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The summer of 2010 was the hottest on record for the United States, and in many parts of the nation, temperatures remained at typical July and August levels until the end of September. Los Angeles recorded an unbelievable all-time high of 113 after fall had officially begun. And if that anecdotal evidence doesn’t convince you that climate change is having an impact, there is plenty of comprehensive scientific data.
Nevertheless, the American public is remarkably unconcerned. For several years, attitudes about the climate change have been shifting toward apathy and denial. Consider these polling numbers:
- In a 1989 Gallup survey, 35% were “greatly worried” about global warming. In a similar poll in 2009, only 34% said so – despite a mountain of scientific evidence for climate change that has emerged in that 20 year period.
- In a 2009 Pew survey, climate change raked 20th out of 20 issues that people wanted Obama and Congress to focus on. A similar ABC/Washington Post placed it 11th out of 11 issues.
- In 2010, a Gallup poll showed that only 24% consider the environment and climate change a “very important” issue for the midterm elections. Broken down by political affiliation, it was16% of Republicans (not surprising), 18% of Independents (somewhat surprising) and only 34% of Democrats (shocking).
What has happened to make 3 out of 4 voters and even 2 out of 3 Democrats believe that climate change is not a critical issue? Karlyn Bowman of Forbes.com offers four theories, with my commentary in italics:
1)Letting The Professionals Handle It – “When we as a nation agree on goals policy should serve, we usually step back from the discussions about the means by which those goals should be achieved. Most of us are busy, and we don’t have time to read the latest reported changes in water quality or global temperature over the past century… We are content to let public interest groups, political parties, and others debate the next policy steps, reasonably confident that good policy will result from the clash of interests.”
(That sounds ridiculous and naïve to us political junkies, but that is the way the majority of citizens think – our duty is to vote in elections, and then let the winners do their jobs. If the corporatocracy is ever going to be broken, and if climate change is ever going to be handled effectively by our government, this mindset will need to change.)
2)Climate Change Is Not An Immediate Threat – “Americans don’t see it as a problem for today. Only 4% of respondents to a Yale/Mason poll strongly agreed that they had personally experienced the effects of global warming. For obvious reasons, people are much more concerned about the economy and unemployment.”
(This is where education and awareness building is a key. The right-wing propaganda machine is pumping out a constant stream of false evidence to deny climate change. We need to connect the dots for people by pointing out how more intense storm systems, longer summers, more record high temperatures, and changing rainfall patterns are all symptoms of a warming planet. Unfortunately, this task will get easier as time goes on.)
3) Over-Exposure – “There is evidence from polls that media outlets may have over-covered the topic. When the environment emerged as an issue, the media had much greater public credibility. A decade ago, 31% said the media were exaggerating the seriousness of the issue. That figure has risen to 41% today.”
(Again, Fox News and the like are largely responsible for these backwards trends in public awareness, but perhaps the non-right-wing media has turned it into too much of a doomsday scenario like Y2K, and not enough of “this is very gradually going to change the way we live in a negative way.”)
4)Politicizing The Issue – “Media’s championing of the cause may also explain a new development in more recent polls on the topic: intense partisan polarization on many aspects of the debate.”
(In my previous post in this series, I outlined how the Senate climate bill went nowhere because of heavy political and corporate pressures. Many citizens on both sides who are concerned about climate change have lost faith in Congress and in the political process as a whole – resulting in a lack of enthusiasm for the issue in the 2010 elections.)
Whatever the reason for the apathy, it is definitely there. California seems to be the only state where climate change is a hot issue. Voters there will decide on whether to delay or nullify AB 32, the landmark cap and trade legislation enacted in 2006. Hopefully, a victory for AB 32 will start the ball rolling in other states and eventually in Washington.
Somehow, the enthusiasm for the issue needs to be recaptured. Congress has proven that it will not act on its own volition. It will take an uprising of voices from the people to elect the right representatives and then push them toward the reductions in carbon emissions that only strong legislation can accomplish.
In the next post in this series, I’ll dig into the issue of anecdotal vs. statistically significant evidence for climate change, and how we can use both to raise awareness of the issue.
10 Comments
Part of the problem is the economy; the environment is secondary if one is worrying about not being able to put food on the table or a roof over one’s head.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs stuff, in other words. The environment isn’t seen as an immediate existential threat so it’s higher up the list than food and shelter and immediate security.
