In politics, the distance between a triumph and a trivia question can be surprisingly short. In August 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, a sprawling law with the largest federal climate and clean-energy investment in American history. Soon afterward came the awkward part. Ask an ordinary voter what the law did and you might get a pause, a guess about inflation, or a courteous change of subject.
Climate Power lives inside that pause. The nonprofit does not manufacture batteries, install heat pumps, or write legislation. It manufactures recognition. It takes a factory tax credit, an emissions projection, or a regulatory rollback and tries to make it land as a job, a breath, a storm, or a higher monthly bill. Its product is not policy. Its product is the sentence through which policy enters public life.
This makes it a peculiar institution: part advertising agency, part polling lab, part opposition-research desk, part campaign war room. Its “customers,” such as they are, include allied advocates, political leaders, community messengers, journalists hungry for data, and candidates looking for language. But the real user is the voter who never asked to be in a focus group and would like the electricity to stay on without the bill becoming a small emergency.
A temporary campaign forgets to disappear
Climate Power began on May 13, 2020, wearing an expiration date in its name. Climate Power 2020 was launched by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club. Lori Lodes, who became its founding executive director, and strategist Claire Moser are identified by the organization as co-founders. The immediate proposition was bold but narrow: make climate an affirmative electoral issue and punish candidates who denied the science.
The original map concentrated on eight states - Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The campaign assembled political operators, digital organizers, content makers, and a marquee advisory board. Joe Biden talked about climate more than prior presidential nominees had. He won. The supposedly temporary project dropped the year from its name and stayed.
“The politics of climate have changed.”Lori Lodes, during the 2020 campaign
The next test was not merely electing people who favored climate action. It was helping them pass something. Climate Power and LCV became fixtures in the long push for federal investment. Their coalition later tallied more than 400 events, 575,000 doors knocked, 27,000 small businesses engaged, tens of thousands of calls, and over $50 million in television and digital advertising. There were even butter and ice sculptures - proof that no communications plan survives contact with the need for a photograph.
When the law passed, the coalition discovered a classic organizational problem: success had changed the job. Passing policy requires pressure on a few hundred lawmakers. Making policy politically durable requires millions of people to know it exists, understand what it does, and assign credit. The audience had expanded; the attention span had not.
The first thing to fail was recognition
Climate Power’s response was scale. In September 2022, it announced a $10 million, 12-week campaign with partners aimed at young people and communities of color across eight states and Los Angeles. Another $10 million collaboration with LCV and Future Forward broke the law into short claims about clean energy, medicine, jobs, and bills. In 2023, Climate Power committed $80 million to promoting the Biden administration’s climate record through the 2024 cycle. En Acción added a $5 million bilingual campaign for Latino audiences, and Climate Power Action joined a $55 million coalition effort directed at younger voters.
The activity was undeniable. The causal result was not. Climate-focused groups could point to policies defended, voters contacted, and messages tested. They could not plausibly claim that the spending delivered the 2024 presidential election. Donald Trump won, and Republicans took both chambers of Congress. That does not prove climate advertising had no effect; elections do not offer clean control groups. It does establish the boundary of the product. Reach is not persuasion. Awareness is not salience. A message can perform well in isolation and still be smothered by prices, immigration, identity, candidate impressions, and the hundred other signals arriving at once.
So the planet became a power bill
Organizations rarely announce that an old frame has run out of road. They hire different people and change the nouns. In 2025 Climate Power launched an “Accountability Project” under former Washington governor Jay Inslee, tying federal decisions to household costs and health. It joined an $8 million August-recess effort across at least 16 congressional districts. Then came 266 digital billboards and urban panels in ten districts. By 2026, its polling guidance explicitly presented clean energy as part of the cost-of-living fight.
The newer language begins at the kitchen table. Electricity rates. Insurance. Grocery prices. Reliability. When data centers became politically combustible, Climate Power urged candidates to connect them to bills, pollution, water, and who gets a say. The climate case remained underneath, but the doorway had moved.
This is the piece another organization can copy. Start with a felt problem, not an institutional category. Use polling to discover the language people already employ. Attach one policy choice to one visible consequence. Find a local messenger. Prepare proof that can travel through television, social feeds, direct mail, a reporter’s notebook, and a candidate’s mouth. Then repeat before the opponent supplies the explanation.
Climate Power’s En Acción project sharpens the lesson. It was built “by and for Latinos,” running tailored research, paid and earned media, rapid response, local campaigns, and work against Spanish-language misinformation. Its 2025 Latido Climático partnership with GreenLatinos and Sachamama set out to reach two million Latinos through digital storytelling and events. The important distinction is structural: this is not a central slogan sent downstairs for translation. It changes the trusted messenger, the media habits, and the story itself.
Real change begins when people see themselves in the story.Climate Power
What the model can - and cannot - sell
In the crowded climate market, some organizations litigate, some lobby, some organize members, and some design policy. Climate Power specializes in the connective tissue. Its advantage is integration: research informs creative; creative gives partners common language; rapid response keeps that language in the news; state boards and coalitions provide local messengers. The organization has roughly 86 employees, enough to operate like a specialist communications firm without pretending the public is a client waiting patiently for a deck.
Its nonprofit model is funded through grants and donations, including $72 million across 14 grants from seven funders itemized in 2022-2024 filings. That buys public communication rather than a subscription or service contract. It also creates a measurement problem. The organization can count impressions, ads, events, doors, and jobs announced. The most consequential outcome - durable political permission for climate policy - is shared with allies, candidates, economic conditions, disasters, and opponents. Attribution is foggy by design.
The approach is weakest when the promised benefit is delayed, the local evidence is absent, or the messenger lacks trust. It is vulnerable when household experience contradicts the ad - a clean-energy message about savings will not comfort someone staring at a rising rate. It can also shrink a planetary problem into short-term consumer language. If climate only matters when it cuts this month’s bill, policies requiring visible sacrifice become harder to defend.
But the organization’s central observation survives those limits. Good policy does not narrate itself. A tax credit has no protagonist. An emissions target makes no sound. A clean-energy factory becomes politically meaningful only when someone connects the building, the paycheck, the vote, and the person opening the bill. Climate Power has spent six years trying to make that connection. Its record contains a presidential win, a landmark law, a presidential loss, and a useful correction: the grandest issue on Earth may enter politics through the smallest envelope in the mail.