Politics of warming part of U.S. culture wars
WASHINGTON — When it comes to global warming, America’s political climate may have changed more than Earth’s climate over the past three decades.
NASA scientist James Hansen put the world on notice about global warming on June 23, 1988. Looking back, he says: “I was sufficiently idealistic that I thought we would have a sensible bipartisan approach to the problem.”
After all, Republicans and Democrats had worked together on an international agreement to fix the hole in Earth’s ozone layer. Republicans would later represent eight of the 20 co-sponsors on the first major bills to fight climate change in the 1980s and 1990s.
Yet 30 years after Hansen’s initial warning, the issue is as much at the core of the nation’s political divide as abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration.
Most Republican candidates today cannot say “climate change” — let alone support policies to address it — without risking backlash from their base, which increasingly believes that manmade climate change is a liberal fantasy. There’s virtually no space left for a climate change advocate in the Republican Party of 2018. Just ask Bob Inglis. The former South Carolina Republican lost his congressional primary in 2010 after speaking out about global warming following a trip to the Arctic. He has since dedicated his professional life to convincing conservatives that climate change must be taken seriously.
“We hit a low in the tea party,” Inglis said. “That turned out to be a false bottom because we went lower with the election of Donald Trump.”
President Trump, who once tweeted that climate change was a “Chinese hoax,” pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement — the only country to do so — and his Cabinet has aggressively dismantled and dismissed government efforts to fight global warming.
“As the climate is getting worse, the politics is getting worse,” said Paul Higgins, public policy director of the American Meteorological Society. But it’s not just politicians. The 12 states with the highest per-person emissions of carbon dioxide voted for Trump in 2016. The 10 states with the lowest per person carbon emissions voted for Hillary Clinton.
Polling suggests global warming is now even more polarizing than abortion, said pollster and Yale Center for Climate Communication Director Anthony Leiserowitz.
Nearly 7 in 10 Republicans — or 69 percent — think the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, Gallup found in March. Among Democrats, just 4 percent — not even 1 out of 10 — believe the issue is exaggerated.
Academics, politicians and climate scientists say politics — and an industry campaign to shed doubt on the science — led to the public divide.
Fossil fuel industry interests seeing a threat from a 1997 international treaty that required U.S. carbon emission cuts spent a lot of money to “promote a message of confusion, a message of doubt,” said Harvard science historian Naomi Oreskes, who wrote the book Merchants of Doubt about this and other industry efforts.
“Their goal was to prevent the United States from acting on climate,” Oreskes said. “They were much more effective getting across their message of doubt than scientists were effective in getting across their message of science.”
The newly formed American Conservation Coalition is working across two dozen states to convince Republicans to return to their pro-environment roots. Yet the group’s website doesn’t mention the words “climate change” because it would alienate conservatives, said the organization’s Benjamin Backer.
“I hope that in the next decade, or hopefully a lot sooner, we can have a discussion about climate change where it’s not so partisan,” Backer said.