Not only that, The Status Quo is less dangerous than what Obama might try to sell us in some kind of “comprehensive” reform. After I read Naomi Clines report at the G20, and fat Al Gore’s unscientific scare announcements during his speech, (wherein the scientists did refute him for using hyperbole) I don’t want him to touch it.
Can’t we just ship all the denialists and their champions to the new planet- the one that may be able to support life- first?
I’m going to disagree with you, not because I don’t agree with Naomi Klein’s effort to uncover the Shock Doctrine at work, but because there’s more to this than he-said-she-said politics.
First, the science indicates we have a problem; the very few scientists who take issue should be scrutinized carefully. The question is less about whether we have a problem, but more about the size of the problem. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend it’ll go away, or we can find a way to deal with it. Our options are reducing the risk, or adaptation, and they aren’t mutually exclusive.
Second, Al Gore has been promoting environmental and ecological consciousness for decades. Perhaps you are not aware that he wrote about book about the subject as a seated U.S. Senator in 1993, in which he called for a energy Marshall Plan. His promotion of environmental concerns is not some flash-in-the-pan money making scheme; he put his reputation as a moderate at risk by publishing his book in the early 1990s.
Specifically, he noted that continued use of petroleum and other fossil fuels was a political risk in terms of national security. Do you think we would have gone to war in Iraq if we had listened then and divested ourselves of petroleum as an energy source? What if we had listened back in the 1990s and divested ourselves of coal — would there be more mountain tops in West Virginia?
But climate change is an existential threat that has already ravaged farmland and caused food shortages across the world. I guess Americans won’t care about it until it affects us more directly.
I completely agree with you Rayne, and, in my (experienced) opinion, the upper-middle-class types that make up the environmental movement don’t get it. I was once asked to be an “expert” at a presentation of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” at a college I taught at (I am not an expert but include a discussion of the environment in all my courses). The moderator, an upper-middle-class student active in Democratic Party student organizations, expressed dismay that the majority of the population, i.e. workers, “just don’t understand” the issue, which segued into a thinly-masked litany of naive, paternalistic put-downs of workers (if only they were better educated, didn’t watch so much TV, etc. they would agree that we need to cut back on carbon emissions). When I pointed out what a, say, 50% rise in the price of gasoline would mean for a family getting by on $1000 per month and driving 100 miles to work and back every day in their dilapidated car (as many, many people I have known do) he actually said “I hadn’t thought of that before-thanks”. As you said, most people know about global warming already, it is a matter of priorities, and surviving from day-to-day, week-to-week is the first priority. If you want to address global warming you must address economic inequality first or you will be fighting an uphill battle against the majority of the population who are trying to eek out a bare existence.
There certainly is that, gotta eat. The MOTU don’t give a shit. They’ll make sh’loads of money building big ass walls to hold the water back.
I think this is key. Most people don’t really get that in any closed system, increasing the temperature increases volatility. So there will be higher high temperatures, lower lows, record rainfall in some places and record drought in others.
Why do normal, non-scientists not see the problem?
I suspect that there are many reasons, but the primary one is that it doesn’t seem to show up in any day-to-day activity.
We talk about an average increase in temperature of 1-2 degrees. Most people do not see that as an amount that they can even discern. We talk about rising sea levels and do not see higher water levels around the docks in NYC. We talk about more violent storms, but this year’s hurricane season seems much more benign.
We cannot expect most citizens to read scientific journals, ergo, we need a much better way to present the facts.
why ?
in addition to the above noted reasons, how about:
1. The relentless, sneering, fact -free, fact distorting, outright lying, oil/coal funded spewings, everywhere you care to look, that have been gushing over, and poured upon the surprisingly ( as far as scientific research usually goes, I am told) unanimous findings of science.
2. Lazy, complacent, ignorant “reporters , editors, network managers, desperate, advertising money seeking television, radio, newspapers, who want oil/coal advertising revenue.
3. Head in sand syndrome.
and others.
This is absolutely, by far, the most serious problem facing the planet.
I also think that living in a city, which most people do, has the effect of eliminating contact with the non human world;
being unaware of the plant and animal life, you are unaware of the changes in them, caused by the changes in the climate.
which are somewhat more obvious when you live a little closer to life oustide the city.
I suppose there is another side to that when there are heatwaves, and power outages.