Climate change policy

Probably, if my conversation were about climate change, I should start with graphs, models and images of hot planets. But I am not a climatologist, not an ecologist, or even a physicist, and a political scientist and climate change is not my profession. But everything that concerns the politicization of this issue, and this is exactly what we see in the media, this is exactly what I am not bad at. By the way, a group of colleagues and I are studying how public opinion regarding climate change is formed here in Canada.

At the end of the video, I hope I will be able to demonstrate that public opinion about climate change has little to do with climate itself and the science of it. On the contrary, this opinion, or rather opinions, are tied to our values, to what each of us considers correct both for ourselves and for everyone around us, and this is politics (1). For this reason alone, climate change, or rather, disagreements about it, are intensifying every year, although scientists have already decided everything (2).

Climate issues, like any other hot topics that appear in the media, immediately become an element of political struggle. This means that parties and politicians are trying to “ride” the topic, gaining as many supporters as possible and criticizing the positions of others. This is how any politically relevant issue generally works. Climate was no exception. A topic that once migrated from the pages of scientific journals into public discourse and gradually became almost the most pressing in the United States, today worries the whole world. That is why the cause of the problem should be sought in the political discourse of the elite of this country.

Studying elite opinion is always difficult. Of course, the easiest way is to ask, but it is not always possible to interview all or even some members of parliament. Therefore, they use indirect data sources - speeches and voting on bills.

A team of US scientists analyzed who sponsored climate change bills among 25,000 US legislators from 2011 to 2015 and found partisan polarization (3).

In 2016, the Center for American Progress counted 182 congressmen who either denied global warming or denied human activity as a cause. All of them turned out to be members of the US Republican Party (4). I should mention that the organization that conducted the survey is supported by Democrats, but in this case, their survey results are consistent with research from credible journals.

When Gallup, the world's oldest public opinion research center, released its annual survey of Americans' public opinion on the environment a few weeks later, their views were identical to party positions.

Continuing a trend that began more than a decade ago (5), 89 percent of average Democrats thought global warming would happen in their lifetime, while only 37 percent of Republicans agreed, and among particularly conservative Republicans, four in ten thought it would never happen (6).

Those who, like me today, are forced to observe this ever-widening chasm between two ideologies may not even know that environmental protection in the United States was once a bipartisan issue. When the Clean Air Act was introduced in the Senate in 1970, it passed without a single dissenting vote. In the House of Representatives, only one Republican withdrew his support—a little-known man from Nebraska who was beaten in the primary that same year by another Republican (7). Before 1976, the American authorities managed to pass a whole bunch of similar acts (8). Even by 1990, the notorious consensus on climate change between Republicans and Democrats still existed (9).

But the 1990s changed everything. Throughout the decade, American conservatives bitterly opposed the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that sets binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions (10). Their main tactic was to question not only the potential economic benefits of the Protocol, but also its scientific nature in general (11). This only increased controversy in Congress and led to confusion on the part of European countries (12). By 2002, it became apparent that Democratic support for environmentalism was not just higher, but significantly higher (13). Eleven years later, in 2013, more than seventy percentage points separated the average Democrat from the average Republican on climate change issues (14).

As you might guess, the controversy wasn't just about climate. Scholars have found that the percentage of congressional roll call votes in which a majority of one party opposes a majority of the other has increased significantly since 1970, or at least only occasionally returned to the historical “norm” (15).

Today there is no doubt that American parties have become more ideologically cohesive and more disciplined in matters of party position than ever before (16). From controlling the agenda (17) to selecting their own experts for congressional hearings (18), politicians are steering the debate about the “uncertain economic and political consequences of climate change legislation” in the direction they want.

In 2012, the ideology-driven Democratic Party identified climate change as “one of the biggest threats of this generation,” and Republicans said the word “climate” appeared more often in the President’s Strategy than “al-Qaeda,” nuclear proliferation, radical Islam or weapons of mass destruction,” all of which they consider more serious threats.

Surprisingly, climate science has also become polarized in many countries with high per capita carbon emissions and large fossil fuel reserves (19). According to a Pew Research survey conducted in the spring of 2015 in 40 countries, “people on the left are more likely than those on the right to view climate change as a threat to life,” not only in the United States but also in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom (20), a finding supported by other work in comparative politics (21).

And now a little about people.

Psychologists have long found out that when faced with high information costs, ordinary people instinctively simplify the problem; the human brain reduces complex topics to much more accessible images, controlled by stereotypes (22). For example, the average citizen may confuse climate with natural temperature variations, erroneously relying on their senses (23). For the same reasons, people living on land, geographically distant from the sea, are less likely to associate global warming with rising tides (24). Surprisingly, respondents' views on climate change may vary depending on the temperature of the room in which they complete the questionnaire (25).

Intuition seems so convincing to us not because it is correct, but because it is convenient. This is how a simple conversation about the weather not only makes a complex issue easier, but also creates a mental connection between an almost unknown condition and something already understood (26). In addition to personal experience and intuition, people selectively scan the world around them for other cues that complement and enhance their responses to complex political topics. Typically, to compensate for their lack of knowledge, they seek the opinions of those they consider authoritative - politicians, journalists, lobbyists, sometimes scientists and many others. And ultimately, most rely on those experts whom they personally trust more (27).

So don't be surprised if I say that political preferences are the main thing here (28). People are highly dependent on the opinions of their preferred political party, its leaders regarding the state of the economy, some program or law, candidates, and so on (29), even when they are wrong (30) or if they need to replace objective facts with fakes in their heads (31).

Political ideology itself has already become a powerful form of human self-identification, almost like religion or ethnicity (32). Many scientists note that this can have a profound impact on people's perceptions of the world around them, pushing their values ​​and beliefs in a direction consistent with their political preferences. This behavior is known as “motivated reasoning” (33). This is exactly how people think about complex systems like the planet's climate (34).

Summarizing data from 74 surveys conducted between 2002 and 2010, Brull, Carmichael, and Jenkins (35, p. 185) argue that “the most important factor” influencing our perceptions of climate change threats is “elite political infighting.” Even after controlling for factors like extreme weather events, access to scientific information, volume of media coverage, and the salience of issues on both sides of the debate, scientists find that “the two strongest factors affecting public concern levels in the United States are Democratic Party statements and Republican votes, which increase and decrease public concern, respectively.

Now a few words about Russia

to which discussions about climate are reaching and ideological adherents of the above-mentioned ideas have already appeared. There is a lot of evidence of this, from the text of journalist Yulia Latynina on the Novaya Gazeta website to the many comments of people famous and not so famous (36). But the point is not so much in the emerging texts, but in the same politicization. Russian “republicans”, following the American ones, mainly resort to well-known methods - accusing scientists of bias, paying for the results of the “establishment”, intentionally or not using unverified information, misleading the public. A private but striking example of such propaganda is the above-mentioned article on the New “Church of Global Warming.”