How City Climate Plans Became a Culture War Target

Cities across the United States are taking aggressive steps to reduce their climate emissions, from creating bike lanes to increasing plant-based meals in schools and hospitals. As these city climate initiatives continue to surge, so do the efforts to shut them down. With financial backing from polluting industries, a growing number of politicians are attempting to undercut policy agendas by calling them Marxist, including climate action. We took a look at a recent effort in Arizona — what it means for local governments and their ability to govern.

The bill, SB 1195, was introduced earlier this year by Republican Anthony Kern, a state senator in Arizona. If passed, the bill would have prohibited public funding for a range of climate policies endorsed by most climate scientists, including curbing greenhouse gas emissions and “reducing the consumption or production of meat or dairy products or replacing animal-based protein with insect or synthetic protein.” The laundry list of banned policies also included “furthering Marxist ideologies,” and created a right to sue for any Arizona voter opposed to such policies.

Though the bill failed, the framing has a history. In 2019, critics of the Green New Deal called that effort a “Communist Manifesto, 21st Century” and “a Trojan horse for socialism.” More recently, the language has been used to attack climate action. A number of far-right voices attacked a Department of Defense call for funding proposals for lab grown meat research as an effort to override the free market, falsely claiming cultivated meat would be “tested” on troops. And in a Project 2025 training video leaked to ProPublica, former Trump official Bethany Kozma described the climate movement as an effort to “control people.”

Misinformation Campaign Links Climate Action with Marxism

A number of Arizona cities have climate policies that would have been threatened by SB 1195. Phoenix’s Mayor Kate Gallego sits on a steering committee for C40 Cities, a collection of urban mayors working to combat the climate crisis in their jurisdictions. Had SB 1195 become law, it’s likely that she would have been forced to step down due to a provision prohibiting publicly-funded entities from joining such organizations.

Two hours north in Flagstaff, the city is already experiencing and documenting the impacts of climate change. Flagstaff has committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 — a move that would have been explicitly banned by SB 1195 as the text of the bill prohibited efforts to cut and even measure emissions.

According to the website Follow The Money, SB 1195 sponsor Senator Kern has a wide range of donors from extractive industries. A few of the biggest donors are involved in oil and gas and car dealerships, but funders from the meat and dairy industry include Basilio Aja, who is a part of the Arizona Cattle Feeder’s Association and JM (Jay) Lapeyre, who runs Laitram, a company producing shrimp-peeling machines. Other donors include cattle ranchers and a PAC for Arizona Dairymen.

A local chapter of the Sierra Club was among the bill’s opponents. “We are concerned about the kinds of messages the legislature’s trying to send and the real world impacts that they could have,” Sandy Bahr, who leads Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter, said in the House committee hearing before going on to call the bill “a culture war manifesto.”

Despite the proposed legislation’s far reaching implications, the bill was passed out of the Senate and handed over to the House where it was read once before being shelved.

How Marxism Became the Go-To for Climate Deniers

Even though bill sponsor Anthony Kern framed the legislation as protecting freedom, the law represents a growing effort to preempt the powers of local governments to serve their constituents by painting climate action as an extreme ideology.

Earlier this year, Florida’s Governor Ron Desantis signed into law a prohibition on the sale, distribution and production of cultivated meat. In a statement on the law from the Governor’s office, Desantis was quoted as saying, “Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals.”

Anti-Marxism is a recurring theme. According to Matt Huber, PhD, a professor of Geography at Syracuse University, “any attempt to curb individual choice on matters related to climate change is seen as a threat to freedom.” But Huber says that’s not actually what Marxism is.

The definition of Marxism is an “economy where workers and society as a whole would democratically control production,” Huber says. There is no such emboldening of the proletariat across city climate policies. “It’s not clear how government taxation, regulation and collective efforts to fight public crises constitute Marxism,” Huber says.

Derek Lemoine, PhD, a professor and researcher in economics at the University of Arizona describes the aim of strong climate policy in different terms. “The goal is not to tell people what to do.” Examples of such climate policies include measures like taxing carbon producers, curbing emissions from factory farming, which accounts for between 11 and 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, programs to serve more plant-based options in schools and public funding for alternative proteins.

From Lemoine’s perspective, regulating greenhouse gas emissions is good economic policy. Pollution should come with a price — just as raw materials do. “If you don’t have a climate consequence in the market, then the market is just going to give you way too much climate change.” In other words, says Lemoine, “the markets backfire.”