In ungenerous corners of the left side of the US political spectrum, the questions often are scathing: Can Republicans and conservatives possibly be sincere in believing that decades of independent scientific studies constitute a hoax of truly historic extent – a vast worldwide conspiracy in which thousands of the world’s best scientists and dozens of governments, scientific agencies, and research organizations around the world agree to lie in concert about the climate for vague but insidious reasons? Why do the deniers keep using arguments that can easily be proven false by anyone with access to an internet search engine? Are any of the deniers more than two degrees of financial separation away from the Koch brothers and other wealthy fossil fuel interests? Who do climate change deniers think they’re fooling?
Less judgmental (or perhaps more results-oriented) left-leaning adherents of the consensus view on climate – that global warming is real, caused by human activity, and a danger to the future of civilization – often wonder if there hasn’t simply been a failure to communicate. Climate science has become so politicized, they feel, that US Republicans would almost have to undergo identity transplants and switch parties before they could acknowledge climate change as a major threat. Perhaps messaging has been a major part of the problem, these thoughtful lefties muse. Couldn’t they make the scientific reality of climate change more acceptable to conservatives and Republicans by taking a page out of the playbook of conservative political consultant Frank LuntzFootnote1 – who is probably best-known for promoting the use of the term “climate change” in the first place, as it was thought to downplay the severity of the problem – and simply use different terminology? Instead of spending so much time explaining science and long-term dangers, couldn’t climate scientists get through to conservatives and Republicans more effectively by focusing on the undeniable results in today’s headlines – the catastrophic storms, forest fires, and droughts – and using the word “resilience” a lot? Who after all doesn’t want to be resilient?
In this issue, we take another tack. Instead of asking Democrats and independents who accept climate science how to persuade those who deny it, we spoke with Republicans and conservatives who support action on climate change about how they reconcile their politics with the scientific reality of climate. And what, we asked, might realistically cause more conservatives and Republicans to accept that reality?
Two longtime Republican public officials – former EPA administrator and New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman and current Carmel, Indiana, Mayor James Brainard – gave us wide-ranging, nuanced, and at times hopeful interviews that I’ll refrain from condensing here, in hopes you’ll read them in full. (Still, I can’t help but mention Brainard’s tendency to paraphrase Fiorello La Guardia, the Republican New York mayor oft quoted as saying “there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the trash.” Can some innovative US politician find an effective way to update La Guardia’s maxim, replacing “pick up the trash” with “save the environment”? One may always hope.)
For this issue, we also spoke to a broad assortment of conservative Christians who believe that climate change should be addressed out of religious callings to steward the Earth and protect the poor. As Dawn Stover writes in “Evangelicals for climate action,” in 2018, the National Association of Evangelicals “issued an updated ‘call to civic responsibility’ that urges evangelicals ‘of all political persuasions and backgrounds’ to get involved in policy making and public engagement on a broad range of issues, including climate change.” And it seems clear that younger US evangelicals are more open to climate action than their parents. As 29-year-old Kyle Meyaard-Schaap of Young Evangelicals for Climate Action puts it: “The consequences aren’t abstract to us. This is our future.”
The voices highlighted in this issue of the Bulletin are hardly representative of the public climate change stances of congressional Republicans. You can hardly swing a cat on Capitol Hill without hitting a Republican senator or representative voicing well-practiced talking points that boil down to a bland refusal to address climate change at the federal level. And without some buy-in from Republicans, significant climate legislation will not pass in the current Congress and faces dim prospects in the future. A US president can only do much to shape the country’s approach to climate change; a truly comprehensive US climate program will require Congress to do something is has found difficult of late: to act.
Many polls make it clear that the American public as a whole accepts the science of climate change. Recent polling even shows that a majority of Republicans favor climate action.Footnote2 Particularly given President Trump’s apparently unshakeable disbelief in the evidence of climate science, Republican officeholders are not likely to agree to substantive action on climate change until they feel it is clearly in their best political interests to do so. The best people to explain those best interests to Republican congressmen and -women? Republicans who believe in climate action and vote their beliefs.
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John Mecklin
John Mecklin is the editor in chief of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Notes
1. See the headline at https://www.luntzglobal.com/: “It’s not what you say. It’s what they hear.”
2. See “More Republicans Than You Think Support Action on Climate Change” at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/opinion/sunday/republicans-climate-change-polls.html.