From Climate Activism to the House of Representatives

Last week William Lawrence, a Democrat, won a seat in the House of Representatives, flipping his Michigan district.

Lawrence is a co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led climate activist group. But his campaign focused more on affordability and data centers than climate issues.

I spoke with him on Monday afternoon to talk about what might be possible in the new Congress, about how Democrats have avoided talk of climate change, and how his history as a climate activist might inform his work as a legislator.

Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Congress is working on a bipartisan permitting bill that will make it easier to build energy projects. What are your thoughts?

I hope that Congress doesn’t pass the bill in this lame-duck session. I think it would be a terrible mistake after an election that was about corruption to pass this bill, which further empowers the wealthiest corporations in the country to run roughshod over local communities to build community-polluting projects. We simply must do better. I understand that there are good provisions in this bill, but this is not the way.

The data centers issue is poisoning the entire conversation around the energy transition in my district. People see transmission lines feeding power to data centers, and if we don’t deal with the data centers, then there will continue to be extreme backlash against clean energy as well as transmission. And that’s what I’m seeing in my district.

What congressional action on climate seems possible in the next two years?

I think we need to restore the clean energy tax credits. It’s a huge issue not just for the climate, but for our energy security. People are experiencing the rising costs of fuel due to the war, and volatility around the world. And we can all see the value of being able to have cheap, clean, renewable energy that doesn’t depend on the global commodity markets.

That’s a place that I’d like to start. And we can continue from there. Putting a halt to this out-of-control data center buildout is another top priority, because if these data centers are fueled with diesel and methane gas, it’s a huge problem for our climate.

What role should Congress play in managing the data center buildout?

I’ve campaigned on a federal moratorium on new hyperscale data centers because it’s proceeding at a reckless pace and jeopardizing our entire economy, our work force, and communities in my district.

What do you think Congress can or should do on climate in the longer term?

We need to continue the unfinished business that we began legislating on under the last president. We need to deploy renewable energy at scale. We need to hold polluting corporations accountable. And we need to prepare for the climate impacts that are already arriving on an annual basis.

How were voters talking about environmental issues on the campaign trail?

I found a lot of environmental concern on the campaign trail. It wasn’t always expressed through the word climate, but it’s part of the data center issue. People are deeply worried about data centers sucking up Michigan’s water. They’re concerned about energy usage. They’re concerned about the increasing sprawl that just seems to continue until all of our open lands and wild spaces are gone.

My constituents want to see Michigan’s land and water protected. I was continually encouraged to find that on the campaign trail, and I encourage everybody who is climate-minded not to overlook the ongoing love that people feel for the nonhuman world, the desire to protect the land and water that we all depend on, and to find opportunities to build coalitions with people who feel that way but don’t necessarily speak about climate change using those words.

My colleague Brad Plumer wrote last week that Democrats now seem to de-emphasize climate issues. Why do you think that happened and do you think it’s a permanent shift?

We’ve got cascading crises, one on top of another. We’ve got a climate crisis. We’ve got a cost-of-living crisis. We have wars breaking out in more theaters around the globe and figuring out how to wrap that all up into one neat story is not easy for any of us. But my message on the campaign is about security. Security in the sense of being able to look forward to the future and be secure at night knowing that we and our kids are going to be taken care of, that we’re going to be OK. Climate is as important to that as it’s ever been.

This year’s talks, held in Turkey, will draw only a handful of leaders from industrialized countries. No groundbreaking decisions are expected. Now, the process is all about who can build out clean tech, secure their power supply, and move fast enough before the next grid crunch or extreme summer hits. — Chico Harlan

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