Wealth & Money Quote by Jennifer Granholm

Granholm’s line is a politician’s attempt to defuse a loaded binary without stepping on the landmines that binary protects. By insisting she has “not made any suggestions about climate change,” she narrows her exposure: it’s a disclaimer aimed at skeptics, lobbyists, and opponents ready to tag her as ideologically “green” or economically naive. The tell is how quickly she pivots to “blending or shifting the conversation.” The content isn’t the policy; it’s the frame.

The subtext is that the climate fight has been stalled less by science than by story. “Environment versus the economy” is a script that has served fossil-fuel politics for decades: it turns regulation into a jobs threat and casts clean-energy advocates as out-of-touch moralists. Calling it “old, outdated” is rhetorical judo. She’s not arguing the merits of climate action; she’s arguing the obsolescence of the opposition’s premise, trying to make the tradeoff itself feel behind the times.

Context matters: Granholm’s career has been shaped by industrial-state realities, where “economy” often means manufacturing, energy costs, and political survival. So the quote reads as an attempt to rebrand climate action as industrial strategy: innovation, competitiveness, and employment rather than sacrifice. It’s savvy, but also revealing. The need to avoid saying “climate change” outright shows how thoroughly the debate has been politicized; even advocates sometimes speak in code, not because the problem is unclear, but because the audience is.