Wallet First
Voters just won’t pay much for climate action
IN 2018, California recorded its deadliest wildfire in state history. The combined intensity and duration of the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans’ tropical storms and hurricanes reached a new high. A group of researchers reported that worldwide fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide emissions are projected to hit 37.1 billion tons in 2018, yet another annual record.
It’s time to take a clear-eyed look at the science behind these developments — the political science.
The data show that, for all the evidence that climate change is real, man-made and dangerous, and despite wide public acceptance of those propositions, people in the US don’t necessarily want to stop climate change, in the sense of being willing to pay the cost — which is the only sense that really matters.
“The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans,” according to a review of public opinion literature published in 2017 by Patrick Egan of New York University and Megan Mullin of Duke.
In a series of open-ended Gallup surveys this year asking Americans to name the “most important problem facing the country,” environmental issues never scored above 3 percent.
Even before the recent riots against President Emmanuel Macron’s climate-related fueltax hike in France, there was a quieter backlash in the US: Antifossil-fuel referendums lost in Colorado, Washington and Arizona during the midterms.
Undoubtedly, there have been well-funded efforts to sow climate skepticism in recent decades. President Trump is now amplifying that message. This couldn’t have helped the climate-change movement, even if scholars have yet to identify a “causal link” between such campaigns and individual attitudes.
Of course, the climate-change movement wasn’t exactly silent during recent history. What’s crucial, after accounting for the battle between the movement and its opponents, is the inherent nature of climate change as a political issue: It requires voters to accept “up-front costs that, if successful, will stave off neverto-be experienced long-term damage — policy for which election-oriented politicians can easily foresee receiving blame instead of credit,” Egan and Mullin note. Slashing carbon emissions is a cause that “has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in policy change,” while “a majority of people benefit from arrangements that cause” climate change.
The US, with its multiple veto points for various regional and economic interests, tends to postpone dealing with longrange crises even more than most democracies, as our failure to shore up the solvency of federal entitlements shows.
Climate change and environmentalism more broadly have gotten caught up in the partisan polarization corroding US politics, with support for “green” policy increasingly a badge of Democratic loyalty and opposition to it defining what it means to be Republican.
Democratic concern doesn’t necessarily translate into support for specific, costly policies, however. Washington, a deep blue state, rejected a state-level carbon tax in a 2016 initiative and did so again in 2018.
The most politically feasible climate-change proposals, Egan told me in an e-mail, may be those that “address the problem in a more piecemeal and thus less visible fashion,” such as raising automobile fueleconomy standards, or, at the state level, requiring that a minimum share of energy come from low-emission renewable sources.
It didn’t work in Arizona, where 69 percent of voters, obviously including Democrats and independents, opposed a measure this year that would have required utilities to derive 50 percent of electricity from renewables by 2030.
In California, though, voters this year did retain the state’s 12cent-per gallon gas-tax increase, which was enacted in 2017, possibly because Gov. Jerry Brown defended it as a way to pay for better highways.
The larger point — the inconvenient truth, you might say — remains. It’s not easy to persuade citizens of a democracy to accept real financial sacrifice in the here and now, for the sake of a diffuse benefit in the future.
Macron might not be facing violence in the streets now if he had packaged his tax hike as something other than a climate measure, or if he had proposed to rebate the revenue collected, as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has done with his new carbon tax.
Another of 2018’s lessons, therefore, is that the climatechange movement faces a democratic deficit. It must either overcome that deficit or fail.