrastructure. Wind and solar are already the cheapest and fastest forms of new electricity, but they are blocked by red tape and bad incentives. Interconnection queues stretch for years. Transmission lines take decades to build. Electricity markets reward legacy assets instead of new, low-cost generation. We are failing to deploy the cheapest power available at the very moment we need it the most.
Texas offers a real-world proof of concept. ERCOT can bring wind and solar projects online nearly twice as fast as other regions. Rather than conducting lengthy interconnection studies, it approves new projects quickly, reserving the right to curtail output when congestion strains the grid; and a cost-sharing system enables transmission upgrades that reduce curtailments. The lesson is clear: When you unblock the market, clean energy moves.
While ERCOT is one of the country’s few unregulated markets, the state’s success should inspire us to remove friction across the entire U.S. electricity system. Utilities should be rewarded for increasing flexibility and lowering costs, not preserving outdated infrastructure. Markets should value speed, reliability, and new capacity.
Permitting reform needs to be a top priority, but has been a thorny issue to fix. Environmentalists waged hard-fought battles to establish a permitting regime that protects clean air, clean water, and public lands, and they are right to guard against backsliding. But climate advocates who oppose permitting reform are playing tug-of-war with themselves. We must balance protections and community engagement with tighter deadlines and simplified requirements. A process that takes ten years to approve clean infrastructure is not protecting the climate. It is preventing progress.
Lower costs for the next generation
Beyond accelerating low-cost renewables, we need to drive down the costs of emerging technologies and compress learning curves. Over ten years, the price of solar fell roughly 90%, with help from R&D funding, tax credits, and feed-in tariffs. We need to replicate that success for clean firm power, low-carbon industrial heat, fuels for heavy transportation, and other early-stage technologies.
Energy innovation is structurally different from technologies with fast learning curves like semiconductors, software, or consumer electronics. New energy facilities require massive upfront capital, depend on preexisting physical infrastructure, and carry high technical and market risk. Government support is essential to traverse the Valleys of Death that prevent clean technologies from reaching commercial scale. To lower costs, the government must provide early de-risking, invest in shared infrastructure, change regulations, and help establish initial market demand.
Federal agencies already hold significant funds and firepower to advance clean tech. The problem is access. Hundreds of clean energy startups and entrepreneurs struggle to navigate the erratic, convoluted federal support landscape. Funds too often flow to incumbent energy companies with in-house experts who know the system, and those incumbents tend toward incremental improvements rather than transformative breakthroughs.
Restructuring federal innovation programs to better support startups and early-stage technology would be genuinely catalytic — and it can be done without using more taxpayer dollars.
Bring climate back into the conversation
Climate will almost certainly be largely absent from 2026 campaign messaging. Whether it returns for the 2028 cycle depends on whether we change the agenda and combine decarbonization gains with affordability with economic growth. And that requires a different way of defining success. Not just emissions reduced, but clean capacity added. Not just policies passed, but projects completed. Not just pledges made, but capital deployed at scale. When clean energy becomes the cheapest, fastest, and most reliable option, emissions fall as a result. That is how we win the energy race and outcompete fossil fuels.
The climate community cannot remain defined by obstruction and regulation — not because it is politically toxic, but because the status quo is not working. Instead, we must own the agenda of lower costs, faster construction, and bolder innovation.
That is an economic growth agenda. It is an American competitiveness agenda. And it is, unapologetically, a climate agenda.
Aliya Haq is the president of the Clean Economy Project, a nonprofit initiative that advances new policies for economic growth, shared prosperity, and a safe climate. She previously led the U.S. policy team at Breakthrough Energy, the organization founded by Bill Gates to accelerate clean technologies. The opinions represented in this contributed article are solely those of the author, and do not reflect the views of Latitude Media or any of its staff.
