A recent opinion piece in The Hill argues that Democrats should and are beginning to rethink their approach to climate and energy policy. Pointing to renewed support for natural gas infrastructure, oil and gas exports, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the author suggests that political realism requires prioritizing affordability, job creation, and national security alongside emissions reduction. The argument is presented not as climate denial but as maturity…a necessary correction to what is portrayed as ideological rigidity. It’s a case worth taking seriously, precisely because it names real pressures and real people. But it also leaves something essential unexamined.
In recent weeks, a familiar argument has returned to public discourse that Democrats, and perhaps climate advocates more broadly, must recalibrate their approach to energy. Affordability matters, jobs matter, national security matters. An “all-of-the-above” energy strategy here is not ideological retreat but political maturity.
There is truth here, and it should be acknowledged plainly. Energy transitions are not experienced in the abstract. They are lived locally…in monthly bills, in the dignity of work, in the stability or fragility of rural communities. Any climate politics that fails to take this seriously will not only lose elections, but it will also lose trust.
And yet, there is a deeper question that this rhetoric consistently avoids. Not whether energy should be affordable, or whether people deserve good work. But whose experience counts when we decide what is practical?
Pragmatism and the Shape of Time
Much of the current defense of fossil fuel expansion rests on short-term accounting. Natural gas reduced emissions relative to coal, while fracking boosted GDP and export capacity, strengthening allies and weakening adversaries. These claims are not fabrications in that they are partial truths framed within narrow temporal windows.
What often goes unspoken is that infrastructure remembers. Pipelines, compressor stations, export terminals, and extraction fields are not neutral bridges toward a cleaner future. They are long-term commitments that shape what futures remain possible. Once built, they exert a quiet pressure on policy, markets, and imagination alike.
This is not ideology. It is systems thinking. What appears pragmatic in electoral time can prove costly in ecological time.
The Missing Dimension: Empathy as Perception
In my own work on empathy, I’ve argued that empathy is not primarily a moral sentiment or an ethical achievement. It is a way of perceiving and is how the world first comes to matter to us individually.
What’s striking in many contemporary energy debates is how narrow the field of perception has become. Voters, workers, markets, and allies all appear. But watersheds rarely do. Soil rarely does. Forests, species, and future bodies remain largely invisible.
This absence is not accidental. It reflects a failure of empathy…not emotional indifference, but perceptual narrowing. We have learned to see economic benefit clearly while training ourselves not to see cumulative ecological harm until it arrives as crisis.
Empathy, understood ecologically, resists this narrowing. It asks us to attend to what bears cost slowly, silently, and often without political voice.
Land Is Not an Abstraction
Extraction economies are often defended as lifelines for “overlooked” places. But land is not an abstract resource pool waiting to be activated for growth. It is a living field of relations between humans and more-than-humans that remembers disturbance long after boom cycles fade.
Anyone who has spent time with communities shaped by extraction knows the pattern. Initial prosperity with infrastructure investment and job creation. And then, often, degraded water, long-term health impacts, ecological fragmentation, and economic precarity occur when markets shift.
To name this is not to dismiss workers or romanticize poverty. It is to refuse a false tradeoff that pits dignity of labor against the integrity of place.
Beyond the Binary
The real failure of the “all-of-the-above” framing is not that it includes fossil fuels. It is that it treats energy as a menu of interchangeable options rather than as a formative relationship between people, land, and time.
A genuinely pragmatic energy politics would ask harder questions:
- What kinds of work help communities remain with their land rather than exhaust it?
- What forms of energy production cultivate care, skill, and long-term stewardship?
- What do our infrastructure choices teach us to notice…and what do they train us to ignore?
These are not elitist questions. They are practical questions in the deepest sense.
A Different Kind of Realism
Climate politics does not fail because it asks too much. It fails when it asks too little…when it narrows realism to GDP curves and election cycles while ignoring the slow violence written into landscapes and bodies.
If empathy is how the world first comes to matter, then energy policy is one of the most powerful forms of moral formation we have. It shapes what we see, what we value, and what we are willing to sacrifice…often without saying so aloud.
The question before us is not whether fossil fuels have brought benefits. Of course they have. The question is whether continuing to expand systems that require ecological blindness can ever count as practical in a world already living with the consequences of that blindness.
Pragmatism worthy of the name would begin there.